5 of 5 members found this review helpful.
“When Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself, she set in motion a strange and perturbing day, and a stunning novel.
"...in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June," says the author of her protagonist early on, and it sets the tone for a novel that consistently and brilliantly grapples with the intangible nothings of which lives are constructed. Woolf called her novel The Hours for much of the time she was writing, before deciding on its current title, and a day's worth of waking hours are all she is concerned with. Remember that these are but hours of consciousness, and that this is but another summer's day. Nothing will happen, remember, but lifetimes of thought, memory, triumph and regret will reassemble and recreate people's histories before your eyes. In the absence of plot and movement and intrigue, the twelve hours of Mrs. Dalloway are still poised on the points of a tottering twenty years' experiences: even the barest tremor is a terrifying hazard. Read with bated breath: a mere gasp could topple the entire edifice and bring it tumbling down.
Mrs. Dalloway is an etching done in a giant's hand, at once vast and microscopic, and magnificent in both. Woolf the miniaturist captures the colour, the word and whimsy of a single day; using them, Woolf the painter of frescoes illustrates the attitude, the bent and thought of a generation. These are struck and held spellbound by brilliant prose, cast in crystal and held up to brightest sunlight. With them, Woolf can slow what is fleeting, can speak of what is unknowable: life, London, that moment of June.”
Frabjous Day wrote this review Wednesday, January 28 2009.
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