Just spent a few minutes in Regal Park inside Mrs. Dalloway’s head, as well as the heads of everyone else who happened to be there. An amazing concept.
Remember the movie with Mel Gibson (What Women Want?) where he gets electrocuted by trying out a woman’s hairdryer and gains the ability to read the minds of everyone he passes by? Well, that’s what this passage was like. It also reminded me a bit of the famous Jimmy Stewart Christmas movie where the angel takes him around to view what life would be like if he managed to commit suicide.
But the writing of it must have been both taxing as well as a helluvalot of fun. I’m going to try it some day soon; sit in a restaurant or mall somewhere and just try to figure out what people are thinking. Woolf uses some props to keep them tied together: an airplane that starts to skywrite above the park. It’s hard to include an excerpt here, since Woolf’s sentences are about a page long sometimes, and in fact, the pages are turned simply because the reader doesn’t really have a good cutoff point in the reading.
But I am enjoying this novel, appreciating the prose, and while it’s not my favorite novel so far, I am learning much from Virginia Woolf in stretching limits of creative abilities.
Frankly, between Mrs. Dalloway and the PBS special on String Theory that’s been vibrating in my mind, reality doesn’t seem so for-sure anymore. More soon.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology