This
was my first Woolf novel, having recently read her non-fiction title “A Room of
One’s Own”, which is an extended essay in fictional narrative form and which gave
me a taste of her writing style.
Still,
I have to admit that in the first tenth of the novel I had a slight problem
adjusting to her “stream of consciousness” style, often having to turn back the
pages to get a grip on who’s saying what. Once I got adapted to it, I found
that I became sort of addicted to being transported into the hearts and minds
of the characters, who are just members of an ordinary family and their friends,
each trying to cope with changes in his/her life.
The
outstanding skill of Woolf is her way of using affecting imageries throughout the
novel, at times to paint an atmospheric background (particularly in Part 2), and
at other times to inject thoughts and emotions into her characters. The end
result is a picture-perfect story that is created out of a non-dramatic, even mundane
narrative concerning the everyday life of the Ramsay family and their friends.
After
putting down the book, I found that the words are no longer there, but the
imageries have stuck.
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