To the Lighthouse

Rating:
Summary: Stunning, if You're in the Mood for It
Review: Take my word for it--if you've not read Virginia Woolf before--you need to be in the mood to read her. I think her books can be unbearable otherwise. However, I was in the mood for "To the Lighthouse," and I thought it was terrific.

I've been much more intrigued by Virginia Woolf after Michael Cunningham's "The Hours," (and the subsequent film) brought her back into the limelight. She was fascinated with the degree to which everyday, seemingly trivial details of life can seem to be matters upon which the state of the world hinge in the lives of those experiencing them. Therefore, in Virginia Woolf's world, the decision as to whether or not a vacationing family will visit a lighthouse on the following day becomes the focus of everyone's thoughts--to a little boy, it seems as if his world will end if he doesn't get to go; to the father, his ability to determine whether or not they will go gives him a sense of power and authority over his wife and children.

And at the center of all this non-drama is Mrs. Ramsay, wife and mother, who is the foundation upon which the family is built. Woolf is expert in communicating the influence Mrs. Ramsay has on those around her. Everyone is struck by her beauty, her bearing, her very existence. It's this quality in her that makes so many wives and mothers the center of their respective families, which gives "To the Lighthouse" a sort of universality that resonated very strongly with me.

There has been a lot of literary study on the psychology of the novel (especially Freudian), which has become somewhat less interesting as Freud has become commonplace. I would instead appreciate it for the utter mastery of language exhibited by Woolf, and the insights she has into male/female relationships.

"To the Lighthouse" is one of those books that left me feeling incredibly sad in a very satisfied way, and I can't even tell you why. I don't always enjoy such ethereal writing (I don't even enjoy other books by Woolf) but in this case I enjoyed every word.

Rating:
Summary: Interior monologues by a gifted writer. Just not for me.
Review: Virginia Woolf wrote this book in 1927. It must have been courageous for her do so at the time as it's all stream of consciousness and she lets the reader get a glimpse inside her thought processes. The very slight plot focuses on a vacationing British family and their guests and there's a constant interior monologue about every little thing.

The first part, entitled "The Window" is by far the largest section of the book and the reader has to plow though a complex web of the author's thoughts as she focuses on one detail after another using all her senses. True, she's a gifted writer and deeply explores the relationships between men and women, focusing mainly on Mrs. Ramsay, the matriarch of the family. It's as if everything is in the background and the only thing in the foreground is what she has in her head.

The second part, entitled "Time Passes" is perhaps the strongest part of the book. It focuses on an empty house and its details of decay over a ten year period. It is masterfully done.

The third part, entitled "The Lighthouse" is about the remaining members of the family, who come back to the house in order to take a trip to the lighthouse which has been postponed for ten years. It's all very symbolic and the reader is left to draw his or her own conclusions about the meaning of it all.

This is the only Virginia Woolf book I've ever read and although I can appreciate the skill of the author, I'm not interested in reading any more of her works and can recommend this book only for fans of hers as well as those with a curiosity about her writing.

Rating:
Summary: Tedious - loved by Eastern critics; hated by readers
Review: I knew I was in trouble when I read the L-O-N-G run on sentences that clogged up reading flow in just the first two pages. No one talks like that. No one thinks like that. And no one writes like that except for pretentious authors beloved by academics who have no idea what interests people outside of moldy ivory towers. Virginia Woolf committed suicide. All the more reason to avoid this book lest the contagion of her world view infect your mind and depress you. This is a dated, pretentious, dry, irrelevant novel. I am asuming that it is being pushed because it is poilitically correct to have at least one female author in the great books list. Unfortunately, this is a dead author whose works should have been allowed to die with her rather than be immortalized. In fact, while Woolf was contemplating suicide, she should have destroyed her work along with her life in a big bonfire. That would have spared us this novel that I wasted money on.

Rating:
Summary: To the Lighthouse
Review: I just finished Virginia Woolf's TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, and I am not sure what to write about it, except that it's a brilliant, fulfilling read, very rich and layered and nuanced and wonderful. It's a singular work that facilitates new understanding and insight, and makes the point effectively that the drama-rama of the human mind can supercede or at least equal the drama of the world around us.

