Mrs. Dalloway
Author: Virginia Woolf  199 pp
My rating: 3*
Started June 21 2009, Finished July 8 2009.

This is a boulder problem of a novel, a technical challenge that goes nowhere. An exercise in stream of conscious writing, the book follows the titular character and some whose paths she crosses through her day of party planning, reminiscing and social encounters. Though short, it is nonetheless demanding, requiring close reading and careful attention on the part of the reader, particularly as transitions from one character’s thoughts to another tend to occur in mid paragraph and even mid sentence. The books modernism and ambition to reinvent the form bring to mind Eliot’s contemporaneous The Waste Land, as do various moments and for that matter, its setting in London, the “unreal city”. Of all the characters, Mrs. Dalloway herself came across as the least clearly depicted.

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“In love!” she said. That he at his age should be sucked under in his little-bow-tie by that monster! (45)

The word “time” split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without making them, hard, white imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; (69)

Later she wasn’t so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness. (78)

The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained -- at last! -- the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round slowly, in the light.  
  A terrible confession it was … but now, at the age of fifty-three one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, int the sun, in Regent‘s Park, was enough. (79)