the 941

This week’s book was a long time coming. My interest in Mrs. Dalloway was first aroused when I saw the film The Hours way back in 2002. That movie, based on the novel of the same name by Michael Cunningham, actually depicts Dalloway’s author, Virginia Woolf, and plays with the narrative of the original novel throughout, echoing and updating it in interesting ways.

So why’d it take me seven years to get around to reading the original? I have to plead laziness, although I did make my way through Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own in the interim. But boy do I regret putting off Dalloway now, because it is an exceedingly great book, a twisting, panoramic, stream-of-consciousness modernist classic.

The plot is about as simple as it gets. One June day. London. Clarissa Dalloway is putting on a party. That’s pretty much it, but what draws readers in is Woolf’s prose: the way she dances about her characters’ heads as they think back on their lives, on all the missed opportunities, the minor moments of joy, the odd turns we all take passing through our days.

Woolf published Dalloway just a few years after a similar one-day-in-June novel, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the two bear many similarities. (Woolf definitely has the edge on Joyce in the brevity department: Dalloway clocks in at a concise 194 pages.) I rank the modernist upswell of which Woolf was a major force as the richest, strangest and most beautiful period in all of literary history — it was the age of Woolf and Joyce, sure, but also of Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, F. Scott Fitzgerald — and Mrs. Dalloway is a centerpiece work of the era.

So yeah, I’m glad I got around to it.

Upcoming entries in The 941 Book CL-B:

• Beowulf
• Milan Kundera’s Immortality
• Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• What will land on this list next? Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo? Sophocles? James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name? Jorge Luis Borges’ Collected Fictions? Harold Pinter’s Betrayal? Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove? Jacques Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy? You won’t know unless you tune in, so to speak, next time.

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