Sasha's Reviews > To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf has a thing about sea lions. Here's Mr. Ramsay leaving the porch:

with a movement which oddly reminded his wife of the great sea lion at the Zoo tumbling backwards after swallowing his fish and walloping off so that the water in the tank washes from side to side, he dived into the evening air.

In The Waves a different pinniped attends the opera: "Swaying and opening programmes...we settle down, like walruses stranded on rocks, like heavy bodies incapable of waddling to the sea." In Mrs. Dalloway she describes Lady Bradshaw "balancing like a sea-lion at the edge of its tank, barking for invitations." She returns to this image because she has a thing about water, but also because sea lions are funny.

So here she is again, wry and "alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life." Life - "terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance." To the Lighthouse is her most autobiographical novel; the basic family dynamics are the same. She's left some of the darker parts out.

She likes parties, Woolf does, and the climax in this book is the triumphant dinner party closing Part I where for a night everyone is part of something, even Lily Briscoe, the self-doubting artist who's closest to our stand-in for Woolf herself. From there it takes a jarring leap through a decade, in a passage that's sometimes gorgeous, describing the passage of time and decay of times;

how once the looking glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling, and went out again.

and sometimes a little overwritten - at one point we're "despairing yet loth to go (for beauty offers her lures, has her consolations)," and you're like wtf "loth," shut up Shakespeare - and I don't love Part II. You can hear the gears grinding. But it's short, and worth it for Part III, during which we find out whether we'll get to the lighthouse, and along the way "picked up used & tossed aside all the images & symbols I had created," because Woolf is a very tight writer, and she knows exactly what she's doing.

You get this peculiarly Woolfian feel from her books. They are funny, and joyous too: you feel that she thinks life is beautiful. But you also feel that it's not for her. She admires it, but she can't really do it. She's generous, I think; she sees beauty and she can put it into her books. But she doesn't keep it for herself. Eventually, she'll be off into the water with rocks in her pockets and she'll leave it with you. But, I mean, thanks, Woolf. I got it.