Customer Reviews

To The Lighthouse

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4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(25)

 

 

I've discovered a little secret to reading Virginia Woolf -- it takes time.

It is practically impossible to read this book in little ten-minute spots, while watching television or babysitting. Don't try it; you'll end up not liking it.

It needs your time. Give it an hour with no interruptions. Get a bag of pistachios and read. Unplug the phone, turn off the TV. Read and don't stop. Then you'll discover the joy of Virginia Woolf -- for while her prose is tough, it is haunting, beautiful, and real.

Once you've settled into it, you'll discover a wonderful book, a tale of everyday life lived. Both intensely personal and incredibly universal, this book is life itself.

So, you want the real review. Alright, it's the story of a beach house, where reside the Ramseys and their various friends. Mrs. Ramsey is a goddess and nearly everyone worships her. This is more fun to read than it sounds. Lily Briscoe is a painter trying to figure out what she sees and what she loves.

There is a brutal twist in the middle, and the rest of the book is coping with that. No, I won't tell you what it is. Go read the book. It's great.

It's about beauty, about the incredible tragedy of time passing, about art and the world, about love and marriage, about people. It's not only a book about life, it is a book of life itself.

So maybe it's not written for our 30 second commercial, read at the bus stop age.

Many critics, teachers and readers consider To the Lighthouse to be Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. To the Lighthouse was published in 1927 and its structure is unique, although it does contain elements of the Victorian. Woolf wrote this novel in only one year and did very little rewriting. Both subtle and sharp, the ease with which the book was written is apparent in the flow of both its narrative and its prose. The novel was written during one of the brief peaceful and happy times in Woolf's life. (In 1895, after her mother's death, Woolf became almost continuously depressed and suffered a series of nervous breakdowns, culminating in her suicide by drowning in 1941.)

To the Lighthouse, like Woolf's previous novel, Jacob's Room, is a somewhat disjointed story, possessing numerous characters, points-of-view and conflicts. The overlapping and separation of the characters and their stories seems to result from both intention and oversight and is a product of what Woolf referred to as "all characters boiled down," and the "break of unity in my design."

The story centers around the summer vacation to the Isle of Skye of the Ramsey family, a family Woolf admitted was very much like her own. In fact, Woolf said that writing To the Lighthouse helped her "rub out" the obsessive memory of her own mother. Mrs. Ramsey, like Woolf's own mother, is a woman of decidedly Victorian ideals, choosing to focus on her home, her marriage and her family.

Interacting with Mrs. Ramsey is the character most representative of Woolf, herself, Lily Briscoe, a young girl who is staying in the same beachouse as the Ramseys. Unmarried, Lily draws both disapproval and sympathy from Mrs. Ramsey who firmly believes that "an unmarried woman has missed the best of life."

Mrs. Ramsey and Lily represent the conflict between the Victorian and the Edwardian eras, the age of the woman in the home and the advent of the woman in the workplace. An intelligent young woman, as well as a sensitive and talented artist, Lily is very aware of Mrs. Ramsey's disapproval.

The role of art in the novel deals primarily with Post-Impressionism and the attempt to freeze reality, not on paper or on canvas, but in the mind, and then to paint the very equivalent of this reality. In many ways, To the Lighthouse resembles a painting because of its three distinct images of reality: the summer, the return and the seven years in between.

Woolf was not the only writer to "paint" her novels. In Place in Fiction, Eudora Welty writes of "painting and writing, always the closest two of the 'sister arts.'" Throughout the novel, Lily works on one painting and cannot seem to "connect the mass on the right hand with that on the left...But the danger was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be broken." The need for connection in the painting is much like the need for connection in the narrative. And Lily and Mrs. Ramsey both serve to fulfill the role as unifier.

One of the most startling moments of unification occurs as Mrs. Ramsey is staring at a bowl of fruit she has placed in the middle of the table during a dinner party. Because of her extreme attention to detail, Mrs. Ramsey focuses on the bowl throughout the dinner. She particularly notices the perfection of the arrangement while also fearing its imminent destruction as she catches another guest looking at the fruit, no doubt desirous of it. Mrs. Ramsey thinks, "That was his way of looking, different from her. But looking together united them."

Even when not physically present in the story, Mrs. Ramsey continues to exert a strong influence. At the end of the novel, Mr. Ramsey finally takes his two youngest children, James and Cam, to the lighthouse. Both children have changed considerably from the time of their first vacation; Mrs. Ramsey's absence has required that they develop a new independence, yet she was their only tie to their father, the typically restrained and uninvolved Victorian husband.

