To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (5 May 1927) is a novel by Virginia Woolf. A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, centering on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skillfully manipulates temporality and psychological exploration. To the Lighthouse follows and extends the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, where the plot is secondary to philosophical introspection, and the prose can be winding and hard to follow. The novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls the power of childhood emotions and highlights the impermanence of adult relationships. One of the book's several themes is the ubiquity of transience.

It was okay...but not much happened.

The way in which Woolf writes is something I fell in love with. She was one of the first writers to ever use stream of consciousness of the characters and let the audience know about the minuscule and minute details of a scene and its characters. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

Took me maybe 50 pages to figure out how exactly to read this but once I did it became one of the most effortlessly beautiful books I've ever read. Woolf is able to magnify the space between sentences, where every gesture, stifled look, awkward fidget is an ocean of expression. And what's left is what's never said to the ones we love most. Wonderful!

This book club pick was my second Virginia Woolf, and since I'd read Mrs. Dalloway several years ago, I at least had some idea of what to expect stylistically going into it. And that's the point, really, with Virginia Woolf anyways, that stream-of-consciousness style. It's certainly not plot, as not much happens here. The book is divided into three sections: in the first, the Ramsays, a large family with eight children, are at their home in the Hebrides off the coast of Scotland and discuss whether or not they will take a trip to the local lighthouse the next day as they host a dinner party with many of the friends that have become a part of their orbit. In the second, ten years pass (coinciding with the years of WWI) and a handful of deaths occur. And in the third, several but not all of the characters from the first section reunite at the house, and the long-delayed trip to the lighthouse occurs. It is, naturally, not “about” the plot at all. It's about people, and Woolf takes us straight into their heads to give us a chance to see them from the inside. I found it particularly effective during the dinner party, because the anxieties being experienced by the various participants about whether they should have come at all or what they're going to say, or if they've just said the wrong thing entirely, feel so relatable even nearly 100 years later. She's often sharply witty in her observations of relations between men and women, highlighting the ridiculousness of male plays for female attention. I found her curiously minimalist on the subject of The Great War, though, mentioning it only through the death of one of the characters in combat. It seems odd that she just kind of glides past it, though maybe she felt she'd already said what she wanted to say in Mrs. Dalloway. As much as I get what she's doing with the stream-of-consciousness choice, I have to admit I find it something less than enjoyable to read. It requires so much active attention and is rarely really worth the reward. It's a good book, very much worth reading and something I liked, but the style is best in very small doses.