Eight Short stories: by Virginia Woolf

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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V S Naipaul’s thoughts on reading and writing

This is a personal account of how a person inclines to accept ‘getting into the game’ of reading and writing. But when the same person gets a Nobel in the same game, it’s worthy enough to have a glance at the process!

At one place he talks about the blankness in him about which way to go. He was on his hard-earned scholarship at Oxford. The idea of fiction or a novel puzzled him. He says that the idea of a novel is something that is made up, that is precisely its definition. At the same time, it is expected to be true. It is expected to be drawn from life. How? later he finds an answer through Evelyn Waugh,

“Later when I had begun to identify my material and had begun to be a writer, working more or less intuitively this ambiguity ceased to worry me. In 1955 the year of this breakthrough, I was able to understand Evelyn Waugh’s definition of fiction (in the dedication to “Officers and Gentlemen” published that year) as “experience totally transformed”. I wouldn’t have understood or believed the words the year before.”

V S Naipaul

Naipaul has a whole gamut of his Non-fictional work, he talks about the reasons,

“Fiction had taken me as far as I could go. There were certain things it couldn’t deal with. It couldn’t deal with my ears in England. There was a social depth to the experience it seemed more a matter of autobiography, and it could not deal with my growing knowledge of the wider world. Fiction, by its nature, functioning best within certain fixed social boundaries seems to be pushing me back to worlds- like the island word or the world of my childhood- smaller than the one I inhabited. fiction which had once liberated me and enlightened me now seemed to be pushing me towards being simpler than I really was. for some years three perhaps four I did not know how to move. I was quite lost.”

V S Naipaul

It was interesting to know Naipaul’s take on R.K. Narayan and his characters of small people, talking big and doing small things,

“Narayan’s world is not after all as rooted and complete as it appears. His small people dream simply of what they think has gone before, but they are without personal ancestry. There is a great blank in their past.”

V S Naipaul

Literature, like all living arts, is always on the move and it should constantly change, thinks Naipaul. Tho it was a simple yet circumstantial account, if you do not know much about the author’s take on his writing and reading, It will give you an idea of his progression and how he gained ground in the game!

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19th Century 20th Century Adventure Africa American Asia Booker British Literature Children Classic contemporary Crime Detective Drama Essays fantasy French Literature German Literature Gothic Historical Fiction Horror Humor India Indian Literature magical realism Memoir Music Mystery Nature Netgalley Nobel Prize Non Fiction Novel Novella Philosophy Play Poetry Race Romance Russia Russian Literature School Short Stories War Women