The children must, however, incorporate the influence of both of their parents on their journey to the lighthouse, a journey that is both literal and figurative. From shore, Lily watches them as she paints their journey, recalling Mrs. Ramsey with both annoyance and love. Lily, like Woolf, herself, has finally come to terms with the connection of all things, the completion of a painting as well as the completion of a journey.

To the Lighthouse is a quiet, reflective and meditative novel and one of the first to display Woolf's unique Impressionistic stream-of-consciousness style.

I haven't read To the Lighthouse since college, a time at which I understood very little about it, but was still greatly moved. Two things struck me about the experience of re-reading it. One is that while I can't claim full understanding, I no longer found myself struggling with the form in order to read the book. The second is how much more resonant the book became for me now that I'm older and can identify more with Mrs. Ramsey instead of seeing the book only through the character of Lily Briscoe.

To the Lighthouse centers around the Ramsey family and the people they bring in their wake to their home on the Isle of Skye. Families in the world of this book are fragile things. The first half creates the Ramsey family group so well that when the second half is without it, the reader is constantly aware of the ghost images standing in the empty spaces. Meanwhile, Lily tries to understand the world she's in and make her painting by meditating about the Ramseys and how much has changed in the world around them.

The book is tremendously beautiful and sad. I'll look forward to re-reading it again in another ten years.

Art of such consequence as this makes demands on its audience, but the return is colossal. This is an extraordinary book. It is at least as much poem as tale, as much music as prose. It will certainly change your idea about limitations of expression. For readers who require signposts of plot to trigger their perception of information, and who don't find it easy to appreciate the subtle flavours of words, be warned: you will need to depend very heavily on your inner ear, to allow some of the more exquisite sensations of language to wash in of their own accord. (Other reviewers have hinted here at the role of reading skills in our understanding.) It is possible though, by such openess, to develop a reliable method of perceiving and pulling ideas which is not at all the way we are so used to guzzling and then spitting them out, in our late 20th century consumerist addiction to news media sensation. A good book makes you want to write and speak, to learn how language can serve you. Woolf gently turns the relationship between events in time and the play of human feeling on its head in the search for universal truth. I read it the first go in two or three bites because it's flavours are so rich and I did not want to miss anything by failing to savour them properly. I'll always revisit it to learn and feel more and to be enriched further. This is not an Oprah book.

Art of such consequence as this makes demands on its audience, but the return is colossal. This is an extraordinary book. It is at least as much poem as tale, as much music as prose. It will certainly change your idea about limitations of expression. For readers who require signposts of plot to trigger their perception of information, and who don't find it easy to appreciate the subtle flavours of words, be warned: you will need to depend very heavily on your inner ear, to allow some of the more exquisite sensations of language to wash in of their own accord. (Other reviewers have hinted here at the role of reading skills in our understanding.) It is possible though, by such openess, to develop a reliable method of perceiving and pulling ideas which is not at all the way we are so used to guzzling and then spitting them out, in our late 20th century consumerist addiction to news media sensation. A good book makes you want to write and speak, to learn how language will work for you. Woolf gently turns the relationship between events in time and the play of human feeling on its head in the search for universal truth. I read it the first go in two or three bites because it's flavours are so rich and I did not want to miss anything by failing to savour them properly. I'll always revisit it to learn and feel more and to be enriched further. This is not an Oprah book.

This is quite simply, the most beautiful, illuminating, and period-defining book I have ever read. The prose is smooth and fluid, and if you let it carry you into the book, it will completely absorb you. I understand how stream-of-consciousness can be difficult, but rather than fighting the stream in an attempt to understand every sentence, I recommend 'going with the flow' for the first few pages and letting your visceral reactions to the emotions and ideas in the book guide you.

This is a book about transitions; from childhood to adulthood, from an era of clearly defined roles to one of liberation; it is a book about the things people need from each other but have difficulty communicating; it is a book about the impossibility of communication and the other subtle ways we attempt to bridge the divide between ourselves and other people. I doubt these topics will ever be addressed as elegantly.

--"The subject of this brilliant novel is the daily life of an English family in the Hebrides." That's the copy description on the back cover of my edition of "To the Lighthouse." I found it hilarious. I laughed for five minutes.

--So it's an inadequate description of the novel?

--Inadequate is an inadequate word to describe just how inadequate it is.

--So what is "To the Lighthouse" about?

--Well that's just the thing. To say it's about a family vacationing by the shore, about the delicate relationships between them and their friends, about how time changes them and their relationships between each other...is to miss the point entirely even if it is perfectly accurate.

--As I understand it, this is a novel in which ten years passes in about fifteen pages, while the rest of the novel meticulously describes two days.

