To The Lighthouse ~ Virginia Woolf
Well hello there. I'm a long time reader, first time poster.
I recently picked up a copy of To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I had often heard it is one of her greatest and a masterpiece of the English language so I decided to make it my introduction into the writings of Ms Woolf.
What a mistake!
Now it could easily be just me and her greatness is just too much for little old me but dear lordy, it is so damn boring.
I'm actually only 64 pages in and rather than give up completely - I hate to do that with a book - I decided to skim ahead and see does it get better.
It doesn't.
If anything I got more irritated by it.
The story is about the Ramsey family and their summer guests on the Isle of Skye in 1908 (1909?). It's in three parts. The first - The Window - interweaves, boringly, the different characters on the one day when they discuss lots of boring crap and talk about visiting the Lighthouse the next day. A trip that looks set to never happen as the weather looks to bad.
The second - Time passes - is just that, time passes. A whole ten years which happen to include the First World War and it's told in eighteen pages.
The third is ten years later and some of the guests are back with a plan to go visit the lighthouse again. That's as far as I got before even the skimming became boring and I had to stop.
My issues with it really are the fact that I find it slightly confusing. There is none of the type of dialogue quotation that I'm used to in a book. Instead someone will be saying something and you've no idea who is saying it, or even if they are saying it or just thinking it. (If that makes sense?)
Then there's the fact that the characters are dull. I couldn't even a flying monkey about their thoughts, their lives, their anything.
Which is probably just as well as in the Time Passes section, there are three character deaths and all are mentioned so lightly and in one or two sentences that it just felt "meh!" Who really cares anyway.
And with that that is probably how I'd sum up my experience with To The Lighthouse - who really cares?