Book review. Virginia Woolf dismantles the boundary between the surface and the deep

Many go to a primeval story when they need piggas up. A movie, a book, a painting... ”To the Lighthouse” (”To the lighthouse”) is mine. It may seem strange, as Virginia Woolf herself thought of the book as an elegy, a dirge. But good art, zest for life, and in ”To the lighthouse” is all true, as Virginia Woolf sought, and often failed.

Now, it has come in the new Swedish translation by Margareta Backgård. First, I am suspicious. This novel has become a part of my own life, Woolf metaphors are so classic, and her use of language is sometimes just as tricky as the Prousts. But Backgårds translation is clear as water. Again, I am struck by the nerve of the Virginia Woolf text, which never bidding on anything that resembles a story but still, almost a hundred years after it was written, collapses the boundaries between surface and depth. The past and the present penetrates and dissolves each other.

This is the Virginia Woolf pen really got the ”weathering”, as she herself expressed it.

Well, if a desire to sail to the lighthouse, which is not getting off, but then, ten years later,... Not much to act thus. In addition, the book people barely with each other. All are thoughts that are woven back and forth, in and out between the one and the other in the circle around Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay on summer vacation with eight children in a run-down house on an island in the Hebrides.

the References to fabric and textile are legion. Yet it is not sad, but lovely to keep up with the intricate dansturerna between the rationelle and self-pitying man (researcher mr. Ramsay) and his skeptical and serious wife (mrs. Ramsay), the younger, the painter, Lily Briscoe, ramsay's students and guests of the worn-villa - and so the kids crashing in and out of the house and garden. Read as pure literature circles book about the loss of childhood, and man's attempt to reconcile himself with death, war, and an indifferent nature. The weight is on the loss and humiliation – but also on the creation of conditions and on the arts as the ultimate meningsbärare.

”To the lighthouse”

that art would be outwork. She desired shape, it is important. According to her, gives the form an inner meaning, and creates the feeling. Also there is similar she's a cubist painter. To get the most out of the book, one must also be aware of the shadows and spacing. For despite the fact that the author both physically and artistically longed to go astray is the novel crafted in all dimensions. Woolf describes the never without embodying seemingly petty social situations where people peeping through their reactions. All thrown in between hatred and doubt. In particular, the self-doubt. No one is rectilinear and not finished. It is created and re-created in relation to each other, which makes it tiresome for the reader. But so blazingly lucid! Ridiculous like Tove Jansson's Muminfamilj for the other. It swings between anxiety, envy, death missklädsamhet, a beastly flare up anger, an unexplainable beauty and so walking as a cure for life's blind cruelty.

Most dividend gives it still to read ”To the lighthouse” unclean, pendelrörelser between the text and Virginia Woolf's own life. This is a very modern, time-shifted and disguised autobiography. The place is really St. Ives in Cornwall, where Virginia spent her childhood, all the summers. There draws nowadays Woolf fans from all over the world, despite the fact that the view from the family Stephens rickety rented Talland House was blocked and the small fish and the seaside town of trivialiserats of mass tourism. There also drew Virginia's brothers and sisters after both the mother and the father (according to this reading, therefore, Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay) died, the years 1895 and 1904 .

in the childhood became the siblings ' journey through a disappointment. Instead, created the Virginia Woolf ”To the lighthouse”(1927) , a fiction or Paradisillusion. Idyllens snake open, however, its asked already on the first page. Evil runs late amok in the abrupt mellankapitlet ”Time goes by”, the format of an abyss (first world war) between the two heavier kapitelblocken ”Window” and ”the Lighthouse”.

Virginia Woolf writes that ”To the lighthouse” was a gravestone for the mother, whose sudden death at fifty years of age the daughter could not come to terms with. This was her life's tragedy. But at the book's publication in 1927 she was able to put the mother aside. The grief bemästrades through writing, which this time was light-hearted, ”which to blow soap bubbles in a pipe”. Nurtured, one might presume, by the author's newfound kärlekslycka together with Vita Sackville-West.

Mrs. Ramsay is the book's protagonist, composed of grief, care and love. Even if she suddenly dies (as in a parenthesis), she has the book through an intrusive presence. Sometimes, she even as a deity over the fields. But a victorian woman who rakes for men was not Woolf's own feminine ideal. Herself she is much more in the younger, the painter, Lily Briscoe, as throughout the novel stubbornly struggles with a chaotic oil and on the book's last page, after ten years of trying, manages to pull a center line of : ”Yes, she thought, and put away the brush, completely exhausted, I have had my vision”.

the Lighthouse of Eilean Sionnach, on the island of Skye in the scottish Hebrides. Actually downloaded Virginia Woolf the inspiration for ”To the lighthouse” from Cornwall. Photo: Rights Managed

this time she is forty-four years old - a contemporary of Lily Briscoe who drag their balancing pensellinje.

One might wonder if the line accounts for the novel's lighthouse. A mirage that on closer scrutiny turns out to be just a building like any other. It is clear in any case that even the author Virginia Woolf has now had his vision. Vision or shock that she called those moments of lucidity that she could sometimes experience. Epifanier who brought with them horror and a physical collapse but that also made her an artist. For usually appeared to her the world be empty ”batting”. But when she wrote, she could suddenly ana a pattern behind the batt.

also Read about Ingela lind's book on the seven members of which Virginia Woolf belonged.

One such pattern is ”To the lighthouse”. But I love it not for the women and the children fighting so modern for its independence or for other freedoms such as Virginia Woolf, like the friends of the seven members, was early to operate. I love the not to man is a wolf barking and not seeing the flowers. No, everything is much more complicated than that. The complication were Virginia Woolf method. Nothing in the book is static, except possibly Mrs. ramsay's annoying beauty. Not the cut-throat existence - but not the little everyday miracles. At any time the connecting link is cut. Arcadia may be coated by a skimmer. So, suddenly, is here again sjabbigt, fragmented and broken.

Everything can always slide over into something else. ”Becoming” is the word. Prospective...

This is possible in distinguishing Virginia Woolf's own text from the many other followers who were inspired by the ”To the lighthouse”.

One such novel is newly published and much-lauded debut ”All the Lives we ever lived”. Seeking solace in Virginia Woolf” (Crown. New York City). Written by literary scholar Katharine Smyth.

free to use the classics as a consolation. I freely admit that the arts often have been my straw. Nevertheless, I am surprised Katharine Smyths intensive therapeutic heat. She's reading ”To the lighthouse” as a bible. Even her own book is a dirge over a dead parent, in this case a dying father - the charming despot, the architect and the alcoholic as in flare-ups are broken down by cancer. Chapter-lie Smyth his own youth, both with ”To the lighthouse” and Virginia Woolf's autobiography.

It's bold. I don't know if the sentence is to usurpera on ”To the lighthouse” or just to show how a classic can be indispensable. Either way is ”All the Lives we ever lived” is best when it leaves the ”To the lighthouse” and sets out on his own to examine the tangled relationship between father and daughter.

But it strikes me that Katharine Smyths novel, perhaps, is a newly built bridge to their model. You can read it as a hyperaktuellt calls over the time span of a hundred years.

And then everything is forgiven.

Read about Per Molanders book of essays ”Everything is waves. Virginia Woolf and modern physics”