The Ramsay family is the center of the story, and it is at their home in the Hebrides that the first section takes place, "The Window." In fact, this section, which covers only part of a day in time, comprises 125 pages of the 209-page book. In a way similar to that of MRS. DALLOWAY, Woolf switches the perspective among the Ramsay family and some of their guests, Lily, an indepedent single woman, the Ramsay children, and Charles Tansley, a student of Mr. Ramsay, a philosopher.

There are threads of the issue of femininity in the book. What do the differing ways in which Mrs. Ramsay, mother of eight and supportive wife, and Lily, single woman, painter, enact their feminity mean? How do they deal with and understand and love each other? What forces do they unleash on each other?

The book deals skillfully with the perception of the passage of time, as "The Window" deals with that short bit, focusing, I found, the book's most amazing and engaging section on the dinner party that night. The second section, "Time Passes," is merely 20 pages, but covers ten years, and the final section, "The Lighthouse" is one morning. There are all kinds of
reminders of the fluidity of time in the text, a skull of an animal on the wall in the children's nursery that causes them to be unable to sleep, as well as Mrs. Ramsay's glance back into the dining room at the end of the party and her realization that the success of the evening, which was somewhat hard won, is ephemeral and over, already in the past.

The second section has a different view of time, almost looking at the house from nature's point of view as time ravages the house through the war when the family isn't using it. It's very meditative. Major events in the lives of the people who attended the dinner are enclosed in brackets, as side notes, for the passage of time and the entropy that ensues is the major drama here. We see the lives and deaths of the characters as small things, part of a greater cycle that winds on and on in a more eternal, less fleeting, way.

What Woolf begins in the first section, she deals with more strongly in the third, I think, and that is that the validity of each person's differing perception of the others is equal. Two of the Ramsay children, James and Cam, go with their father and a fisherman and his boy to the lighthouse in the sailboat. James despises his father, while Cam sees his weaknesses and loves him for his vulnerabilities. She knows how James feels and feels drawn to protect James, too, but she knows a different father than James does.

I think that was what struck me the most about the book, the way the characters' combined perceptions assemble a greater truth and understanding than each of them singly has.

Woolf has a great insight and beautifully descriptive and engaging way of writing about thought as dramatic and intimate. Woolf writes about such things, the pleasure of picking up a pleasant and soothing thought so elegantly, that it doesn't seem to be writing on a page, but access to another's mind, and the part of the truth he or she holds.

And overall the writing is simply stunning.

In the first section, one of the characters loses a brooch on the beach, and they discuss going back to look for it the next day. By the time the book ends, the lost brooch seems so far away, in some deep and distant memory. I think this one detail is a mark of the beauty and success of the book.

Rating:
Summary: On First Reading Virginia Woolf
Review: When I read a poem I generally have to read it several times before I can fully (hopefully) absorb its meaning. To The Lighthouse (TTL) reads like a prose poem, a text that also needs more than one reading. You read it slowly, and intently, and then reread passages. This being the case it is somewhat gratifying that the book is only 200 pages long for if it went beyond that it could become a sizable reading project.

The reader becomes a spirit flitting between the minds of the novel's characters. Their thoughts become the substance of the story. The plot is minimal; the action insignificant. In fact, the most physically active participants of TTL are the sun and the wind which prowl through a decaying house in the book's mid-section. Here Ms. Woolf becomes particularly poetic in describing the effects of the elements on a house that has been abandoned for ten years.

Mrs. Ramsey is a strong woman who is married to a professor who is well grounded in Victorian views about women. Her role is to serve her family, and to praise and feel sympathy for her husband. A physically attractive woman with eight children she still has ways of wielding power over people. Lily, on the other hand, is a single woman who values her independence, but doesn't seem -to me- to be achieving anything. The male characters are generally weak men who compensate by being arrogant. And it is not what these characters say that matters as much as what they think, and that is something you are privy to throughout the book.

The first 100 or so pages portray a one day scene in the lives of the Ramsey's and their guests in their seaside vacation home. Around thirty pages of the book are devoted to a dinner scene in which most everyone is bored. I must admit that the boredom was convincing as I began to be suffused with the same feeling. I am sure, however, that if I read this section one more time I will view it in a different light.

This stream of consciousness novel should be read by everyone interested in reading their way through the literary canon. Although it is a 1920s experiment in form it is still highly accessible to the average reader.

