Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
This isn't my first encounter with Woolf - I've read Between The Acts and Orlando before, though both were many years ago - but this is the first time where I've struggled with her.
Initially I was smitten with this book. It contains a lot that I really like: a fragmented, dreamlike narrative that hops from character to character without any real boundary; a close focus on a specific moment in time; a stream of consciousness style that puts us deep into the internal lives of its characters. It's easy to see why this is often spoken about in terms of Joyce's Ulysses, and I think I can see the influence of this in some of my favourite books (especially the work of Jeanette Winterson).
And yet as the book went on I realised that I was struggling to extract any meaning from it. Everything feels very opaque, and though we spend a lot of time with the characters they don't seem to say much. We see repeated images over and over again, small obsessions and looping phrases. We revel in the mundanity of real life. I think it's a worthy experiment, and Woolf's prose is gorgeous, but ultimately - despite how much obvious influence this book has had on the genre of literary fiction as a whole - I don't feel like there's much of anything here.
Maybe I need to spend more time dwelling on it. Maybe I need to re-read it when I'm not still teetering on the edge of a reading slump (this really didn't need to take me over a week to read). I certainly didn't dislike it, but I didn't get anything like as much out of it as I thought I would.
I'm glad I finally read it, though.