The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf


Virginia Woolf’s first novel, which takes place mostly on board a ship and in South America, is clearly apprentice work. The young person’s earnestness about the big subjects—love, marriage, and death—is there, and at times predictably leaden. But having said that, the young person making this first attempt is Virginia Woolf, and there are flashes of her future brilliance throughout. Her descriptions of social events, the society in which they occur, and of the people who populate that society are often witty, perceptive, and brilliant, and her engagement with at least one of the big issues, death, is substantial and moving. In her reflections on the place of women in society we see the seeds of A Room of One’s Own.

This was the last book I finished in 2025. I look forward to continuing my reading and rereading of Virginia Woolf’s novels in 2026.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai

Image
       Just a page or two into the first chapter of  Seiobo There Below , the 2008 novel by László Krasznahorkai I was stunned in a way that reduced me to cliches: the hair on the back of my neck stood up; my breath was taken away; I left my body. These cliches, as is almost never the case, describe my actual experience of reading the beginning of this book: an account of a crane standing in Kyoto's Kamo River waiting for a fish. Every other chapter, every other page, is equally good. The plot—the crane never moves—is not what pulls us along. Krasznahorkai's long, cascading sentences, where only the odd semi-colon provides readers with a place to rest, are what does it. These sentences (no account of his writing fails to mention them) let us see that stillness is as compelling as the frenetic nonsense with which too many novelists (to say nothing of film-makers) concern themselves.  Krasznahorkai employed the same style in earlier, equally brilliant, w...
Read more

Going Forward: An Introduction.

 Eighteen years ago, some friends and I started a blog. Back in the day I used to post there about a variety of things. Then the energy to do those kinds of posts got sucked onto Facebook, and I pretty much stopped writing on the blog. The one thing I did continue to do was to use it as a place to write short squibs about the books I'd read. Now Typepad, the host of that blog, Only a Blockhead , has announced that they're closing up shop. Those squibs will vanish into air (and the link to Blockhead will die soon). I've decided, though, to continue writing squibs about the culture I consume—mostly books, perhaps movies (if I ever watch another movie) music, etc. I don't plan to do any other sort of writing here (but who knows?). I suppose the blog will be little read by anyone other than me, but with my memory being rather random access, it's good to have a record of what I've consumed. The blog is ugly now, but I will try to make it prettier by and bye. —David
Read more

The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield

Image
  Katherine Mansfield wrote to Virginia Woolf, “We have got the same job, Virginia, & it is really very curious & thrilling that we should both, quite apart from each other, be after so very nearly the same thing. We are you know; there’s no denying it.”  Woolf, as far as I know, didn't deny it. In fact, she wrote: “I was jealous of [Mansfield's] writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.” Woolf, it should be noted, was not known for praising her contemporaries. One can see why she felt this way about Mansfield whose stories are each little gems, made more gem-like by the author's fastidiousness in avoiding crude effects. Unremarkable people are observed, and things and animals almost as much as people. The people do their best. There is never a big bang or clanking epiphany at the end. Rather, there is a hint that things probably won't change, life, for better or worse, will go on. (Pictured above is the edition I read. The cover is a detail fro...
Read more