Mrs Dalloway Said She Would Finish The Book No Matter What

I wish I hadn’t watched The Hours before reading Mrs Dalloway

Something my yoga teacher often says is that the most challenging option might be to take a child’s pose because it challenges your ego. I smile every time she says it because it is painfully true, but of course I’ve never actually taken the child’s pose.

She also says that “yoga” happens more off the mat than on; another truth that I’ve been noodling while pushing myself to finish reading Mrs Dalloway.

My copy of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is 544 pages. I read that book in about four days. When my husband’s colleague leant him House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski, I only had three days to consume it (I am not sure the verb “read” is appropriate for that book) before it needed to be returned. The point I’m rather braggadociously making is that I’m a fast reader.

My copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is only 180 pages. It took me months of picking it up, putting it down, up, down, down for so long I had to re-start it, before finally dragging myself through to the end. And my ego is crying out, “why?!”

Is it because of the stream-of-consciousness style of writing Woolf used? It took time to find the flow of the writing, but I love writing that is explicitly not from the age of search engine optimisation.

Is it because there are no chapters and very few double spaces between paragraphs? If this is the case, I’m afraid it means superfluous headings required by SEO have fried my brain.

Is it because the characters feel like silk scarves I can’t quite grasp before they float to the floor?

All that is left to consider now are the themes of the novel. And here is where my ego has another challenge because while I could identify a few minor themes, I felt like there was something more pervasive that I had missed entirely. I wanted this post to be a more serious kind of book review, but a vague allusion to “obsession” and a brief “Peter Walsh: incel” didn’t feel like enough to make this worth anyone’s while.

So, I swallowed my pride and took a child’s pose by watching several lectures and explanations on YouTube. Now I could tell you about the broader themes of the novel and how it fits into the context of Virginia Woolf’s life — themes I probably missed because I forced myself to finish the book — but this isn’t a formal book report. This is what I call my Reading Journal, and the best part about a journal is how honest you can be with your writing.

Another bit of wisdom from my yoga teacher, and another thing I can’t seem to practice on my yoga mat: let come what come, let go what go.

This seems the perfect situation for some off-the-mat yoga practice. I did my best to read Mrs Dalloway, and now it’s time to let it go.

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Thanks for reading this week’s hot mushrooms — hope to see you next week!