Mrs Dalloway

Yups. I finally finished reading the dang "Mrs Dalloway" after almost 2 month of reading a 200 pages book. Pathetic. Any other books, I can finish them in 2 weeks without trying. This is definitely not a book for leisure.

I won't make a lengthy review of it. Nah. Not-a-review one might say. Rather my opinion.

The summary as taken from Amazon.com.

As Clarissa Dalloway walks through London on a fine June morning, a sky-writing plane captures her attention. Crowds stare upwards to decipher the message while the plane turns and loops, leaving off one letter, picking up another. Like the airplane's swooping path, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway follows Clarissa and those whose lives brush hers--from Peter Walsh, whom she spurned years ago, to her daughter Elizabeth, the girl's angry teacher, Doris Kilman, and war-shocked Septimus Warren Smith, who is sinking into madness.

As Mrs. Dalloway prepares for the party she is giving that evening, a series of events intrudes on her composure. Her husband is invited, without her, to lunch with Lady Bruton (who, Clarissa notes anxiously, gives the most amusing luncheons). Meanwhile, Peter Walsh appears, recently from India, to criticize and confide in her. His sudden arrival evokes memories of a distant past, the choices she made then, and her wistful friendship with Sally Seton.

I was shocked at first in reading a bisexual 'sentiment' in there, the uneasiness of easiness in marriage and repression. Reading accounts of her life I get what she's trying to tell in Mrs Dalloway and thinking if it will mirror mine one day. Dang! We got ourselves a thinking book right here.

Bored to tears is my unprofessional and totally ignorant opinion. This style of writing is called a 'stream of consciousness'. Something that seems to separate Virginia Woolf from other writers. As so I found myself reading one thought after another and after the other, and without warning, another thought is seamlessly put in by another character altogether and on and on it went. Very little dialogue in the novel and nothing of the usual plots or stories. The usual Booker or Pulitzer kinda books I guess, where we are exasperated by the end... since most of us like to have a tightly closed story complete with a red ribbons adorned towards the ending.

However I had to admit that even during my tears of boredom as I read the book, I recognized her brilliance in writing thoughts after thoughts without full stop. From a profound revelation to the most simpering of thoughts of groceries, she captured it and literally put the thoughts into writing. Not an easy feat. Her mental illness is part of this brilliance as I read.

Brilliant or not, it would take me at least 5 years before I attempt to pick up her books or works again. So off to the world of chic lit ridiculousness again.