My birthday gift of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter was such a success with its intended recipient that they already owned a copy. “You’ve given me one of my favorite books for my birthday! I think this one is up there with To The Lighthouse,” they texted me after opening it. “Thank you! ❤️”
(If I can toot my own horn for a minute, I want to stress that even though this is a book friend and that most of our conversations touch on books, Carson McCullers had never come up. I was just operating on vibes.)
I’d given To The Lighthouse a couple of tries, years ago, because Mrs Dalloway was that rare piece of assigned reading that I actually enjoyed. It’s one of the few books I’ve liked enough to read more than once, and I even made a point of attending Bloomsday in 2019 in a low-key Clarissa Dalloway costume (so low-key that it was more akin to a private, petty joke that only I found amusing). Alas, I found To The Lighthouse so much harder to get into. Something about Woolf’s prose in anything else I’ve ever read from her is just…unpleasant. I don’t mean that it’s difficult; there’s lots of difficult writing I enjoy on the aesthetic level. I mean that I derive almost no enjoyment from it.
But the siren song of a book friend’s recommendation is hard to resist—and besides, I’m older and wiser now. Maybe, also, the paperback version I tried to read back in Korea was just too ugly, with too-small text and an unappealing font. Maybe this time I would fall in love with Virginia Woolf again. (Even though just three years ago I’d panned Orlando for “not being Mrs Dalloway.” Conveniently forgot that!)
This time around I at least finished To The Lighthouse, so that’s an improvement. I admire the conceit and the concept: the way that Woolf freezes a single afternoon into a cut gem and then examines it like a jeweler, assessing it from every angle and perspective; the graceful skip through the intervening years and tragedies (war, deaths, failed marriages) to arrive at the return of the Ramsays to the island. “Time Passes” was actually the one section of the book that flowed for me, that I enjoyed reading. Everything else was bumpy, jerky, hard to get into.
Always a weird, hollow feeling when you really want to like a book for whatever reason (it’s by an author you like; it’s a friend or lover’s favorite book) but you just can’t. Again, I ask: Why aren’t you Mrs Dalloway?
