Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway IV

"I have been trying to read this book for the last 6 years..."


"I would not recommend this to a young woman excited by life and the future - Clarissa's melancholy manages to instil negativity in almost everything"


"I did found a good thing about the book and that is the description of different parts of London during the day , the ding dong of the Big Ben and so on, but I'm afraid , that's about it ..."


"Reading should not be such hard work
Initially I feared I was just not intellectual enough to appreciate this work, but after finding that all our book club members had the same opinion of it I came to the conclusion that the pain and grief Virginia Woolf apparently went through in writing this book was hardly any less than I felt in reading it, and didn't justify the results."


"Appaling
Mrs. Dalloway is one of the worst books I have read. It is not, in fact, about anything, particularly. It is instead a loosely linked ramble throught the minds of a large number of people in London. Every single one of them is dysfunctional or insane. Their reactions are like those of a manic depressive - one moment they are full of the joy of life, the next, they start to feel homesick and plunge into almost suicidal depression. If you think I'm exaggerating, take a flick through a copy of it ... Also, I'm fairly suspicious of symbolism. The problem is that it can mean anything, and when you start to say that something is symbolic, where do you stop? Mrs. Dalloway is like that. It is considered to be so deeply symbolic that I suspect it isn't.

It's just a bad, bad book."


"This books is not particularly difficult to read as there are no complicated ideas or challenging concepts in it. It is just a long, tedious collection of gibberish prose. As I read the book I deliberately forced myself to try and see what the big fuss about it is but once I put it down I admitted to myself that I had just read a really bad book and felt somewhat tricked. Don't let yourself be fooled by wasting your time reading this shamefully overrated book."