Rating:
Summary: A work of genius which I HATED
Review: Look, I hated this book. I hated reading it. I hate all stream of consciousness writing, or very nearly all. I hate what little I have read of Joyce, I hate most of what Faulkner I have read, and I find Proust nearly as unreadable.
This work is the only work by Virginia Woolf I have ever read. It took me nearly forever to finish it. Reading it's long, winding, meandering sentences was like walking through molasses.
Thank goodness I have finally, FINALLY finished it.
I hope to never ever read anything else by Virginia Woolf.
And I mean that.
Keep her stuff away from me.
It just does not interest me at all.

...Having said all that, I must hasten to add, however, that I do recognize this novel, this ability to string together random thoughts and make some semblance of sense out of them, to be a work of clear genius. It must've taken her a staggering amount of work, amount of thought. The woman clearly had a wealth of intellect and talent. Just keep anything else by her away from me, because it doesn't interest me in the slightest, this detailed, ultra-remonstrated British upper-crust mindset stuff.

Rating:
Summary: Slow
Review: Slow isn't necessarily bad, but in this book it was. I am biased against the 'consciousness' style of writing, so my perception of this book was already negative before I started reading it. The book wasn't too difficult to understand (unlike The Sound and Fury by Faulkner) but it was just plain uninteresting. William Bankes (a character in the book) said concerning literature "let us enjoy what we do enjoy," and I simply did not enjoy Virginia Wolfe's book.

Rating:
Summary: Woolf's "Lighthouse:" Persistence Pays
Review: Those who come to Virginia Woolf for the first time do not know quite what to make of her style. Most authors structure their novels in the traditional rising action, climax, falling action manner. A linear line of plot is most often the key to their works. In Woolf's novels, she eschews such straight line plotting in favor of a weirdly blended kaleidoscopic view that makes relentless use of both a stream of consciousness narrator and interior monologues. In TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, Woolf tells the tale of a married couple, the Ramsays, who lived in England just before the First World War. The Ramsays are the prototypical Victorian family replete with servants, a summer beach house, eight children, and a keen awareness of the fragility of life. What happens to them is neither earth shaking nor memorable. What happens within them is of far greater consequence. As Woolf focuses on each character, she presents a highly subjective view of the internal thought processes of that character. Each thought is like a ripple caused by a stone thrown into a still pool. Woolf allows her character to meander not only spatially (from point to point) but also chronologically. Events are described as if they were occurring within the literal present, but most often the events are from the past merging into the future. Thus, the plot ripple pool is constantly crosscutting each other with events removed from each other both in space and in time. It is no wonder, then, that readers unfamiliar with such an expanding and contracting temporal flux are confused. Woolf challenges her readers to involve themselves in a manner that requires a dedication to reading not often found in more traditionally structured novels.

As one reads from section to section (there are three: The Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse), one becomes aware that the novel's primary symbols--the lighthouse, Lily's painting, the sea, and the internalized thought processes of Mrs. Ramsay--function in a manner that does not become clear until after one has read considerably into this admittedly puzzling work. The initial clue lies within the title of the book: "To the Lighthouse." Thus, the lighthouse is seen both as a starting point in a journey (its radiating beacon of light lies close to the Ramsay's summer home) and a destination in that the youngest of the Ramsays, James, wants to go there, but it takes him ten years to do so. Lily is Lily Briscoe, a close friend of the Ramsays who seems to have difficulty painting a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay, no great surprise there since that portrait points not so much to Mrs. Ramsay as it does to an abiding life-long interest of Virginia Woolf herself: the desire to impose order and form on a universe that is inherently chaotic. It is crucial to note that Lily succeeds only at the very end of the novel when Mrs. Ramsay has long been dead, thus emphasizing the ephemeral nature of her task. Mrs. Ramsay's personality also is a barometer of Woolf's belief that the post Great War society of England would forevermore be seen as formless as Mrs. Ramsay's meandering thoughts. The first section "The Window" forms the bulk of the book. It is here that Woolf depicts a rather ordinary family who collectively symbolizes the inability of individuals to leave an abiding footprint on the shifting sands of time. In the second part "Time Passes," time does indeed pass, ten years worth. The home of the Ramsays falls into decay that requires the re-entry of the surviving family members to invigorate it and themselves in the final section "The Lighthouse." Lily's painting of the now deceased Mrs. Ramsay allows Virginia Woolf to claim even a minor victory in the ultimately losing battle against cultural entropy.

