Outside A Dog

And… I’m back! Work is slowly taking over my life, so not much time for reviewing, but I’m still managing to set aside plenty for reading. Hopefully I’ll be able to go on a massive posting spree and get all caught up soon.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is one of those novels that I’ve been meaning to read for ages but would usually get passed over in favor of something less intimidating. I dipped in and out of it for the better part of a month and a half, and finally steeled myself to finish off the last sixty pages one evening towards the end of last week. And then when I was done, I thought, ‘that’s it?’

The entirety of Mrs. Dalloway takes place during the course of one day, with the story taking place as the reader follows the various characters around London. The story flows from one character to another as they interact — and I use the word ‘interact’ loosely here, maybe ‘encounter’ is better for some of them — with each other, culminating with Clarissa Dalloway’s party at the end of the evening, where everything all kind of ties together.

I wasn’t an English major, so I can’t begin to understand the complexities and subtleties that are most likely hiding in this work. I’ve never read Ulysses by James Joyce, either, a novel to which Mrs. Dalloway is (apparently) often paralleled, so there goes more that I might be missing. While I did enjoy reading about each of the characters and getting little glimpses of what makes them tick as they communicate with each other, this is, at times, a very tedious book.

At some point in the future, I’ll probably give it another try in hopes of getting more from it, and I also intend to give To the Lighthouse a go. But I can’t say that Mrs. Dalloway will ever make my list of favorites.