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lauralina2345's review against another edition
5.0
The end is amazing and sad, as the war is starting again...
mala_ramona's review against another edition
4.0
Ukronija should really get a lektor - to što su pustili da ne prerađen prevod i tekst izađe u štampu samo kvari Virdžinijinu genijalnost.
snowbenton's review against another edition
5.0
Extremely readable, poignant, sad, funny. Everything you always think your own diary will be but never is. It's a fascinating insight into Woolf herself and her writing process. I like that this version is edited to be just about her writing and literary thoughts.
sidharthvardhan's review against another edition
5.0
"I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?”
I normally avoid diaries that weren't published directly by author but this woman is too cool not to be in hell. The book suffers typical limitations of diary - written in certain moods, without desire of being understood always present (sometimes Woolf just throws a word stream instead of sentences) and not much focused on being eloquent. Woolf was full of ideas what forms literature could take and this book is full of such ideas. Another way a person interested in mind of a writer or art of writing might gain insights is how she has to go through spells of depression, writer's block, insecurities about her writings etc. Than there are all writers impressed her (to impress someone like her should be a real milestone). There are a number of beautiful passages I collected - more than I ever expect to from reading someone's personal diary.
I normally avoid diaries that weren't published directly by author but this woman is too cool not to be in hell. The book suffers typical limitations of diary - written in certain moods, without desire of being understood always present (sometimes Woolf just throws a word stream instead of sentences) and not much focused on being eloquent. Woolf was full of ideas what forms literature could take and this book is full of such ideas. Another way a person interested in mind of a writer or art of writing might gain insights is how she has to go through spells of depression, writer's block, insecurities about her writings etc. Than there are all writers impressed her (to impress someone like her should be a real milestone). There are a number of beautiful passages I collected - more than I ever expect to from reading someone's personal diary.
savaging's review against another edition
4.0
"I am surprised and a little disquieted by the remorseless severity of my mind: that it never stops reading and writing . . ."
This book is hard to finish, because the end of the diary is the end of Woolf's life. And she still had so many things she wanted to write. But at the end you feel this numbness in her, how she wanted to write with nuance and delicacy and was stuck in a raw, catastrophic war.
Also: astonishing to read how many articles were rejected and how much anxiety Woolf had over publishing her best books.
This book is hard to finish, because the end of the diary is the end of Woolf's life. And she still had so many things she wanted to write. But at the end you feel this numbness in her, how she wanted to write with nuance and delicacy and was stuck in a raw, catastrophic war.
Also: astonishing to read how many articles were rejected and how much anxiety Woolf had over publishing her best books.
is_book_loring's review against another edition
5.0
"The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial."
Could one put a rating on someone's diary? Is it even appropriate to do so? Should one be saying things like 'you have a nice, organized thoughts', 'you keep a very thorough, meticulous and systematical diary', 'clear and very well-written', as though diary/ journal is written for someone else's eyes other than the writer's. Therefore, this rating is reserved for how meaningful the experience of perusing through Virginia Woolf's journal to me.
I have a confession to make. I, with the fiber of my being, worship Virginia Woolf. One of my regret is that I've found her late in my life stages, and from the first time I opened the page to A Room of One's Own, she has always been my hero ever since. Thus, I was daunted to read her personal journal, because as the saying goes, never meet your hero. To my enormous relief, seeing, listening and reading her makes me love her in a similar and different way. She felt like an intimate friend, whose voice and thoughts resonated in me, not as a writer of course, but as a person who inspired and comforted me with her passion, honesty and brilliant courage.
She's an inventor who always strove to create new forms, new styles of writing, of life-telling. She's a visionary who aimed for something greater and deeper, meaningful.
"I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say 'This is it'? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as was walking through Russell Square last night) I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is 'it'. It is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; trotting along Russell Square with the moon up there and those mountain clouds. Who am I, what am I, and so on: these questions are always floating about in me: and then I bump against some exact fact — a letter, a person, and come to them again with a great sense of freshness. And so it goes on. But on this showing, which is true, I think, I do fairly frequently come upon this 'it'; and then feel quite at rest."
Often time, it feels as though she is obsessing over glory or fame, but in fact what she craves for is respect and connection. She might be judgmental and critical on other people, but never more than on herself. She was a very harsh judge on herself, demanded perfection to her works. She's vain but oddly humble, never aim of being great writer, only an interesting one. She wrote but never preached, which was one of the reason I admired her so much. "Art is being rid of all preaching: thing in themselves: the sentence is beautiful: multitudinous seas; daffodils that come before the swallow dares."
The devotion and determination to her books was breathtaking. In her life, she focused to be her own self, refusing to be controlled, hated dominion or imposition of will over others. She would not lose her identity, sticking bravely to her aesthetic, using the sheer defiance of 'I write for myself' as her fighting pose every single time. "I will not be 'famous', 'great'. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded" And she was brilliant enough to find a way to be financially fulfilled but still able to write whatever the hell she wanted, instead of marketing herself to the satisfaction of public. "I am an outsider. I can take my way: experiment with my own imagination in my own way. The pack may howl, but it shall never catch me."
