This book reminds me of the Japanese Zen dry, Ryōan-ji's garden with asymmetrical larger and smaller rocks on a space of sand raked into linear patterns to facilitate meditation; our guide explained that as our thoughts cannot be completely controlled and must be allowed to wander, the outline of the garden and its rocks takes your thoughts here and there.
In this book the writing is the thoughts of its people, and they jump, you need to pay attention because the next sentence may be by another character,
it makes it actually interesting and caused me to read closely. The book is not long but often I had to reread a part to be sure I got it right, making it even more catching.
Published 1927 this edition Vintage 2000
198 pages
Grade 5/5 –
Will I read more of this author: YES.
ISBN: 978-0-09947-829-4
The book has three parts: 1. The Window, 2. Time Passes, 3. The Lighthouse.
In the first part the Ramsey family, Mrs. and Mr. Ramsey and their eight children are on summer vacation on the Isle of Skye, some time before the first world war. They have friends with them: Minta Doyle and Paul Raley, August Carmichel, Charles Tansley, William Banks and Lily, the painter.
The first part is what happens over one day and how people interact.
Here I thought to concentrate on the Ramsay family and its interrelations, I am glad I did not have to live in that family.
Mrs. Ramsay is sitting in the window reading a fairy tale to James, the younger boy, aged 6, he wants to go to the lighthouse tomorrow. His mother agrees with him, but his father refuses and James thinks (page 4): Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children by his mere presence….
The book tells, what everybody is thinking about themselves, the others and other stuff, it is sometimes difficult to see who is thinking now, but returning to reread it becomes clear.
Some sentences are very long, just like my thoughts:
For example, the description of Mrs. Ramsey, I believe this is the author’s thinking (page 6): She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters – Prue, Nancy, Rose – could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, though to them there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at table beneath their mother’s eyes, honor her strange severity, her extreme courtesy, like a Queen’s raising from the mud a beggar’s dirty foot and washing, when she thus admonished them so very severely about the wretched atheist who had chased them – or, speaking accurately, been invited to stay with them – in the Isle of Skye.
A womanly woman; I am glad she is not my mother.
The description of the children I find interesting because that is what my kids did and do, even they are adults today having to close the windows that the gossip will not escape (page 7): Disappearing as stealthily as stags from the dinner-table directly the meal was over, the eight sons and daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay sought their bedrooms, their fastnesses in a house where there was no other privacy to debate anything, everything; Tansley’s tie; the passing of the Reform Bill; seabirds and butterflies; people; while the sun poured into those attics, which a plank alone separated from each other so that every footstep could be plainly heard and the Swiss girl sobbing for her father who was dying of cancer in the valley of the Grisons, and lit up the bats, flannels, straw hats, ink-pots, beetles, and the skull of small birds, while it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in the towels too, gritty with sand from bathing.
The children do not call their parents: mother or father.
Mr. Ramsey has written some books (on subject and object and the nature of reality) but the last one is not as successful as an earlier one. Tansley is writing his thesis.
William Banks is an old school friend of Mr. Ramsay but they had grown apart when Ramsay had married. Banks do not have children and his wife has died, he is perhaps jealous of the Ramsay’s but has nicked named the children after kings and queens of England: Cam, the Wicked, James, the Ruthless, Andrew, the Just, Prue, the Fair, Andrew, the Brains according to their behavior towards him (page 20).
To contrast this Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts on her the children (page 54): Prue, the perfect angel, Andrew, the mathematician, Nancy and Roger, wild creatures for now, Rose, her mouth too big but she had a wonderful gift with her hands, James was the most sensitive of her children.
Mr. Ramsay thoughts about his wife (page 35): It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life-
When Mr. Ramsay catches Mrs. Ramsey reading a book (page 113) he wondered what she was reading, and exaggerated her ignorance, her simplicity, for he liked to think that she was not clever, not-book-learned at all. He wondered if she understood what she was reading. Probably not, he thought. She was astonishingly beautiful.
What an idiot he is!
Mrs. Ramsay’s reaction (page 114): she felt he was still looking at her, but that look had changed. He wanted something – wanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him. And, that, no, she could not do. He found talking so much easier than she did. He could say the things- she never could. So naturally it was always he that said the things, and then for some reason he would mind this suddenly, and would reproach her. A heartless woman he would call her; she never told him that she loved him. But it was not so – it was not so. It was only that she never could say what she felt.
Playing games, without honesty and openness.
These are some of the thoughts of the Ramsay parents from the first part of the book, it covers a day in their life. The story really caught me and I could not wait for the next page.
I have had this book on my self for a couple of years, thinking it would be obscure and difficult to read, it was a pleasant surprise to read and I enjoyed it.
On the author: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) British, important modernist author, home schooled because she was a girl; all her life she fought with what today is called a bipolar condition, which caused her to take her own life.
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