Proua Dalloway (Eesti Päevalehe romaaniklassika, #10)

Experiencing Mrs. Dalloway is like being a piece of luggage on an airport conveyor belt, traversing lazily through a crowd of passengers, over and around and back again, but with the added bonus of being able to read people’s thoughts as they pass; this one checking his flight schedule, that one arguing with his wife, the one over there struggling with her cart, bumping into those arguing and checking. For the most part, the ride is smooth as Woolf transitions from one consciousness to another [...]

“So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying ‘that is all’ more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, [...]

While reading her works, I get the impression that Virginia Woolf knows everything about people and that she understands life better than anyone, ever. Is there a single hidden feeling or uncommon perspective with which she is not intimately acquainted? And does anyone else draw forth these feelings and perspectives with more grace and empathy, and impart them to us in such a lush, inimitable fashion? Perhaps. But you’d never think that while immersed in her exquisite, adult dramas. In Mrs. Da [...]

‘Moments like this are buds on the tree of life.’Our lives are an elaborate and exquisite collage of moments. Each moment beautiful and powerful on their own when reflected upon, turned about and examined to breath in the full nostalgia for each glorious moment gone by, yet it is the compendium of moments that truly form our history of individuality. Yet, what is an expression of individuality if it is not taken in relation to all the lives around us, as a moment in history, a drop in a mult [...]

Virginia Woolf I hate you. There I said it. Some authors you just don’t get on with, and Woolf is right down the bottom of my shit list. I’ve got quite a few reasons why:Artistic slayingSo there’s a trend with each and every new artistic movement which involves pissing all over the one that came before it. The newness asserts its dominance by destroying the old; it’s happened many times over history in all forms of artifice, whether it be literature, music, paintings or media in today’ [...]

Mrs. Dalloway is one of those books one is supposed to adore for its disruption of convention and innovative use of time, sound, parallel narrative structure etc. While I respect and admire the literary advances VW makes with this novel, I just can't get into it. I've read it three times over the course of my reading life, once at 17 then at 21, and finally just a few months ago. I find it sleepy like dozing in a warm insect filled garden, which is not a bad way to spend an afternoon (as long as [...]

What does the brain matter,” said Lady Rosseter, getting up, “compared with the heart?”I didn't realize, until the final page, at its heart, MRS. DALLOWAY is a love story. I absolutely loved this book. Mrs. Dalloway is a complex and compelling novel. It is wrongly described as a portrait of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway; this is not correct. Mrs. Dalloway is the hub that connects the spokes, the characters of Woolf's novel, but there is no main character. What this book is, is a w [...]

Virginia Woolf set out to write an unconventional novel and succeeded, although since she wrote, we have read so many unconventional novels that it seems tame. In her introduction to the edition I read, Maureen Howard writes: “If ever there was a work conceived in response to the state of the novel, a consciously modern novel, it is Mrs. Dalloway.” She may have been influenced by Ulysses because all the action occurs in one day. Church bells mark significant events. In turn this marking of t [...]

"What does the brain matter compared with the heart?"so states one of the last lines in this short, brilliant novel, a thought -provoking book, life is temporary after all. This phrase is about Mr. Richard Dalloway who works for the government in the early 1920's in London, England. Clarissa Dalloway's nice, steady husband, rather ordinary, he will never be a member of the prestigious cabinet, nevertheless she loves him, he reciprocates that emotione knows, but he's much too embarrassed to verba [...]

THE TERMINATOR 2 OF DOILEYSI can see why people hate Mrs-Dalloway-the-book (there are a fair few this-is-so-boring-I-lit-myself-on-fire kind of one/two star reviews) because Mrs Dalloway-the-book is the Terminator 2 of doileys, ribbons, and fetching hats, the Die Hard 4 of a sunny day in London, 1923, the Apocalypto of curtains and place mats and memories of moonlight boating parties; and the Transformers of wondering if you married the right person. You have to get into Mrs Woolf’s style, whi [...]

It’s been a while since I last read Mrs Dalloway. I’d always had it down as her third best book, but falling a fair way short of The Waves and To the Lighthouse. Therefore I was surprised by just how much I loved and admired it this time round. It’s probably her most popular novel – because it’s more intimate, more personal and sprightly and warm than her other novels. What’s most brilliant about it is the easy fluid way she makes of each passing moment a ruffled reservoir of the inn [...]

I love travelling by train, and this is one of the best environments for reading. Luckily I got a seat for myself and the coach is pleasant. There is so much light. How enjoyable!What a funny way to start the book. Someone says that Clarissa Dalloway is setting off to buy the flowers. But here is the famous quote What a lark!, what a plunge!, but it is not quite at the beginning of the book and cannot quite join other iconic beginnings like Call me Ishmael or Longtemps je me suis couché de bonn [...]

Virginia Woolf made me feel like a drunken gardener, a diver on the verge of the bends, a foot stamping child, a foal tripping over its own legs trying desperately to get to its mother. And you know, I really don’t like feeling like any of these things. What is worse, she set up a buffet of champagne, mimosas, fruit and jam, white table cloths fluttering on a patio in the sunshine and light breezes, let me settle myself down to watch a perfectly civilized game of tennis between old pals from E [...]

I apologize for writing so much; but there was just so much to write aboutOn the surface, this appears to be a boring little account of a boring woman getting ready for throwing a boring snobbish party at the end of the depicted day, with various interludes and people wandering around London during the course of the day, thinking all sorts of freeflowing thoughts and having flashbacks to their pasts. but every time you examine this novel to try and critique it, something new about the novel stri [...]

