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Jacob's Room
Virginia Woolf's first original and distinguished work, Jacob's Room is the story of a sensitive young man named Jacob Flanders. The life story, character and friends of Jacob are presented in a series for separate scenes and moments from his childhood, through college at Cambridge, love affairs in London, and travels in Greece, to his death in the war. Jacob's Room established Virginia Woolf's reputation as a highly poetic and symbolic writer who places emphasis not on plot or action but on the psychological realm of occupied by her characters.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1922
About the author
Virginia Woolf
1,423 books24.5k followers(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
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November 19, 2022
“When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.”
Jacob's Room ~~ Virginia Woolf
Buddy Read with Dylan
So I’ve finally come to Virginia Woolf’s JACOB'S ROOM, which was written in 1922. This was a buddy read with my friend, Dylan. The discussions we shared only heightened my enjoyment while reading this. My last minute revelation while writing this review, ~~ the joke's on us ...
Yes, JACOB'S ROOM is quite flawed; but's also quite brilliant. Whatever one thinks of JACOB'S ROOM, it belongs to that amazing prewar phase of English experimental writing that changed the world in 1922, or as Willa Cather said, The world broke in two.
JACOB'S ROOM is not one of Woolf’s better-known novels ~~ in fact, it’s really more a novella than novel. Also, it’s not even one of her best books, but second rate Woolf is far better than most writers at their best. What JACOB'S ROOM is, is a major step in Woolf’s growth as a writer. Here, she departs from Edwardian story telling and begins experimenting with the technique she perfected in Mrs. Dalloway.
I loved this book, much more so than Dylan I think. JACOB'S ROOM has no real plot, there’s no point of view ~~ our understanding of Jacob is built upon the impressions of those who inhabit his world ~~ woman mostly along with his best friend who happens to be homosexual, and unbeknownst to him, is in love with Jacob. What Woolf has created here is a character study of a young man named Jacob Flanders without defining Jacob's character since his point of view is virtually never explored in the book. As I wrote previously, everything we learn about him is through the eyes of random people who inhabit his world. Some of these people know him well, some not at all. What we learn is that he is Jacob, and he exists. But with these being the impressions of others, how do we know what is true and what is not? We do get a portrait of Jacob over the course of the book, but it is an impressionistic portrait.
Jacob leaves an impression on all he comes in contact with. Women fall helplessly in love with him. His best friend views him as an intellectual to exchange ideas with even while he secretly pines for him. And His mother ~~ she views him as careless. And yet, for the most part, he moves thru life with no real enthusiasm ~~ no passion. It is not until he leaves England that he begins to find himself. Or perhaps it’s better stated as he loses himself.
JACOB'S ROOM doesn’t quite succeed. It’s too cold in some ways, and the prose, while beautiful doesn’t flow as well as in her later writings. This makes JACOB'S ROOM difficult to read at times. But at the same time, Jacob Flanders is himself detached, impressionistic, beautiful, and hard to read. Perhaps Woolf did succeed here and the joke’s on us.
JACOB'S ROOM caused a sensation upon its release. To see the awakening of Woolf’s artist journey here is amazing. While JACOB'S ROOM may not be the easiest of reads with its lack of a point of view and plot, it is none-the-less tremendously rewarding.
4.5/5
Jacob's Room ~~ Virginia Woolf
Buddy Read with Dylan
So I’ve finally come to Virginia Woolf’s JACOB'S ROOM, which was written in 1922. This was a buddy read with my friend, Dylan. The discussions we shared only heightened my enjoyment while reading this. My last minute revelation while writing this review, ~~ the joke's on us ...
Yes, JACOB'S ROOM is quite flawed; but's also quite brilliant. Whatever one thinks of JACOB'S ROOM, it belongs to that amazing prewar phase of English experimental writing that changed the world in 1922, or as Willa Cather said, The world broke in two.
JACOB'S ROOM is not one of Woolf’s better-known novels ~~ in fact, it’s really more a novella than novel. Also, it’s not even one of her best books, but second rate Woolf is far better than most writers at their best. What JACOB'S ROOM is, is a major step in Woolf’s growth as a writer. Here, she departs from Edwardian story telling and begins experimenting with the technique she perfected in Mrs. Dalloway.
