To the Lighthouse

Informationen zum Autor Virginia Woolf Introduction by Susan Choi Klappentext "A beautiful edition of the groundbreaking classic novel, with a new introduction by award-winning writer Susan Choi. "Without question one of the two or three finest novels of the twentieth century. Woolf comments on the most pressing dramas of our human predicament: war, mortality, family, love." -Rick Moody, bestselling author of The Ice Storm. The enduring power of this iconic classic flows from the brilliance of its narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of its prose. Though the novel turns on the death of its central figure, Mrs. Ramsay, her presence pervades every page in a poetic evocation of loss and memory that is also a celebration of domestic life and its most intimate details. Observed across the years at their vacation house on the Isle of Skye, Mrs. Ramsay and her family seek to recapture meaning from the flux of things and the passage of time. To the Lighthouse enacts a moving allegory of the creative consciousness and its momentary triumphs over fleeting material life."--Provided by publisher. Leseprobe from the Introduction to the Vintage Classics edition (2023), by Susan Choi    To the Lighthouse begins very abruptly—with nothing much going on. “Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay. It’s an empty moment of vacation in-betweenness, of busy­work and lazy repetition. Six-year-old James Ramsay has been given by his mother a catalogue to cut out the pictures. Mr. Ramsay and his tendentious acolyte Charles Tansley are walking back and forth as they always do, in the same track, talking as they always do about the same petty, insular topics. Mrs. Ram­say is thinking, as she always does, about the dominating qual­ities of men; and the claims of houseguests; and the prejudices of her children. Her children are feeling as usual prejudiced against Mr. Tansley, as well as reflexively compelled to curb their prejudice, as per their mother’s admonishments. The house as always is littered with paint pots and bird skulls and handfuls of sand; it’s decorated as ever with “long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall” (p. TK) from which the sun pouring into the room draws “a smell of salt and weeds,” as changeless as the sun itself. Even the possible trip to the lighthouse is a tired debate (Will the weather be fine?), not a plan, and even were the lighthouse attained, it would only be to offer superfluous tribute to a changeless landmark affixed to its “rock the size of a tennis lawn” where there’s nothing to see but “the same dreary waves breaking week after week.” In other words, nothing changes—in this room, in this house, in this family, in these conditions of existence . . . where the walls are so thin that it is impossible not to hear one of the servants, a “Swiss girl sobbing for her father who was dying of cancer in a valley of the Grisons.” Should we pay attention to this sound of bereavement? Surely not. Surely we’re meant to disregard this, as the family does.   Nothing much going on: yet everything is here, in sparkling distillation, as we drift aimlessly on time’s stream. It’s the kind of afternoon that might well have been swept under the amnesic rug of “non-being,” Woolf ’s name for that greater part of experi­ence, the part that we live but don’t notice, which she compares to “a kind of nondescript cotton wool.” She goes on, in her auto­biographical “A Sketch of the Past,” “When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger. I had a slight tempera­ture last week; almost the whole day was non-being. The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being. I think Jane Austen can; and Trollope; perhaps Thackeray and Dickens and Tolstoy. I have never been able to do both” (Woolf, Moments of Being , 70). Perhaps I badly misunderstand what Woolf means by non-being, or perhaps Woolf, writing those sent...

Product details

• Authors: Susan Choi, Virginia Woolf
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 03.01.2023
• EAN: 9780593468869
• ISBN: 978-0-593-46886-9
• No. of pages: 224
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 16 mm
• Series: Vintage Classics
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature