To the Lighthouse

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Summary: To The Lighthouse
Review: "To The Lighthouse" is a portrait of the Ramsey family; a portrait "taken" as they are vacationing at their summer home on the rugged coast of Scotland. This is a very interior portrait, though, the most interior I've ever stumble upon in any book to date. For me, at least, this book transcends the barrier of time, culture and all else and speaks straight from the soul, something few authors have been able to do.
Two things struck me about the experience of reading it. One is that while I cant claim full understanding, I no longer found myself struggling with the form in order to read the book. The second is how much more booming the book became for me now that I'm older and can identify more with Mrs. Ramsey instead of seeing the book only through the character of Lily Briscoe.
To the Lighthouse brings the Ramsey family and the people they bring their wake to their home on the Isle of Skye. Families in the world of this book are little things. The first half creates the Ramsey family group so well that when the second half is without it, the reader is always aware of the ghost images standing in the empty spaces. We found out what has happened to the missing members of the group by a reunion with the ghosts of the past. Meanwhile, lily tries to understand the world shes in and make her painting by meditating about the ramseys and how much has changed in the world around them.
I beleive that Woolfs well known stream technique at its more poetic and influential than anyone else I have read. The boook is very beautiful and sad at the same time. I'll look forward re-reading it again in a couple more years. It's luminous, it's astonsishing, it's prizewinning. It's a book I think high school students should be made to read to really understand life at its fullest.

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Summary: Don't be daunted and give up on this book...
Review: if you do you'll miss out on an incredible and poetic book. The genre of this book is stream of consciousness, which, when first reading, is very hard to focus on. Basically, stream of consciousness is writing as if one is reading a person's thoughts. Every thought, as disjointed as it may seem, is thrown in. I found it very confusing in the beginning and wanted to throw the book against the wall. I, however, ignored my inner feelings of frustration and kept reading. To my surprise I fell in love with this book. Woolf's analogies are not only beautifully exact and poetic, but in my opinion, pure genius. Without ever being a mother herself, she captured a mothers fears, various feelings, and love for her children. She also, quite eloquently and precisely, somehow manages to describe "the dance" known as marriage. The ebbs and flows of relationships, the frailty of life....it's all in this amazing piece of literature. Read it, don't give up on it, and you'll be glad you did.

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Summary: Woolf's best and most readable
Review: Virginia Woolf achieves her most sterling triumphs when she focuses, as she does in To the Lighthouse, on the relationships of men and women to the seemingly trivial events of everyday life. In this book, the camera lens is on the interplay of contact between members of the Ramsay family as they vacation (in about 1913-ish) at their summer home in the Hebrides, trying to plan an excursion to the lighthouse.
Popular once again because of Cunningham's novel The Hours (a spin-off of Mrs. Dalloway) and the superbe movie based on the novel, Virginia Woolf's books are once again bestsellers - and that's a very, very good sign.

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Summary: Words and more words, so take your time.
Review: Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse" (pub. 1927) has some similarities to her previous work, "Mrs. Dalloway" (pub. 1925). The latter covers just one day in the life of Mrs. Dalloway; in the former, the first 127 pages of 209 pages cover just one day in the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. A dinner party at the end of the day has an important place in both of the novels as well as in the lives of Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay. Aside from those similarities, the overwhelming one is the stream of consciousness writing style that Woolf adopted in "Mrs. Dalloway" and carried over into "To the Lighthouse." I can't remember the applicable quote but the sense of it is "There are certainly a lot of words there." Words fall on words as grains of sand in an hourglass fall on to the pile of sand at the bottom of the glass - words, words, words, etc. Impressions that might well have been only momentary feelings of a character are turned into paragraphs and even pages of words.

That isn't all bad. If you like the sounds that words make (some of the passages really should be read aloud) or if you like the images that can be invoked, there are some enchanting passages in "To the Lighthouse." At times, however, there seems to be just endless words - I had to force myself not to resort to skimming in order to get the story being told. Looking for the story is, to some degree, pointless because Woolf shows no interest in a definite beginning or ending - she ends the work without ending the story. Perhaps one should say that in this work it really is the journey and not the starting and ending points that is the reason for reading. At times, Woolf's words have a certain madness about them. Some say her own madness affected her writing, some say not. I tend to agree with the former - she herself indicated a certain fondness for the imagery which came to her during her "mad" periods. Even though she did not write during those periods, she may well have stored away images to evoke later in her writing just as one can store away vivid images received in dreams.

Woolf succeeds in making her characters live in this book, perhaps because Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are closely modeled on her own parents. One has to remember, though, that they are seen through the eyes of an impressionable daughter and that they died before Woolf developed an adult relationship with them - she was only 13 when her mother died and just 22 when her father died. Perhaps the ambivalent reactions of the character, Lily, in the story mirror Woolf's own impressions of her parents. Her characters have no constant viewpoint, just as real people grow cold and warm on different issues and on their relationships with other people in their lives. They can both detest and love some other person in the course of a day or even in the course of an hour or a minute, having both lovable and irksome, even maddening characteristics. One of the most interesting "characters" in the story is the house which they rent for each summer. The house is on a beach and has all the problems and frailties of beach houses of the early 1900's. The Woolfs were of the British intelligentsia and, although certainly not wealthy, could afford to have a cook and servants. One might think Woolf would ignore the presence of these menials, as is often the case for such writers, but she doesn't and her treatment of them adds some depth to the story of the house and the times.