But even still, she wanted to do her own share for humanity. "I want to give the whole world of the present society--nothing less: facts as well as the vision." This contradiction became a continuous struggle, entangled with her war with self-worth, old age, and deaths of her friends, acquaintances, the rake of raw emotions that easily overwhelmed her, and the battles of depression.
From her journal, it could be seen how writing was a core need to her being, it how she came alive, she stated how she couldn't stop, or she would fall into a state of depression. If she didn't has anything to engage her brain: reading or writing, it was as though the inactiveness would force her to stare into the meaningless void of existence."Wonder how a year or so perhaps is to be endured. Think, yet people do live; can't imagine what goes on behind faces. All is surface hard; myself only an organ that takes blows, one after another; the horror of the hard raddled faces in the flower show yesterday: the inane pointlessness of all this existence; hatred of my own brainlessness and indecision; the old treadmill feeling, of going on an on and on, for no reason."
Virginia Woolf was a gifted thinker, a born writer who was plagued by constant, continuous self-doubt, uncertainty and depression her whole life, but kept galloping courageously, floundering and stumbling in her search for truth and her own personal voice, but always transforming. Reading her writing process, her creative-always-changing journey had moved and touched me in an inexplicably profound level.
"I saw all the violence and unreason crossing in the air: ourselves small; a tumult outside."
Could one put a rating on someone's diary? Is it even appropriate to do so? Should one be saying things like 'you have a nice, organized thoughts', 'you keep a very thorough, meticulous and systematical diary', 'clear and very well-written', as though diary/ journal is written for someone else's eyes other than the writer's. Therefore, this rating is reserved for how meaningful the experience of perusing through Virginia Woolf's journal to me.
I have a confession to make. I, with the fiber of my being, worship Virginia Woolf. One of my regret is that I've found her late in my life stages, and from the first time I opened the page to A Room of One's Own, she has always been my hero ever since. Thus, I was daunted to read her personal journal, because as the saying goes, never meet your hero. To my enormous relief, seeing, listening and reading her makes me love her in a similar and different way. She felt like an intimate friend, whose voice and thoughts resonated in me, not as a writer of course, but as a person who inspired and comforted me with her passion, honesty and brilliant courage.
She's an inventor who always strove to create new forms, new styles of writing, of life-telling. She's a visionary who aimed for something greater and deeper, meaningful.
"I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say 'This is it'? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as was walking through Russell Square last night) I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is 'it'. It is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; trotting along Russell Square with the moon up there and those mountain clouds. Who am I, what am I, and so on: these questions are always floating about in me: and then I bump against some exact fact — a letter, a person, and come to them again with a great sense of freshness. And so it goes on. But on this showing, which is true, I think, I do fairly frequently come upon this 'it'; and then feel quite at rest."
Often time, it feels as though she is obsessing over glory or fame, but in fact what she craves for is respect and connection. She might be judgmental and critical on other people, but never more than on herself. She was a very harsh judge on herself, demanded perfection to her works. She's vain but oddly humble, never aim of being great writer, only an interesting one. She wrote but never preached, which was one of the reason I admired her so much. "Art is being rid of all preaching: thing in themselves: the sentence is beautiful: multitudinous seas; daffodils that come before the swallow dares."
The devotion and determination to her books was breathtaking. In her life, she focused to be her own self, refusing to be controlled, hated dominion or imposition of will over others. She would not lose her identity, sticking bravely to her aesthetic, using the sheer defiance of 'I write for myself' as her fighting pose every single time. "I will not be 'famous', 'great'. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded" And she was brilliant enough to find a way to be financially fulfilled but still able to write whatever the hell she wanted, instead of marketing herself to the satisfaction of public. "I am an outsider. I can take my way: experiment with my own imagination in my own way. The pack may howl, but it shall never catch me."
But even still, she wanted to do her own share for humanity. "I want to give the whole world of the present society--nothing less: facts as well as the vision." This contradiction became a continuous struggle, entangled with her war with self-worth, old age, and deaths of her friends, acquaintances, the rake of raw emotions that easily overwhelmed her, and the battles of depression.
From her journal, it could be seen how writing was a core need to her being, it how she came alive, she stated how she couldn't stop, or she would fall into a state of depression. If she didn't has anything to engage her brain: reading or writing, it was as though the inactiveness would force her to stare into the meaningless void of existence."Wonder how a year or so perhaps is to be endured. Think, yet people do live; can't imagine what goes on behind faces. All is surface hard; myself only an organ that takes blows, one after another; the horror of the hard raddled faces in the flower show yesterday: the inane pointlessness of all this existence; hatred of my own brainlessness and indecision; the old treadmill feeling, of going on an on and on, for no reason."
Virginia Woolf was a gifted thinker, a born writer who was plagued by constant, continuous self-doubt, uncertainty and depression her whole life, but kept galloping courageously, floundering and stumbling in her search for truth and her own personal voice, but always transforming. Reading her writing process, her creative-always-changing journey had moved and touched me in an inexplicably profound level.
"I saw all the violence and unreason crossing in the air: ourselves small; a tumult outside."
erd's review against another edition
slow-paced
3.0
good to listen to in the background, though she does say problematic things at times