I loved this book, much more so than Dylan I think. JACOB'S ROOM has no real plot, there’s no point of view ~~ our understanding of Jacob is built upon the impressions of those who inhabit his world ~~ woman mostly along with his best friend who happens to be homosexual, and unbeknownst to him, is in love with Jacob. What Woolf has created here is a character study of a young man named Jacob Flanders without defining Jacob's character since his point of view is virtually never explored in the book. As I wrote previously, everything we learn about him is through the eyes of random people who inhabit his world. Some of these people know him well, some not at all. What we learn is that he is Jacob, and he exists. But with these being the impressions of others, how do we know what is true and what is not? We do get a portrait of Jacob over the course of the book, but it is an impressionistic portrait.
Jacob leaves an impression on all he comes in contact with. Women fall helplessly in love with him. His best friend views him as an intellectual to exchange ideas with even while he secretly pines for him. And His mother ~~ she views him as careless. And yet, for the most part, he moves thru life with no real enthusiasm ~~ no passion. It is not until he leaves England that he begins to find himself. Or perhaps it’s better stated as he loses himself.
JACOB'S ROOM doesn’t quite succeed. It’s too cold in some ways, and the prose, while beautiful doesn’t flow as well as in her later writings. This makes JACOB'S ROOM difficult to read at times. But at the same time, Jacob Flanders is himself detached, impressionistic, beautiful, and hard to read. Perhaps Woolf did succeed here and the joke’s on us.
JACOB'S ROOM caused a sensation upon its release. To see the awakening of Woolf’s artist journey here is amazing. While JACOB'S ROOM may not be the easiest of reads with its lack of a point of view and plot, it is none-the-less tremendously rewarding.
4.5/5
March 10, 2019
Fragmentary impressions while reading Jacob’s Room. Life keeps interfering.
I travelled the underground while reading The Voyage Out, and it made impressions on others. Incomprehensible, fragmentary impressions on them, unforgettable ones on me.
Immediately, I made the decision to read Jacob’s Room, for I wanted more Woolfian impressions, and I brought it to the underground as well. Some patterns are repeated unconsciously, being part of everyday routines we just follow, without seeing or thinking.
But while the The Voyage Out dragged me in, and made me travel too far, Jacob’s Room stayed when I was leaving, and started travelling on its own. I hope someone found it. An old woman with time on her hands, with a certain sense of humour to understand my comments in the margins.
Meanwhile, there was a new quest, to order another copy of Jacob’s Room, and embark on other reading journeys to fill the gap in time. Bleak House features a room as well, a lovely Growlery, leaving a different mark on me. A Room of One's Own. Mine. To read Jacob’s Room. And I restart Jacob’s Room, with Bleak House towering in my mind, a brand-new copy picked up from the post-office, a globetrotting book, from England over Denmark to Sweden, by truck, boat, and train. It follows me by plane and train on a short stay in Switzerland and Austria, sharing a backpack with the sweet taste of Mack and the boys, celebrating their parties in Cannery Row. Sweet Thursday leaves a trace in my reading as well. As does the break over Christmas. It is not the same reading as it would have been if the first copy hadn’t stayed on a seat in the Underground.
How to write a review of a book everyone knows, and loves, or hates, or doesn’t care about? Why add words to words, when all I can offer is my own conscious decision to read and unconscious distraction while doing so? I wonder if it is always so hard? Or is that only the case when you love a book beyond the capacity of your language?
Details gain power and I am lost in visual pictures and scenes. Incidents grow and carry weight. Is there a plot? Maybe, but I lost track of it. Faces in the street, in the Underground, and at home have some kind of significance, for someone, somewhere. But of course, there was no use for an Underground in the life of Virginia Woolf. I am sure it would have played a major part in her stories otherwise. Condensed, fragmented, temporary humanity. Randomly mixed and unmixed. Characters come and go. They are part of the puzzle of reality, just like reading Woolf while thinking about laundry and dinner, or which stop to get off the train.
“Such faces as one sees. The little man fingering the meat must have squatted before the fire in innumerable lodging-houses, and heard and seen and known so much that it seems to utter itself even volubly from dark eyes, loose lips, as he fingers the meat silently, his face sad as a poet’s, and never a song sung. Shawled women carry babies with purple eyelids; boys stand at street corners; girls look across the road - rude illustrations, pictures in a book whose pages we turn over and over as if we should at last find what we look for. Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned - in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages - oh, here is Jacob's room.”
