To The Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse / Virginia Woolf
Peterborough ON: Broadview Press, 2000, c1927.
310 p.

Another read from the 1920s for the first week of 2020 -- this time it's Virginia Woolf's classic To The Lighthouse. I read this book many years ago, but had forgotten most of it. So time to reread!

I realize why I didn't remember that much about it, now, though. It's a bit of an impressionistic book, characters who are not well defined, a vague plot, time that passes in a blur -- it's really all about the writing and the concept. 

Mrs. Ramsay and her large family are living in a summer house on the Isle of Skye; the youngest son wants to go across to the lighthouse in a boat. It doesn't happen until the end of the book, many years later. But in between -- well, life itself happens. Marriages, births, deaths, absences, changes, with a few constants that seem to stay themselves without cease. 

It's a book that is coloured by Woolf's own life, and her recollections of her own parents and childhood. And also by her adult desire to capture life still for a moment, and how to do so, and what that might look like in art. For example, Lily Briscoe when painting illuminates the question: 

"...she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made.”

It's a beautifully written book, delving into the way people, landscapes and history are seen by others. The central section, in which years pass over the span of ten pages, is particularly brilliant. 

Mrs. Ramsay as a beautiful and ungraspable character, Lily Briscoe as an artistic spinster with her own views on everything and everyone, the stable of children - each of them has a part in the book and the investigations of interior thought are the most fascinating parts of the story, for me.

Nonetheless, although I usually love her novels, I found this one has been so far my least favourite of her works. More 'difficult' novels have been more satisfying to me. There is just something about the diaphanous nature of this story that I can't grasp. I can't recall much about the characters and their relationships (and usually I can tell you more about fictional people than real ones) and my mental images of the varied scenes are all jumbled up together. I find this novel hard to sort out. 

It's definitely worth reading, especially for the language, but I don't feel it measures up in character, or even setting, though that's still stronger than some of the characters, and all of that is stronger than plot (this is not about plot). If I am going to love a book, though, it has to have more than just good writing. So while I do appreciate this book, it's unlikely I'll ever read it again. On to the next!