"Mrs. Dalloway"

This was one of the more complex reads I had to get through! The whole novel takes place in a single day!! It blew my mind that a person could actually write that much about one day that leads up to a party. As soon as I started reading it though I understood how Virginia Woolf could pull this feat off.

The writing style of this novel caught me off guard at first because I felt like it was hard to follow, but then after a few pages I got the hang of it. Everything is described with so much detail that it is easy to lose track of who is narrating and what is going on. There was literally quite a few pages about a plane writing words in the sky. I know it doesn't seem like a big deal to us, but back then it was this brand new thing that captured everyone's attention and the novel allows us to realize this. Before the plane captured the attention of everyone, a car had! Yes, a car, it was described as being a very fancy car that might have held one of the royal family within it!! It had everyone speculating and acting different. I felt that the car was described and brought up so many times within a few pages; it actually got annoying after a little bit. But that's Virginia Woolf's writing style I guess, it might also be the fact that she was suffering from mental illness and she thought that this was a work of pure art.

Having insight into what the various characters were thinking was interesting. You'd be looking at everything through the view of one person and then it would switch to someone else completely different! One example of that would be in the park when the little girl ran into Rezia's leg. We first saw it from Peter's point of view as an onlooker and then it switched to Rezia's point of view. It allowed us to see how both people assessed the situation and how they reacted. It is a good way to understand the characters a bit more when you are able to look at them through the eyes and/or thoughts of someone else. Even though sometimes you can become confused as to who is the narrator at a given point in time.

I personally felt that reading this novel once is enough! I love reading novels but I don't want to try and sit through this novel with its extreme description of everything that is going on. Don't get me wrong, I sort of enjoyed reading this novel, it's just not a piece of literature I would have chosen myself. But I feel grateful for having the opportunity to be able to broaden my literature scope and read something I normally wouldn't have!