there is a pretty clear dichotomy between what my head and my heart says about this book: my head thinks it is a remarkable artistic achievement, and my heart feels little to nothing at all.

woolf is an expert at her craft--how lucidly and intensely she captures the interior life of these twentieth century londonites, from the eponymous mrs. dalloway to her daughter's pious governess to the wwi veteran who throws himself from his window--how deftly their narratives are woven together and flow back and forth--the constant but subtle juxtaposition of people and events from varying and sometimes diametric points of view--the cumulative effect is a stunning kind of realism, a brief impression of the overwhelming complexity of human beings and human life.

in her portrayal of the british aristocracy (or what is left of it anyway), she captured--what feels like effortlessly--the contradiction between the frivolity and self-absorption of their lives, and the very real dramas that play out within them. how serious each person's love and grief is to her, no matter where it stands on the global cosmic scale. for the majority of us living in the so-called first world/america, this is condition of our lives--to know how insignificant our troubles are, how they pale in comparison with the damage we wring to the rest of the world (war, conquest, genocide, famine)--and yet to feel on a personal level that each quotidian moment--first loves, first deaths, first apartments, birth and disease and old age--is of nearly unbearable consequence. this is the myopia of human nature, this is the part of human ego that we understand, even if we can't forgive, and woolf renders all of it with neither pity nor judgement. her concerns are artistic, not moral--or even necessarily emotional--and in that sense, she is singularly successful.

but on a (more) subjective, affective level--the level in which i ultimately judge and value all art, being someone who reads and watches and listens and consumes in order to feel--mrs. dalloway is not a book that will stay with me for very long. my actual experience of it--my sense of its wisdom, its grandeur, of pathos--was lukewarm at best. the book's artistic hypothesis--which i took to be something like 'everyone is human, equally and terribly, even the dinner-party having lords and ladies who almost made cabinet'--feels... valid, i guess, but also foregone and not particularly inspiring. perhaps there is only so much i can care about upper-crust london, which may be a limitation of the reader, and not the text.

i am, however, very glad i read the book. it was my first time reading woolf, and i can understand now her stature in the canon of english literature. a genius, even if not (so far) my kind.

(bonus points for making everyone a lil gay.)