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June 29, 2014

Me and Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. DallowayMrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I have got to say up front that Mrs. Dalloway put me through the most difficult reading process I ever made it through (and I have read a lot of academic texts, Egyptian tomb inscriptions and stuff). That was not because it is a bad book. It is because Mrs. Dalloway is not so much a book in the conventional sense with plot and such. It is basically a herd of consciousnesses invading your mind and running rampant. It is often hard to follow whose head you just switched into. It is somewhat like what I imagine being a mind reader must feel like. It's so utterly exhausting; like you wouldn't believe. I had to stop and take a break about every 30 pages and re-motivate myself to move on.

But while it was painful and hard to get through, it was also very rewarding and worth the effort in the end. It is hard to believe that this was first published in 1925. I mean, for example, how could this women so accurately (from what I understand at least) describe PTSD and recognize it as the serious illness that it is - long before it even became a diagnosis? And how come that it took the medical community so much longer to come to that same conclusion? (Their arrogance again and again their stupid arrogance. Like Woolf rightly recognized. And most infuriatingly still, they just don't learn from that mistake ever, it seems. Not from this. Not from the whole “gentlemen's-hands” debacle. Never. But I digress.)

All that would have been remarkable enough on it's own, but that is actually not the only issue she is surprisingly spot on about – again especially considering when this was written. She manages to step into the heads of all these characters and accurately portray them; young and old, male and female, everyone unique and life-like (i.e. with real issues); it's baffling. It makes me wonder if my paranoia about some people maybe being able to read my thoughts might have been justified after all …



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