The most appealing character, to me, is Mrs. Ramsay. She is a compulsive caretaker who guards her husband's and children's tender feelings from hurt. Something like a female Don Quixote, she is a guardian of the lonely and shy, even when they don't want a guardian. Like most of the people who knew her, I came to have an affection for Mrs. Ramsay.

If you like history and science writing and have not developed a fondness for writing such as that of Jane Austen, you may not have the patience to enjoy this work. If you do like Austen and/or if you like poetry, you may very well enjoy reading "To the Lighthouse." Even better might be the audio version - just close your eyes and listen to the sound pictures as Woolf flits about the room.

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Summary: Brilliant; not sure why I hated it so much.
Review: So, To The Lighthouse. It's a brilliant book, really. There are points when you're reading this book where you can step back and look at a paragraph or a passage or a chapter and say: THAT'S how a good book should be written, that's how brilliant authors do their thing.

Which is why I feel guilty that I hated this book so much. It was a scant 200 pages, and it took me MONTHS to read; I hated all the characters, hated the writing style, hated everything about the book, which is weird because I completely recognize just how good of a book it was. It makes me shudder a little bit to think back on it. If I were forced to reread this book, I actually might start chewing on my wrists.

So there it is. It's a great book, sure, but at the same time, it was horrible. Can't say I'd recommend it to anyone. Wish that weren't the case, but it is.

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Summary: Stick to Joyce
Review: I found this book to be virtually unreadable. Rather than offering insight into the characters, it consist of merely words with no meaning, form or function. If you want stream of conscious stick to "Ulysees" or work you way through "Finnegans Wake". When you finish Joyce, you know you have improved your insight of humanity and have been amused on the way. After reading "To the Lighthouse", all I did was regret the time reading it that could have been put to better purpose. When I finished this book, I had to read some Henry Miller and Louis Celine to clear my head. I put this and Henry Green's "Loving" together as not really books, but merely the stringing together of many words.

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Summary: Beautiful!
Review: When I first began to read To The Lighthouse it seemed dull and monotonous but as I kept reading, I began to see how wrong my first impression was. She writes with a beautifully rhythmic pattern that entralls the reader and made me love the book. The book is centered around her characters' private introspections that I both agreed with and learned from. She pulls you into an entirely different world that you simply do not want to leave. I intend to re-read this book over and over again to better absorb its beauty, passion, and wisdom. Read this book! But keep an open mind for it takes patience to fall into this masterpiece that Woolf created.

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Summary: Nothing else even comes close
Review: This is quite simply, the most beautiful, illuminating, and period-defining book I have ever read. The prose is smooth and fluid, and if you let it carry you into the book, it will completely absorb you. I understand how stream-of-consciousness can be difficult, but rather than fighting the stream in an attempt to understand every sentence, I recommend 'going with the flow' for the first few pages and letting your visceral reactions to the emotions and ideas in the book guide you.

This is a book about transitions; from childhood to adulthood, from an era of clearly defined roles to one of liberation; it is a book about the things people need from each other but have difficulty communicating; it is a book about the impossibility of communication and the other subtle ways we attempt to bridge the divide between ourselves and other people. I doubt these topics will ever be addressed as elegantly.

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Summary: Absolute Worst Book I Have EVER Read
Review: I found this book to be immensely boring. It has no real plot, and it defies almost every rule of grammar I have been taught. Many words were mispelled, and I had a hard time forcing myself to finish the book. After reading the entire book, I cannot recall anything about it other than Mrs. Ramasay's name. I don't know what any of the people who gave this book good reviews were thinking, because I would NEVER recommend this to anyone who I held even the smallest amount of respect for.
DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK

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Summary: Makes annoying Modernist techniques FUN!
Review: Wow...simply wow. Well, the first obvious thing to do is compare this to Ulysess. It is a 'day in the life of' subjectivist steam-of-consciousness novel, like Ulysess (though much, much easier to understand...more like Joyce in "A Portriait" really...), but it also has Proustian elements on the nature of time and man's place in time. It's a simple story, almost too simple. A family and some friends live on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides. That's about it. But, oh the Characters! Everylast one of them can be analyzed for hours and hours, yet none of them ever become less then believable. It's a wonderful, moving experience to read this novel. And for those of you worrying about the difficulty, don't. This isn't Finnegans Wake. Yes, you do have to pay more attention to it then say, a Daniel Steele novel, and it is by no means escapist, but it isn't anything that a slightly intelligent person couldn't figure out. And every slightly intelligent person should read this novel.