Yes, here it is, physically present next to me, looking at me with the expression of the envelope on the table while Jacob disappears in the room with a woman for an act of indecency. Would it have been indecent at all if his mother’s letter hadn’t witnessed the scene?
Would my review have been more … but oh … there is my copy of Tom Jones. I wonder if it is worth a reread? Maybe when I have finished Kurt Vonnegut. After all a review fills the time between lunch and dinner pleasantly.
And as for Jacob, he has left a fragmentary mark on the world, fleeting, vague, but clearly visible to my inner eye.
All those faces...
I travelled the underground while reading The Voyage Out, and it made impressions on others. Incomprehensible, fragmentary impressions on them, unforgettable ones on me.
Immediately, I made the decision to read Jacob’s Room, for I wanted more Woolfian impressions, and I brought it to the underground as well. Some patterns are repeated unconsciously, being part of everyday routines we just follow, without seeing or thinking.
But while the The Voyage Out dragged me in, and made me travel too far, Jacob’s Room stayed when I was leaving, and started travelling on its own. I hope someone found it. An old woman with time on her hands, with a certain sense of humour to understand my comments in the margins.
Meanwhile, there was a new quest, to order another copy of Jacob’s Room, and embark on other reading journeys to fill the gap in time. Bleak House features a room as well, a lovely Growlery, leaving a different mark on me. A Room of One's Own. Mine. To read Jacob’s Room. And I restart Jacob’s Room, with Bleak House towering in my mind, a brand-new copy picked up from the post-office, a globetrotting book, from England over Denmark to Sweden, by truck, boat, and train. It follows me by plane and train on a short stay in Switzerland and Austria, sharing a backpack with the sweet taste of Mack and the boys, celebrating their parties in Cannery Row. Sweet Thursday leaves a trace in my reading as well. As does the break over Christmas. It is not the same reading as it would have been if the first copy hadn’t stayed on a seat in the Underground.
How to write a review of a book everyone knows, and loves, or hates, or doesn’t care about? Why add words to words, when all I can offer is my own conscious decision to read and unconscious distraction while doing so? I wonder if it is always so hard? Or is that only the case when you love a book beyond the capacity of your language?
Details gain power and I am lost in visual pictures and scenes. Incidents grow and carry weight. Is there a plot? Maybe, but I lost track of it. Faces in the street, in the Underground, and at home have some kind of significance, for someone, somewhere. But of course, there was no use for an Underground in the life of Virginia Woolf. I am sure it would have played a major part in her stories otherwise. Condensed, fragmented, temporary humanity. Randomly mixed and unmixed. Characters come and go. They are part of the puzzle of reality, just like reading Woolf while thinking about laundry and dinner, or which stop to get off the train.
“Such faces as one sees. The little man fingering the meat must have squatted before the fire in innumerable lodging-houses, and heard and seen and known so much that it seems to utter itself even volubly from dark eyes, loose lips, as he fingers the meat silently, his face sad as a poet’s, and never a song sung. Shawled women carry babies with purple eyelids; boys stand at street corners; girls look across the road - rude illustrations, pictures in a book whose pages we turn over and over as if we should at last find what we look for. Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned - in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages - oh, here is Jacob's room.”
Yes, here it is, physically present next to me, looking at me with the expression of the envelope on the table while Jacob disappears in the room with a woman for an act of indecency. Would it have been indecent at all if his mother’s letter hadn’t witnessed the scene?
Would my review have been more … but oh … there is my copy of Tom Jones. I wonder if it is worth a reread? Maybe when I have finished Kurt Vonnegut. After all a review fills the time between lunch and dinner pleasantly.
And as for Jacob, he has left a fragmentary mark on the world, fleeting, vague, but clearly visible to my inner eye.
All those faces...
March 1, 2015
“Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.”
And a shadow of a life, an existential void is what the reader perceives of Jacob Flanders, a young man whose identity remains as elusive as an abstract painting. Set in pre-First World War England and anticipating the brutality of times ahead, the protagonist of this novella blossoms in his absence in the same way that a pervasive sadness reaches out from Woolf’s ambiguous narration. Intimate objects and evocative landscapes acquire a metaphysical dimension and mirror Jacob’s unfocused personality while emphasizing the imperturbable passage of time.
“Both were beautiful. Both were inanimate.”