--Yes, exactly. Like Proust, Woolf begins with a childhood incident that will echo down through the years. Like Joyce, she concentrates on the epiphanic moment. Reading "To the Lighthouse" is a bit like viewing a painting in which the characters move...but very slowly. Woolf passes from character to character, inhabiting each of their minds in turn, seeing the world through their eyes. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their flawed but enduring marriage are the central bodies around which the rest orbit and Lily Briscoe, a spinsterish amateur painter, ostensibly stands in for Woolf herself, but it is hard to say that any of the characters are less or more important than any of the others--this is essentially the genius of Woolf's handling of psychological perspective. Everyone has a point of view and each point of view is essential to attain a vision of the whole.

--But it is a novel essentially about family relationships?

--And relationships between men and women, men and society, women and society, human beings and the inescapable fact of their mortality. Again and again, Woolf asks the question, "What does life mean? What is it for?"

--Does she have an answer?

--Yes. And no.

--It's ambiguous.

--It's provisional. But it's enough to help Lily make it through the dark storm of life to use a perfectly horrible metaphor. It's her lighthouse.

--Woolf has a reputation as a difficult author to read.

--And it's well-deserved. She is a difficult read for the majority of readers, who, let's face it, are awaiting Dan Brown's new novel as if it were a major event in world literary history. What happens in "To the Lighthouse," when anything happens at all, isn't as important as how it affects each character internally. That is to say, Woolf's focus is on the fleeting but all-important impressions that the world leaves on us and that ultimately make us who we are. Her greatest gift is to capture these gossamer-thin states in a language of exquisite accuracy--capturing in words the flavor of fleeting emotions seldom if ever described before, even as they evaporate on the tongue.

--You would have to love language, then, to fully appreciate her work.

--Indeed. Her sentences don't move the story forward; they move the story deeper. She writes a poetic prose that many contemporary readers might mistake for unnecessarily flowery and overwrought--when, in fact, it is sharp as a surgeon's scalpel and cuts to the heart. And yet for all its surgical accuracy, it is the sensuous prose of a writer for whom language is like a box of brilliant colors is to a painter, for whom sentences are like caresses to a lover, except that in this case what is touched are the most potently orgasmic areas of our brains--needles to say, the ones most difficult areas to reach.

--But Virginia Woolf reaches them?

--You might say she's a master masseuse.

--Ha ha. Does she provide a happy ending?

--No, not exactly. But it's a deeply satisfying experience all the same.

Take my word for it--if you've not read Virginia Woolf before--you need to be in the mood to read her. I think her books can be unbearable otherwise. However, I was in the mood for "To the Lighthouse," and I thought it was terrific.

I've been much more intrigued by Virginia Woolf after Michael Cunningham's "The Hours," (and the subsequent film) brought her back into the limelight. She was fascinated with the degree to which everyday, seemingly trivial details of life can seem to be matters upon which the state of the world hinge in the lives of those experiencing them. Therefore, in Virginia Woolf's world, the decision as to whether or not a vacationing family will visit a lighthouse on the following day becomes the focus of everyone's thoughts--to a little boy, it seems as if his world will end if he doesn't get to go; to the father, his ability to determine whether or not they will go gives him a sense of power and authority over his wife and children.

And at the center of all this non-drama is Mrs. Ramsay, wife and mother, who is the foundation upon which the family is built. Woolf is expert in communicating the influence Mrs. Ramsay has on those around her. Everyone is struck by her beauty, her bearing, her very existence. It's this quality in her that makes so many wives and mothers the center of their respective families, which gives "To the Lighthouse" a sort of universality that resonated very strongly with me.

There has been a lot of literary study on the psychology of the novel (especially Freudian), which has become somewhat less interesting as Freud has become commonplace. I would instead appreciate it for the utter mastery of language exhibited by Woolf, and the insights she has into male/female relationships.

"To the Lighthouse" is one of those books that left me feeling incredibly sad in a very satisfied way, and I can't even tell you why. I don't always enjoy such ethereal writing (I don't even enjoy other books by Woolf) but in this case I enjoyed every word.

Yes, this is the best novel ever written using stream-of-consciousness narrative, Joyce not excepted, but it's unfair to introduce it that clinically. Simply put, if you want the privilege of living briefly inside the minds of some of the most ordinary and yet most compelling characters ever conceived--and such a paradox is a tribute to Woolf's genius--read this book. Well worth the delicious effort.

When I first began to read To The Lighthouse it seemed dull and monotonous but as I kept reading, I began to see how wrong my first impression was. She writes with a beautifully rhythmic pattern that entralls the reader and made me love the book. The book is centered around her characters' private introspections that I both agreed with and learned from. She pulls you into an entirely different world that you simply do not want to leave. I intend to re-read this book over and over again to better absorb its beauty, passion, and wisdom. Read this book! But keep an open mind for it takes patience to fall into this masterpiece that Woolf created.