The thing I like about minimalist writers (Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff) is that they leave stuff out. They leave things to your imagination. They let you do some of the work. And that's fun.
The only thing left to your imagination in "To The Lighthouse" is whether or not anyone will ever go to the bloody lighthouse.
It's about a bunch of toffs hanging around their fancy house at the beginning of the 20th century, doing very little, and thinking a lot about it. Every thought they have, or half-thought, or thought about a thought, is detailed and dissected in the interior monologuing stream-of-consciousness style that Woolf is famous for.
The dramatic highpoint of the "plot" involves one of the characters nearly snapping at another one when he orders a second bowl of soup.
The other thing I like about minimalist writers is that they use short sentences. Woolf's sentences are so long that by the time you get to the end of one you've forgotten how it started. This kind of thing is no good for people like me with our small brains and smaller attention spans.
"To the Lighthouse" is considered by many literary types to be one of the best novels ever written. I can see why they would think that. It's clearly very good indeed. I just didn't enjoy a single page of it.
Next moth we will be reading "The Making of Star Wars - The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film" by J.W. Rinzler.
2 comments:
Told you so.
And yet a frothy bit o' second soup is strangely tempting...
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