Mrs Dalloway

What is happiness and who defines it? How do we find fulfillment in life and how do we negotiate the tension between our personal desires and the expectations (and restrictions) placed on us by society? How does the human mind work and is true communication, that is, true understanding, even possible between people? These are some of the questions at the heart of Mrs. Dalloway, a revolutionary novel far ahead of its time in both substance and style. Still just as powerfully influential and mysterious today, Mrs. Dalloway is a stream-of-consciousness novel that shifts between the interior monologues of its different characters. The deeply psychoanalytic narrative explores their minds and offers candid glimpses into their inner psyches.  Depression, love, bewilderment and even post-traumatic-stress disorder are some of the emotions touched upon. Time, our perception of it and how it affects our interpreation of past and present events is a central theme. Ultimately, this novel is concerned with the fundamental nature of experience and how we live and relive it in our minds. How do we experience the world and what does it mean to be a part of it? Yes, at times the plot of the novel coems off as vapid (boring, unimportant). It is not always easy to care about Mrs. Dalloway’s party for spoiled London aristocrats (the entire novel takes place in one day, from the morning before her party to the evening of it). Yet, and I say this as someone who really could care less about fancy hats, dresses and evening gowns, this is a truly astonishing novel that reaches deep into human consciousness and wrestls with some of life’s toughest questions. Also, Septmimus Warren Smith is one of the greatest madmen in literary history and his (spoiler alert!) tragic love affair with Lucrezia will make you fight back tears (even if you’re on the football team).

"One of the famous one-day books, it is uniquely different from other classics due to the interesting simplistic sentance structure that still manages to convery deep meaning; the simplicity lends it a different kind of elegance. The unnaturally even tone is quite interesting, and tragedies are narrated almost in passing, revealed by random observations of other characters. Ultimately, it is the story of those who had been unable to do as they wished and who are now stuck in circumstances that they despise, whether it be the mundane aristocratical life of Clarissa Dalloway or the depressed, fatalistic one of Septimus. It is a book that describes love by showing the wound its absence causes in loveless unions. "