Book - 53, Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

by

Virginia Woolf

Book Read: 25-28 January 2016

Note Written: 08 February 2016

'Mrs. Dalloway' was my first experience of Virginia Woolf and it was a tough nut to crack. What caught me off my guard was that she switches from the perspective of character to character without any particular break in narration. It was very confusing for me in the initial pages and later on I got the hang of it; it was still difficult novel to grasp though.

Mrs. Dalloway and all the other characters in the novel are people whom we encounter in our lives, people like us, people with varied ambitions, people who fail to realize or achieve most of them. People, divided by class, status, gender, politics, religion etc., fight for their own survival and living, each in their own specific manner, sometimes surrendering themselves and their lives to the flow of the world, like Septimus does in the novel. 

Mrs. Dalloway was a very challenging novel for me, an amateur reader who recently got into the labyrinth of literature, to read. I had to struggle a lot to read through from page to page. The last book that made me struggle like this was Helen MacDonald's memoir, 'H is for Hawk'. But there are rewards to such kind of struggle - of more knowledge, of widened thinking, of increased understanding, and of an increased spirit of endurance.