The physical spaces Jacob occupies in his natal Cornwall, where the child trembles with each roaring wave, in Cambridge, where Homer and Byron fill the sophomore’s room, or in London, where a hint of the adult’s dreams and failures is reflected in the eyes of those who know him, provide an incorporeal assortment of silhouettes sketching a rough portrait of the character, but his voice remains erratic nonetheless.
Empty rooms, neglected shoes and undelivered letters speak for Jacob and countless men of a lost generation who were muted by the arbitrariness of history and sacrificed to preserve an European ideal that mutated into modern barbarity.
A chorus of voices intones a deadpan elegy that denounces the cultural imprisonment of imbued duty in a succession of overlapping random episodes that converge in trivial details of a fragmented world.
Jacob’s unrevealed psyche evokes the impossibility of jumping across the gaping abyss of individuality and the interplay between his presence and absence suggests the juxtaposition of indistinguishable lives and heroic deaths.
“Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house and dark square is a picture feverishly turned – in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages – oh, here is Jacob’s room.”
It is precisely in Jacob’s disjointed image, in the desolation of his deserted room where the reader can catch a glimpse of Woolf’s first attempts at experimental writing that augur iconic moments in subsequent novels: Mrs. Dalloway’s carefully assembling bouquets of flowers, the tentative light beams illuminating Mrs. Ramsay’s wedge-shaped core of darkness or the polyphonic soliloquies quavering to the rhythm of the rocking Waves arise as sublime culminations of the stylistic techniques that glitter hesitantly in this photographic novel.
Sometimes though, in Jacob’s room, or rather in its emptiness, the vacillating prose flickers with latent virtuosity and the mysteries of the universe can be elucidated. The inconsistency of a tenuous character speaks of the evanescence of humanity depicting death not as “the end” but as a renovation of each bygone moment, for past vanishes to give way to a newborn present, binding beginnings with endings in a perpetual succession of departed lives that will keep on shining eternally like the light of long extinguished stars.
And a shadow of a life, an existential void is what the reader perceives of Jacob Flanders, a young man whose identity remains as elusive as an abstract painting. Set in pre-First World War England and anticipating the brutality of times ahead, the protagonist of this novella blossoms in his absence in the same way that a pervasive sadness reaches out from Woolf’s ambiguous narration. Intimate objects and evocative landscapes acquire a metaphysical dimension and mirror Jacob’s unfocused personality while emphasizing the imperturbable passage of time.
“Both were beautiful. Both were inanimate.”
The physical spaces Jacob occupies in his natal Cornwall, where the child trembles with each roaring wave, in Cambridge, where Homer and Byron fill the sophomore’s room, or in London, where a hint of the adult’s dreams and failures is reflected in the eyes of those who know him, provide an incorporeal assortment of silhouettes sketching a rough portrait of the character, but his voice remains erratic nonetheless.
Empty rooms, neglected shoes and undelivered letters speak for Jacob and countless men of a lost generation who were muted by the arbitrariness of history and sacrificed to preserve an European ideal that mutated into modern barbarity.
A chorus of voices intones a deadpan elegy that denounces the cultural imprisonment of imbued duty in a succession of overlapping random episodes that converge in trivial details of a fragmented world.
Jacob’s unrevealed psyche evokes the impossibility of jumping across the gaping abyss of individuality and the interplay between his presence and absence suggests the juxtaposition of indistinguishable lives and heroic deaths.
“Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house and dark square is a picture feverishly turned – in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages – oh, here is Jacob’s room.”
It is precisely in Jacob’s disjointed image, in the desolation of his deserted room where the reader can catch a glimpse of Woolf’s first attempts at experimental writing that augur iconic moments in subsequent novels: Mrs. Dalloway’s carefully assembling bouquets of flowers, the tentative light beams illuminating Mrs. Ramsay’s wedge-shaped core of darkness or the polyphonic soliloquies quavering to the rhythm of the rocking Waves arise as sublime culminations of the stylistic techniques that glitter hesitantly in this photographic novel.
Sometimes though, in Jacob’s room, or rather in its emptiness, the vacillating prose flickers with latent virtuosity and the mysteries of the universe can be elucidated. The inconsistency of a tenuous character speaks of the evanescence of humanity depicting death not as “the end” but as a renovation of each bygone moment, for past vanishes to give way to a newborn present, binding beginnings with endings in a perpetual succession of departed lives that will keep on shining eternally like the light of long extinguished stars.
Read
July 11, 2018I finished this book some weeks ago but held off from reviewing it until now because the temptation (which I have since resisted) not to use words but to make this an entirely illustrated review was very strong. All of the impressions the book made on me were visual, resembling paintings or stills from a movie. There was no particular action that stood out in my mind, just a series of scenes: interiors, landscapes, seascapes, all impressionistic yet very vivid at the same time, the characters themselves little more than elements in the landscape, similar to the large rock on the shore which the little boy Jacob mistakes for his mother in the early pages as he rambles among the rock pools collecting crabs, pebbles, the jawbone of a sheep.
That opening scene is partly told from the point of view of an artist, a certain Mr Steele, whose paintings are very popular with his bourgeois clients. The picture he is painting at the beach that day includes the unwitting figure of Jacob’s mother Betty, sitting in her black coat on the paler sand against the undisturbed blue of the sky. But just as Mr Steele is about to add the very carefully chosen touch of contrasting black that will, he thinks, make his painting perfect, Betty moves. She has felt the shadow cast by the clouds which are beginning to roll in and she prepares to take her children home leaving Mr Steele frowning at his uncompleted painting. The reader senses that Woolf has little patience for paintings such as Mr Steele’s. Mr Steele, in any case, is abandoned on that beach, never to be mentioned again.
The scenes that Woolf then goes on herself to paint, using a palette of exquisite words, are mostly fragments, unfinished, and many contain shadows. We see Betty in the light of a lamp shaded by an upended book lest it disturb the baby sleeping nearby. We look through a window into an empty room, a pile of sewing abandoned on a table. We see a little boy in bed, a sheep’s jawbone tangled among his blankets. We see rain against a window, flowers beaten to the earth, and ships tossed about in a storm.
And we note that Betty’s surname is Flanders, that it is the last years of the nineteenth century, and that by 1914, Jacob will be a man.
That opening scene is partly told from the point of view of an artist, a certain Mr Steele, whose paintings are very popular with his bourgeois clients. The picture he is painting at the beach that day includes the unwitting figure of Jacob’s mother Betty, sitting in her black coat on the paler sand against the undisturbed blue of the sky. But just as Mr Steele is about to add the very carefully chosen touch of contrasting black that will, he thinks, make his painting perfect, Betty moves. She has felt the shadow cast by the clouds which are beginning to roll in and she prepares to take her children home leaving Mr Steele frowning at his uncompleted painting. The reader senses that Woolf has little patience for paintings such as Mr Steele’s. Mr Steele, in any case, is abandoned on that beach, never to be mentioned again.
The scenes that Woolf then goes on herself to paint, using a palette of exquisite words, are mostly fragments, unfinished, and many contain shadows. We see Betty in the light of a lamp shaded by an upended book lest it disturb the baby sleeping nearby. We look through a window into an empty room, a pile of sewing abandoned on a table. We see a little boy in bed, a sheep’s jawbone tangled among his blankets. We see rain against a window, flowers beaten to the earth, and ships tossed about in a storm.
And we note that Betty’s surname is Flanders, that it is the last years of the nineteenth century, and that by 1914, Jacob will be a man.
December 25, 2018
A curious character study, Jacob's Room sketches the outlines of its titular character's short life, before ending abruptly without the slightest sense of closure. The cold and detached novel was Woolf's first attempt at writing in the stream-of-consciousness mode, and it shows; the writer often seems more interested in experimenting with form than in crafting an emotionally resonant narrative. The plotting is messy, the descriptions stilted and overly self-conscious, the characters strangely hollow in spite of Woolf's focus upon their interior lives. Still, something about the novel's chaos works. Woolf throws so much at her readers, without ever attempting to answer how it all might fit together. The book's excessive ambiguity makes for a rather distinctive, if not entirely enjoyable, reading experience.
July 4, 2018
Woolf’s first experimental novel and as with all of Woolf’s work there are acres of print analysing it (some of which I have read). The Jacob of the title is Jacob Flanders and we follow his life from the start to his death in the First World War. We follow through others; the women in his life and we follow at something of a tangent. As one critic has pointed out; the first room Jacob has is the womb and we follow him to his last room; the tomb. The brief scenes just pick out small points about Jacob, individual traits. The narrator keeps reminding us how difficult it is to sum people up and it is difficult to get an impression of Jacob apart from the very general one that he is “so distinguished looking”.
What follows will probably end up being a series of random thoughts and musings rather than a coherent review! Inevitably some have drawn comparisons between Jacob and Virginia’s brother Thoby.
Of the many characters in the book, one of them is the city of London. An interesting example of this is towards the end of the book when Jacob has returned from Greece. Jacob and many of those who love him are linked by an invisible thread it seems. Jacob and Bonamy are sat in Hyde Park. Walking in the same park but not meeting Jacob are Clara and Mr Bowley; as is Julia Eliot: they are all linked by a runaway horse. The thread spreads wider to others with the city as the linking character.
One thing is clear about Jacob’s Room; there is humour and parody here. Jacob is a typical middle class male of the period; a budding colonial/imperialist preparing to take the position he feels is his due. He appears to have no real character and the narrator seems to mock the typical male “heroes progress” narrative we might expect. The power of male patriarchs here is not pro-creative and is distantly focussed:
“In the street below Jacob’s room voices were raised.
But he read on. For after all Plato continues imperturbably … and Jacob who was reading the Phaedrus, heard people vociferating round the lamppost, and the woman battering at the door and crying, “Let me in!” as if a coal had dropped from the fire, or a fly, falling from the ceiling, had lain on its back, too weak to turn over.”
Jacob reads his Greek, oblivious to tragedies going on around him. Jacob writing and essay on the “Ethics of Indecency” contrasts with his attitude to Florinda. He accepts her when she is giving him a feeling of his own sexual power, but rejects her when he realises her promiscuity is not limited to just him.
There are plenty of more obvious jokes; the British love of queuing:
“the faces of those emerging quickly lost their dim, chilled expression when they perceived that it was only by standing in a queue that one could be admitted to the pier.”
Sometimes the humour is sharper as when Betty Flanders makes an odd connection between Reverend Floyd and his cat Topaz;
“Poor old Topaz, said Mrs Flanders, as he stretched himself in the sun, and she smiled, thinking how she had had him gelded, and how she did not like red hair in men. Smiling, she went into the kitchen.”
It has often been pointed out that listen is an anagram of silent and in Jacobs Room much of the effect is based on the gaps, the spaces left by the narration. It leaves Woolf space to suggest other things. There is a good deal about Greek myth floating around and Woolf invokes the traditions of the pre-Hellenic goddess culture (as Graves was later to do in his book on Greek myth) and the characters of Clara and Betty Flanders are very strong.
As it happens I am also reading a book on Woolf and music at the moment, which is fascinating. The storyline between Jacob and Clara here is a mirror of the plot of the Wagner opera Tristan und Isolde.
There is an awful lot going on here and as with all of Woolf many of the meanings are coded; part of the fun is working them out (or having others work them out for you!).
What follows will probably end up being a series of random thoughts and musings rather than a coherent review! Inevitably some have drawn comparisons between Jacob and Virginia’s brother Thoby.
Of the many characters in the book, one of them is the city of London. An interesting example of this is towards the end of the book when Jacob has returned from Greece. Jacob and many of those who love him are linked by an invisible thread it seems. Jacob and Bonamy are sat in Hyde Park. Walking in the same park but not meeting Jacob are Clara and Mr Bowley; as is Julia Eliot: they are all linked by a runaway horse. The thread spreads wider to others with the city as the linking character.
One thing is clear about Jacob’s Room; there is humour and parody here. Jacob is a typical middle class male of the period; a budding colonial/imperialist preparing to take the position he feels is his due. He appears to have no real character and the narrator seems to mock the typical male “heroes progress” narrative we might expect. The power of male patriarchs here is not pro-creative and is distantly focussed:
“In the street below Jacob’s room voices were raised.
But he read on. For after all Plato continues imperturbably … and Jacob who was reading the Phaedrus, heard people vociferating round the lamppost, and the woman battering at the door and crying, “Let me in!” as if a coal had dropped from the fire, or a fly, falling from the ceiling, had lain on its back, too weak to turn over.”
Jacob reads his Greek, oblivious to tragedies going on around him. Jacob writing and essay on the “Ethics of Indecency” contrasts with his attitude to Florinda. He accepts her when she is giving him a feeling of his own sexual power, but rejects her when he realises her promiscuity is not limited to just him.
There are plenty of more obvious jokes; the British love of queuing:
“the faces of those emerging quickly lost their dim, chilled expression when they perceived that it was only by standing in a queue that one could be admitted to the pier.”
Sometimes the humour is sharper as when Betty Flanders makes an odd connection between Reverend Floyd and his cat Topaz;
“Poor old Topaz, said Mrs Flanders, as he stretched himself in the sun, and she smiled, thinking how she had had him gelded, and how she did not like red hair in men. Smiling, she went into the kitchen.”
It has often been pointed out that listen is an anagram of silent and in Jacobs Room much of the effect is based on the gaps, the spaces left by the narration. It leaves Woolf space to suggest other things. There is a good deal about Greek myth floating around and Woolf invokes the traditions of the pre-Hellenic goddess culture (as Graves was later to do in his book on Greek myth) and the characters of Clara and Betty Flanders are very strong.
As it happens I am also reading a book on Woolf and music at the moment, which is fascinating. The storyline between Jacob and Clara here is a mirror of the plot of the Wagner opera Tristan und Isolde.
There is an awful lot going on here and as with all of Woolf many of the meanings are coded; part of the fun is working them out (or having others work them out for you!).
March 16, 2024
Writing that advances three sentences and retreats two to avoid arriving at the final statement. Virginia Woolf's work is undoubtedly not the most accessible book.
February 16, 2017
Jacob's Room is a life seen from the outside. Incomplete and blurred image of the young man. We can see his life as if in the mirror shards. We can only see his reflection in others eyes, only his silhouette in others tales. It makes us only casual observers and Jacob Flanders is still eluding us. His inner world remains closed to us. But can one really get to know other man ?
Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole-they see all sorts of things-they see themselves...
Woolf as an impressionist painter catches moments and impressions, is lyrical and nostalgic. Shows Jacob on the rocky coast of Cornwall, leads him through Italy and Greece to inevitability of War. Creates intimate portrait, woven from speculations, insignificant events, chance encounters, faded memoirs .
Novel was written shortly after the First World War and one can hear distant echo of that tragedy here, the name of the title hero for sure is intentional and evokes carnage on Flander Fields. It also could be considered as personal Woolf’s elegy for beloved brother Toby.
The boundaries of knowing another man, sense of the evanescence of life, the transience of the moment. Light and shade. Coulors and shapes. Woolf mixes all ingredients and pictures a melancholic and poetic landscape.
Empty room with still lingering presence of it former inhabitant. Some old photos, scattered letters, books. All these remnants of his life and tangible evidences of his absence. Is that all what remains after our lives ?
November 14, 2020
“Беше млад човек с качества.”
От трите книги на Вирджиния Улф, които съм чела до този момент – “Нощ и ден”, “Вълните” и “Стаята на Джейкъб”, последната се открои за мен като най-чистата и цялостна творба.
Моето впечатление е, че книгите на Вирджиния Улф не са сред най-долюбваните в читателските среди у нас, а и да си призная, аз също имах неравен старт с нейното творчество. Но тази книга промени изцяло възприятията ми към света на английската модернистка.
Обикновено в отзиви за книги се споменава като минимум “за какво се разказва” в тях, защото, няма какво да се лъжем, сюжетът не е без значение, а понякога дори е главната причина. За “Стаята на Джейкъб”, както и въобще за книгите на Вирджиния Улф, за сюжет е излишно да се говори, ако има въобще рамка, тя е очертана с най-тънки контури, а съдържанието, което очертават е флуидно, неясно, но не и претенциозно-абстрактно.
Смисъл има, но той не тежи като мокро пране върху тел, а е лек, ефимерен; никога не си сигурен там ли си, накъдето авторът те е побутнал, а изгубването по пътя е задължително. Може би това е една от причините прозата на Улф да оставя след себе си известна неудовлетвореност в добрия смисъл на думата; един глад, който няма засищане; многозначително многоточие.
Но точно тази неуловимост я прави толкова вълшебна и сетивна, или ако използвам думата, предназнач��на за описанието на Джейкъб в романа – “неземна”.
