Love, love, love this book. There are just some books that when you lose yourself in them, you do what tends to be known by the cliche of 'finding yourself'. For me, this was one of those books. I got absolutely lost in it, and wow. Here I am with a subtle but fundamental shift in paradigm.
Mrs Dalloway reveals the interior worlds of several characters, most of them somehow connected with socialite Clarissa Dalloway, over the course of a single day in 1920's London, as Clarissa prepares to host a party. Written in almost continuous prose, unbroken by chapters, the narrative flickers seamlessly between characters as they pass each other in the street etc. A large part of the narrative focuses on Clarissa's past loves.
I loved Virginia Woolf's style. I have never read her before, but I fell absolutely in love with her on the first reading. Her ability to convey the second-by-second experience of what it's like to be a person was beautiful, poetic, apt. It reminded me of D. H. Lawrence a lot, but was so much more readable. Whereas Lawrence verges on the ridiculous on occasion, describing people 'wincing through their wombs' etc., in Mrs. Dalloway I felt Woolf pitched it perfectly. I could not put this book down, I was absolutely swept up in the flittering and flurrying of 1920's London, to the extent that I had severe physical pangs for the British Museum, white marble terraces with black doors in leafy boulevards, and black cabs.
Definitely a book I need to read more than once. Now that it has changed my life I think I should probably go back and look at language, context, etc., the stuff I am supposed to be studying it for...sorry for the crap review, it's just my mind is still reeling from this one. Profound. Absolutely profound!
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