To the Lighthouse

Rating:
Summary: so great!
Review: I am french and I actually study this book . We cannot say that it is boring as It is written in some of the comments,we must undertand the real meaning hidden behind each sentence!! then it's great

Rating:
Summary: A remarkable reading experience.
Review: When I came to the end of To The Lighthouse, I turned it over and started reading it again. Virginia Woolf's prose is breathtaking, and the story she tells is moving and profound. Woolf is not concerned with a linear plot that moves from point A to point B; rather, she is interested in the life of the mind and the (often embattled) relationships between people learning to co-exist with one another. To The Lighthouse contains the realm of human experience from childhood yearnings to marital frustrations to the horrors of war that swiftly obliterate human lives. It's a book to be savored.

Rating:
Summary: Boooooring
Review: This book would have been tolerable had it been more straightforward. Ms. Wolfe goes overboard with her stream of consiousness style. She goes out of her way to not say what needs to be said which is egotistical and makes for a very disappointing book.

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Summary: The sufferings of women
Review: The most important aspect of this novel is that Mrs Ramsay manages to console and support an ungrateful husband and her children, especially her son who is dependent upon her for reassurance. She suffers greatly at the hands of her selfish husband, a typical white male "intellectual" who will not even recognize the tremendous strain put upon Mrs. Ramsay. He worries about getting to "X" or even "Y", as he believes other philosophers do, without realizing that he is fiddling with his chromosomes in a desperate attempt to reassure himself of his greatness. And all the while the women in the novel must suffer and serve males like this. This is a great novel, a heroic story of women's survival in the face of male cruelty. Mrs. Ramsay

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Summary: necessary narrative of those times
Review: the internet being mostly ephemeral as opposed to the medium of published novels this review is extemporaneous and lacking. There is a paragraph in "To the Lighthouse" which describes the lord of the manor more clearly than a camera. This paragraph is one sentence long though not one long sentence. The thought, care, sweat and anguish which must have gone into the complete thrill of brushing the character onto paper is mortar and brick to the sentence. It stands as does Virginia Woolf.

Rating:
Summary: Not recommended for pleasure!
Review: This book is boring to the maximum! All the characters seem so distant and practically the only thing we are possibly able to connect with is the damn landscape ! Although , this sort of writing is typical to our conscience: a stream that is never stagnant, it is not comprehensive when put on paper ( unless of course we note our own thoughts) I guess it shows that it is never easy to truly decipher the thoughts and reasonings of one another. Woolf is successful in portraying a character if we seperate each section of each part. when she tries to congregate 14 characters (of which 6 are the most important) she really messes up. My advice is if you have a choice-don't go for it! It just gives you headaches!! Well , for me it did!

Rating:
Summary: An astonishing experience of English family life.
Review: "To The Lighthouse" doesn't tell a story--it allows the reader to experience it through the consciousness of its various characters. Woolf gets inside their heads and writes down what they're thinking from moment to moment, creating an intimacy between reader and character I've experienced with no other writer. The largest portion of the novel concerns a day at the Ramsay's summer house by the sea. Mr. Ramsay, a once-famous philosopher whose reputation is beginning to wane, entertains two or three of his students, while Mrs. Ramsay, the novel's central character, manages her family and the other guests. As Mr. Ramsay devotes his energy to philisophical obscurities, Mrs. Ramsay devotes hers to stroking her husband's ego when he needs it, consoling her youngest son James who wants to go to the lighthouse across the bay, and creating a serene, safe space for her guests. Gradually, a portrait of English family life emerges, and more importantly, an understanding of a woman's place within it--Mrs. Ramsay has essentially sacrificed herself for her family and husband, and has done so willingly. Woolf reveals these flawed but beautiful people to the reader in a work of art that seems less like reading prose than listening to music or experiencing a painting. To the Lighthouse is one of the masterpieces of 20th-century English literature

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Summary: A Psychological Microcosm
Review: Virginia Woolf's TO THE LIGHTHOUSE represents change, reactions to and the emotional turmoil it causes within the family, and when interpreted archetypally, it also tells the tale of human nature in environments that appear immutable but in reality are as ever changing as the ephemeral nature of the human soul.

Rating:
Summary: Here and now
Review: So here we have Mrs Woolf masterpiece, her great achievement at grasping time. This is a book for those that like a challenge in reading. It is not passive reading, Virginia needs your whole attention throughout the novel, and if you are lucky and get inside you will hace a wonderfull experience, you will be there with her and the characters, reading with a dim light, saling towards the lighthouse, painting, the air will brush your face and you will smell salt and sea and be dizzy after lunch. I do not Know if what she tells really interested me because it was jus something you experiment. Good chance

Rating:
Summary: A subtle, beautiful masterpiece
Review: Virginia Woolf's lovely, poignant novel based on her own family is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. Basing the novel's central character of Mrs. Ramsay on her mother and Mr. Ramsay on her father, the well known philosopher Leslie Stephen, Virgnia Woolf strove to recreate artistically the mysteries and vagaries of time. The novel is divided unevenly into two sections, both of them dealing with possible or actual trips to the lighthouse in the vicinity of the Isle of Skye where the Ramsay family has a house that they use on summer holidays. Rarely in English fiction has the inner dynamics of a family been laid so completely bare as in this.

One of the most enjoyable things about this book is the way Virginia Woolf so probingly explores the personalities of the individuals, though three stand out above all others, the aforementioned mother and father, and the unmarried amateur painter Lily Briscoe. By the end of the novel, we feel that we know all of these characters on the deepest possible level, and while the two women are sketched more lovingly, it is the father, Mr. Ramsay, who is etched in his essence. Brilliant, but with striking emotional and intellectual limitations, he is both the head of the family and its bane. It isn't that the author dislikes him, but she is acutely aware of his vices and virtues (in her own life, Virginia's father despaired over his wife's early death, creating an atmosphere of gloom over Virginia's teen-aged years). The two women are plumbed less deeply, but we come away from the novel having a sense of their worth.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE was revolutionary when it appeared as one of the first attempts to profit from many of the lessons to be taught English language fiction by the extraordinary work of Marcel Proust. Woolf had a love/hate relationship with Proust, on the one hand recognizing very early on that he was the great literary genius of the century (Joyce, on the other hand, the other titan of the century, she thought less highly of), but finding his work so brilliant as to paralyze her. She famously remarked that after reading Proust she felt incapable of writing anything. But the fact is that TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is in many ways a Proustian work. Like Proust and unlike almost no one prior in English literature (with the notable exception of Butler's THE WAY OF ALL FLESH), Woolf fictionalized her own life (she herself appears in the novel as the girl Cam) and produced a profound analysis of the nature of passed time. Also like Proust, she attempts to break down traditional narrative and present her story impressionistically rather than historically. While she may have felt that Proust kept her from writing, the fact is that she produced the first literary masterpiece following in the footsteps of Proust.

But in the end, what makes this most remarkable is the rich detailing, the marvelous nuances, the lush delineations. This is a book to be read slowly and savored, much as one would read a long poem. Indeed, this comes very close to being at times prose poetry, such as the wonderful section "Time Passes," that is sandwiched between the first section of the novel "The Window" and the final section "The Lighthouse."

After having confessed my love of this novel, I will add that I adore this book despite being less than overwhelmed by some of her other fiction. I love Woolf's nonfiction, but ORLANDO I sometimes regard as my least favorite work of fiction by a major writer. This novel, however, easily rates as one of my favorite twentieth century novels. I would urge anyone who has similarly found some of Woolf's other work unpalatable to give this one a try. I would be astounded if many will find it in any way less than brilliant.