Only five days left..
I try to make a choice here, how many pages do I still need to read? Can it be done?
Only four days left..
I feel the pressure of having to fit this novel into my evening, but I'm reluctant to give in easily. There's so much I still want to do beside reading. Winter feels like so many things, that reading has been shoved to the sidelines for a while now. Or maybe it's the novel itself, it isn't a very engaging one, at that.
Three days..
Trying to read as much as I can before I turn my light off and go to sleep. Beside me I hear the familiar noise that comes with someone falling asleep. Everything seems more deeper, more relaxed, that's why I could never fool anyone pretending to sleep when I was little. Only fifty left.
Two days. The day after tomorrow I need to be bringing this novel back to the library, no more excuses left. Either I start reading or it's left unfinished, but running has made me tired and watching telly has made me lazy.
One day left.. Tonight's the night. I begin reading as soon as the little one is shoved into dreamy sleep, but I keep being interfered with exciting things happening around me.
But finally, in bed, after rubbing sleep from my eyes repeatedly I get to the end of this mountain of a novel of 226 pages.
It's a little thing, really, not weighty in touch, but burdening in emotion.
Virginia Woolf paints a picture how a mother, a father and their childs go through their lives. Instead of a novel packed with events, it decides to let us peek inside the restless sea we all feel inside. Family life is rarely content, as each of us struggles to keep faith in our choices, to keep the feeling we might have had better if we chose differently at bay. Virginia Woolf gave it a good try, because, especially in the first part of the book I felt I could relate even though the book is set decades from now.
Near the half the book tends to flutter onto more poetic phrases which didn't hold my attention. Those pages felt like butterflies in the wind. Beautiful to look at, but in the end soon forgotten.
In the end it focuses back onto the people you met in the first half and you get a sort of wrapping up. It might have been a strange ending, but I felt it could've been better if the book ended with the dinner party instead of taking the leap of several years.
Life doesn't provide the answers, it doesn't give you a look into what may have happened, so in my opinion it might have given the story more substance, because it leaves the reader to ponder what might have happened. You feel that the dinner party is a hinge in future things to happen, a doorway into an unknown abyss, yet people clinging to each other by upholding conventions not all of them believe in, makes them unite as a family.
Beside the inner emotions in a family, this novel also depicts the ruin of the victorian age. The age of free will and thought is entering the world and as we say goodbye to some of the characters, in the end we're truly saying goodbye to a past that's already dead and buried, yet still carried along by some.
