Jul 17 2006
Mrs Dalloway
Recommended reading for people who want to familiairise themselves with an influential Virgina Woolf book. 
:-)
I am not planning to read another Virginia Woolf book. Probably because I am turning into a Philistine.
Mrs. Dalloway is the Virgina Woolf book that inspired the beautiful yet disturbing film ‘The hours“. At first I found the book a tad boring. Then I realised that Virgina was carrying me between scenes as if in one uninterupted camera-shot. Visualising the scenes helped the dialog gain life and vibrancy. My familiairity with the London landmarks cited helped make the visualisation rich. I pictured an Ivory and Merchant production with a re-casting of the cast from the Hours. Meryl Streep as Mrs. Dalloway. This helped but I never bulit any strong connection with the book. I found it difficult to empathise with the characters’ interests, obsessions, ways of being. Here’s a sentence that illustrates how I found the book:
“going and coming, beckoning, signalling, so the light and shadow which now made the wall grey the banana’s bright yellow, now made the Strand grey, now made the omnibuses bright yellow“ p139
strength: comparing the buses on london’s strand to banana’s is visually clever and humerous.
weakness: ‘going and coming, beckoning, signalling’ the words that failed to show me anything of value about either this character or the storyline. I don’t see why this charater rather than any other compared buses to bananas and used these descriptive terms. I failed to recognise the significance of this and many of the sentences.
write the first thought on Mrs Dalloway
