A review by cdua
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

challenging reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

Sweet words, well written. I’m not used to reading such poetic language and 60 pages in (given that I was also picking up the book after a long break from it), I had to read the SparkNotes to actually understand what was going on and reread the pages to derive the meaning of all the flowery language. There were snippets I feel like I understood but I still feel like I’m lacking the final step and some wisdom that would allow me to actually understand the meaning of the book—not unlike Lily’s missing factor to her painting!  Time Passing is something magical that I could read over and over and over again. What an eloquent way to talk about time—and what stood out to me most was that nature will prevail. One day, when we are all dead and rot in the ground, nature will thrive again. If anything, this climate crisis will drive our own species to extinction. That’s definitely a distraction from the novel, but it’s what I thought of most. And two quotes to round off this review:
“All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean.” (Page 121)
“But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one’s garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather.” (Page 195)
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