I can’t seem to get through more than two paragraphs of Mrs. Dalloway at a time. It’s inscrutable! I thought after seeing The Hours last week, I’d be more comfortable. (Yes, I’d never bothered watching it before). Well actually I didn’t expect the movie to make the book easier for me (it wouldn’t have done that in any case), I merely wanted something to get me interested enough to start struggling through that morass of a text. I know zilch about Woolf. I plead complete ignorance. I can recall the number of times I’d heard that name pre-Third Year, before it kept popping up in lectures on Modernism and text lists. The first was when I’d read about Elizabeth Taylor and her role in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? or something like that. I'm still not sure whether it is the same Woolf or not, and remember getting confused on that count because I recall the role being slammed as scandalous, lurid, wanton. The second is seeing the book To The Lighthouse on someone’s M.A. reading list. Was faintly interested, then forgot about it. More recently I came across this picture on the net by pure accident and thought she looks extremely intellectual, sophisticated, smart. Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic nose fell into place. Then I learnt she killed herself. After having been absorbed by Sylvia Plath, who did the same, it’s getting more and more intriguing. I don’t know what the definition of Woolf’s ‘madness’ was but to think that she was capable then of writing a book such as this is astounding. I’m not lauding the book. I haven’t read it yet. But then I saw her name in a list of literary ‘giants’ who were snubbed for the Nobel, and taking that as my standard, I’m willing to expect great things from Woolf. And I know once I’ve read the book and the mountain of critical material one is expected to read alongside, I will have understood better, as invariably happens and will wonder how presumptuous I was to speculate so much on something I know absolutely nothing about, and that too after a mere 5 odd pages into it. But I’ve been warned that one has to read the text twice to really understand it, and as things are going, that doesn’t look like too pleasant a prospect.
Woe is me. I say 'text' instead of 'novel' or 'book'. I anticipate critical essays to act as concomitant reading material. i don't take the book as it comes. It's arduous, and a huge pain sometimes, to know you have to read a book, with the pressure of finishing it before a stipulated time. I like to read my book with a mug of tea; plonked on the bed facedown; in the car during traffic jams; on the terrace before the sun goes down; on a mura next to the heater in winter...not with a stubby pencil underlining parts that seem important, from a purely examination point-of-view. I think I started Mrs. Dalloway from that angle. Oh let the first reading progress into a 'reading-for-pleasure' one.
