Oh, the brutes! It’s damnably difficult.
I have read novels of Virginia Woolf. That count goes to three. Three of her major novels four years back. I had opted to reserve my opinion on her writing for a very specific reason that I could not reach a well-defined conclusion then, and could not really spell out how her writing impacted me. Though I had loved all her books and rated them highly. You can say, I bifurcated my opinion in two parts, and rolled out one half in the form of ‘stars’ immediately then; and reserved the other half in the form of ‘reviews’ for the future. I think, now the time has come to bring forth the reserved half in such a language that is as simple as possible. This is the first time I am trying to talk about any of her books with a promise that I am going to revisit all of the above-mentioned ‘three novels’ this year soon. I am currently reading Jacob’s Room also, and it is adding up to my thoughts.
Now coming back to this book; it is a short story collection and I was reading her stories for the first time last year. How different a short story writer she is, to a novelist, I will expound a little bit.
This book has eight stories. But some of the stories are only one or two pages long. Ultra short version of the novelist I experienced. Comprehending those shortest ones was not easy for me. It required a greater level of concentration. You need some extra focus to keep up with her distinctiveness.
The first story is about ‘a Haunted House’ where a couple or you can say the ghosts of a couple safely move from one location to another investigating the locations and recalling their association trying to find out the hidden treasure. This is a symbolic one! The Other story is about the talk; discussions occurring in a society where many young women have sat and they are discussing various topics; book reading, about men, about judges, about war, about chastity, and about poetry, and books and different women have a different opinion. Can they ever have the same? The interesting part is the style of their conversation. I loved the non-identical style of the author.
I don’t think some of these stories are simple to comprehend. I am constantly repeating this; bear with my rumpus cry. I needed to read one sentence many times before I could sense what the author was trying to infer. Similar patterns, at many places, I was observing in her novels too. The story “Monday or Tuesday” is just one page long. But I read it at least four times to understand what it was all about. Lazy and indifferent herons she talks about in this tale. It looks poetic sometimes; philosophical the other time and the third time I thought it, even absurd. I mean… Not easy to grasp!
“Red is the dome; coins hang on the trees; smoke trails from the chimneys; bark, shout, cry “Iron for sale”- and truth?”
MONDAY OR TUESDAY
“An Unwritten Novel” and “The String Quartet”, are some of the stories that my brain somehow could lay hold of. In the story “Kew Garden” I saw an extraordinary style of portraying nature and it was very unusual. “The mark on the wall” is the last one and I witnessed her deciphering skills, and also her surveying capabilities in this story. Perhaps, I liked this story most in this collection. Her deduction through the prose like a mathematician, penning his hypothesis, was magical at many places. This book seems to be a collection of her experiments in her writing and she has achieved success in this.
If I could devise an award last year, I would have named it the “idiosyncratic prose award of the year” and this award would have been handed down to this book selected from amongst all my reads last year!
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