I suspect that the major reason that most readers have with this book lies in their immediate recognition that they have to pay a great deal of attention to psychological free associating. As the characters' thoughts bounce off each other both temporarily and spatially, so must those of the readers, a most imposing task. But for those with persistence and an eye for the nontraditional in plotting, the effort is usually worth it.

Rating:
Summary: Richly Imagined Life of the Mind
Review: "Lighthouse" is a unique novel which established Virginia Woolf's reputation as a great writer. The story focuses on 2 days in the life of a large middle class family, with a middle interlude where the family's house is the major character. The setting is the family's summer home, filled with house guests. The action, however, is all internal, the chronology hazy and the events--to the extent anything really "happens" at all--rather mundane.

This all made for tough going until it "clicked" around p. 50. What Woolf does is create in real time not "real" events but what is going on within--that constant stream of thoughts and emotions that remains hidden from the world. Woolf spends a long time on a simple scene of Mrs. Ramsay reading a story to her 6 year old son. In the space of a few short minutes as she reads aloud Mrs. Ramsay considers whether an engagement she has been encouraging between two of her guests will occur, feels trapped between her son's desire to go to the lighthouse and her husband's cruel squelching of the idea, worries about the bill to repair the greenhouse, and underlying all senses impending doom just beyond the horizon. Another example is Woolf's description of the interior struggle of Lily as she paints in a style that happens not to be in fashion at the time. But Woolf shows us what Lily sees in her mind--a line here, a shadow there, a form.

Virginia Woolf has a reputation of being "hard to read" and I was unsuccessful in trying to persuade my book club to try "Lighthouse." But I'm glad I plowed ahead on my own--it's a rich and complex work, and totally unlike anything I've ever read. Try it!

Rating:
Summary: An Elegy to the Moment
Review: I just reread what I think of as Virginia Woolf's finest book and my personal favorite. Even if one isn't too fond of Woolf, I don't know how any serious reader or lover of great literature could fail to be impressed with the sheer beauty and timelessness of this radiant novel.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is a portrait of the Ramsay family; a portrait "taken" as they are vacationing at their summer house on the rugged coast of Scotland. This is a very interior portrait, though, the most interior I've ever encountered in any book to date. For me, at least, this book transcends the barriers of time, culture and all else and speaks straight to the soul, from the soul, something few authors have ever been able to do.

This is also the most profoundly human novel I've ever had the pleasure of reading. The Ramsays face tremendous challenges in TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, but the book's focus isn't on the challenges per se, but on how the Ramsays react to those challenges and how they are affected by them.

There are probably as many interpretations of this novel as there are readers, and I think that's a great tribute to Woolf. One of the novelist's main jobs is to touch the heart of her readers and TO THE LIGHTHOUSE certainly does that. What makes this book a masterpiece, however, at least in my opinion, is the fact that the Ramsay family act as a microcosm of all humanity; in the Ramsay's we can find something of all families. In the Ramsay's we can find something of ourselves.

Some people have told me they found the inclusion of Lily Briscoe extraneous. I don't think there's one extraneous thing in this book and certainly not Lily. She loves the Ramsay family yet she isn't a member. She's the one character who's able to step back a little and see the family as a whole, with love, yet without becoming overwhelmed. I think Lily is as essential to this book as is the Boeuf en Daube or even the lighthouse, itself.

And why the focus on the lighthouse? Will the journey to it really change anything? Will it really add to or subtract from the life of the Ramsays, especially when so many other factors threaten to disrupt and tear them apart? For me, the lighthouse represents constancy in a world of change. A point of reference to which the Ramsays can cling. The journey out to the lighthouse, for me, at least, represents the promise that one can go home again, even if that home has greatly changed. If the journey to the lighthouse is made, and the promise is fulfilled, then life can go on, even if it is as storm-tossed as the rocky Scottish coast.

I remember feeling awed the first time I read this book and subsequent readings have only increased that feeling a hundredfold. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is Virginia Woolf ar her very finest. This book is one of the greatest masterpieces of 20th century fiction. It's radiant; it's miraculous; it's triumphant. It's a book no serious reader, or lover of life, can afford to miss.