I read Mrs. Dalloway sometime between "The Hours" film was released and college (2002-2003), knowing pretty well what it aimed at--to chronicle life as it is lived, with plenty of characters to populate the sphere that’s immediately around the titular protagonist, the hopeless hostess of parties; all their thoughts at once made clear and later muddled with the novel’s own moving train of consciousness. This time around I found that the most difficult portion of Mrs. Dalloway is its middle se [...]

Of Life and Death, Verbs and NounsI expected this novel to be difficult. However, it wasn't difficult at all. It was an enormous pleasure.I was struck by the preponderance of verbs. The novel might happen in the head of Clarissa Dalloway or the other characters, but they are observing activity and their thoughts reflect it.It is more dynamic than passive or self-conscious or self-reflective.It was less a stream of consciousness, than a consciousness of life as a stream or a number of streams, ro [...]

Finding an author who tilts and swerves and stares into the light as you do is a difficult matter. Half of it is politics, for what we are not on the power scheme of things is all the easier to ignore, and half of it is heart, the blood by which we scheme and thrive and fall. Some authors crop up in classrooms in accordance to popular decree and dance along the usual line of theory and of form. Others, not only one and the same but first, have by happenstance of coin and sex and homicide have no [...]

Well I don't think I was quite ready for Virginia Woolf. It's my first novel by Woolf so I've finally broken my Virginia virginity. The writing is razor sharp, very witty in parts but mostly there's an energy to her writing it's slightly manic and I felt my mind racing through along with her thoughts. But did I enjoy this book? In parts. I found the pacing although the words were written beautifully a little too frenetic like she's throwing everything at you and hoping you keep up. I think this [...]

A dinner party in the works; flashbacks to the past; people from the past returning to the present; a soldier who finds society evil; and the decline of an empire all combined into a wonderful and image filled novel with several themes including some thoughts on a relationship (which may have been a direct reflection on the author). The book tackles several temporary controversies and most characters represent a particular issue. Update from 8/25/2014I really enjoy Virginia Woolf's writing and a [...]

Okay, so this is very fabulous novel and in my opinion one of the Greatest, despite the fact that for me it was not exactly a breeze to get through. I mean, it wasn't painful or anything, but nor was it one I just sat down and plowed through like a maniac until I was through. I carried the thing around with me for awhile and poked at it in fits and starts over a period of time. I think Virginia Woolf is a genius, but there's something kind of inaccessible about her to me, maybe because I'm not a [...]

Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway took me on an intriguing journey through consciousness, through high-society London, its streets and the natural scenery, and the different fragments of philosophical contemplation. This was unlike anything I had read before, full of (both obscure and lucid) profound observations and meanderings of the human mind, written in beautiful, fluid prose much like the ebb and flow of the tides. There are many paragraphs to which I am sure I will return, to ponder and refle [...]

"She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary."Virginia Woolf takes us through a single day in 1923 in post-World War I London. She does so with gorgeous prose [...]

It is late and I will want to think about this a bit more before I finish my review, but there is something almost perfect about Virginia Woolf's modernism. Her stream of conscious writing seems to be more aromatic than Proust (if that is possible) and goes down easier than Joyce. While she didn't write the massive 'Remembrance of Things Past' or the revolutionary 'Ulysses', her short novels seem - pound for pound - to stand up to these greats. Mrs Dalloway is a Madeleine that bites back and mos [...]

Reviewed in November 2012Mrs D is just so eloquent that I've decided to let her do the talking - via Virginia, of course: She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July, August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to catch the falling drop, Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there - the moment of this June morning on which the pressure of all th [...]

This is the third time I've started it. Not because I 'couldn't get into it' or anything like that, more because I can't bear to have to put it down at all I'm just spellbound. Woolf has been a dangling presence for me in the past however many yearsI went through about a hundred pages apiece of this and lighthouse and saw something profoundI think I lost the copies of them or something else interrupted. I put it on the shelf and left it for another time Well, the time is now. I've always been a [...]

Bilinç akışı tekniğiyle yazılmış, girift hislerle dolu. " Mrs. Dalloway çiçeklerini kendisinin alacağını söyledi." Cümlesiyle başlayan harika bir roman.

I wasn’t very far behind her. Just a few paces while she walked her way through the roads to the flower shop. She liked giving parties. I had asked her why. I find it very, very dangerous to live even one day, she once said. What could she possibly mean by that? I contemplated. To her, her body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing. She only thought of herself as being Mrs. Richard Dalloway. Is this the reason why she didn’t marry Peter? Would Peter have been able to make her feel like ju [...]

698. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolfخانم دالووی (دالاوی) - (رواق، زمان نو) سه ترجمه از کتاب هست: جناب پرویز داریوش، بانو فرزانه طاهری؛ بانو خجسته کیهانعنوان: خانم دالووی؛ نویسنده: ویرجینیا وولف؛ مترجم: پرویز داریوش؛ تهران، نگاه، 1362؛ در 240 ص؛ شابک: 9643513947؛ چاپ دوم 1387؛ چاپ سوم 1389؛ شابک: 9789643513948؛عنوا� [...]

"For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven — over. It was June."In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf tells us about life and death, about war and peace through intertwining characters wh [...]

I promise to review this properly some day, to really discuss it in a manner resembling what it deserves, but right now I am tired and a bit wine-infused and distracted by my neighbor once again making strange Buffalo Bill-esque moan-y weird sounds through my paper-thin apartment wall, so I just have one question at the moment: Where have you been all my life? This womanrry, this person was brilliant, particularly in the realm of intuition expressed through microcosm-like paragraphs. Worlds unto [...]