Всичко, което знаем за Джейкъб – млад адвокат в Лондон, от неговото детство в Скарбъро до смъртта му в Голямата война, го откриваме постепенно през очите на хората, чиито пътища се пресичат с неговите, предимно жени от различни социални класи (дори и въздушната проза на Вирджиния Улф не може да се откъсне от класите). Повествованието лъкатуши напред-назад, но най-вече преодолява физически и държавни граници, като читателят е едновременно навсякъде – в Лондон, Скарбъро, Италия и Гърция; в откритите тресавища на родния край или в опушена всекидневна с изглед към Холбърн.
От местата, героите и техните прояви “виждаме” само толкова, колкото Вирджиния Улф избира да ни покаже – писменият еквивалент на картините на импресионистите, в които късчето природа ни се разкрива в уж произволен момент, с щрихи, умишлено случайни.
“Стаята на Джейкъб” е първата книга, чието четене породи в съзнанието ми цветни асоциации и нито един конкретен образ. А това е голямо постижение за една книга.
От трите книги на Вирджиния Улф, които съм чела до този момент – “Нощ и ден”, “Вълните” и “Стаята на Джейкъб”, последната се открои за мен като най-чистата и цялостна творба.
Моето впечатление е, че книгите на Вирджиния Улф не са сред най-долюбваните в читателските среди у нас, а и да си призная, аз също имах неравен старт с нейното творчество. Но тази книга промени изцяло възприятията ми към света на английската модернистка.
Обикновено в отзиви за книги се споменава като минимум “за какво се разказва” в тях, защото, няма какво да се лъжем, сюжетът не е без значение, а понякога дори е главната причина. За “Стаята на Джейкъб”, както и въобще за книгите на Вирджиния Улф, за сюжет е излишно да се говори, ако има въобще рамка, тя е очертана с най-тънки контури, а съдържанието, което очертават е флуидно, неясно, но не и претенциозно-абстрактно.
Смисъл има, но той не тежи като мокро пране върху тел, а е лек, ефимерен; никога не си сигурен там ли си, накъдето авторът те е побутнал, а изгубването по пътя е задължително. Може би това е една от причините прозата на Улф да оставя след себе си известна неудовлетвореност в добрия смисъл на думата; един глад, който няма засищане; многозначително многоточие.
Но точно тази неуловимост я прави толкова вълшебна и сетивна, или ако използвам думата, предназнач��на за описанието на Джейкъб в романа – “неземна”.
Всичко, което знаем за Джейкъб – млад адвокат в Лондон, от неговото детство в Скарбъро до смъртта му в Голямата война, го откриваме постепенно през очите на хората, чиито пътища се пресичат с неговите, предимно жени от различни социални класи (дори и въздушната проза на Вирджиния Улф не може да се откъсне от класите). Повествованието лъкатуши напред-назад, но най-вече преодолява физически и държавни граници, като читателят е едновременно навсякъде – в Лондон, Скарбъро, Италия и Гърция; в откритите тресавища на родния край или в опушена всекидневна с изглед към Холбърн.
От местата, героите и техните прояви “виждаме” само толкова, колкото Вирджиния Улф избира да ни покаже – писменият еквивалент на картините на импресионистите, в които късчето природа ни се разкрива в уж произволен момент, с щрихи, умишлено случайни.
“Стаята на Джейкъб” е първата книга, чието четене породи в съзнанието ми цветни асоциации и нито един конкретен образ. А това е голямо постижение за една книга.
August 14, 2018
"It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done."
- Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
One of Woolf's first modern/stream of concicious novels. Woolf's two earlier novels (The Voyage Out & Night and Day) were more traditional. This one is more like attempting to get a sense of the Parthenon, but only by looking at shadows cast by the sun and the moon, from different directions, night and day, at different times. Eventually, one would understand - almost - a lot about the Parthenon. One might also listen, like a blind man, to the conversations of people going up and down the Acropolis. Women and men. Children. Tourists and Greeks. Again, the impressions of the Parthenon would sharpen, but never, quite, be clear.
This novel, which is more of just a character study, an experimental novel that has no direction except time, tries to examine Jacob indirectly through the impressions of those around him from his early years till he is in his twenties, pre-war. It is fragments. Noise. Smells. Hints. It is what we have. And really, it is amazing and beautiful. It also gives hints of later, fantastic Woolf novels like Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. We see in this novel, Woolf's huge potential. Her influence. The ship has turned.
- Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
One of Woolf's first modern/stream of concicious novels. Woolf's two earlier novels (The Voyage Out & Night and Day) were more traditional. This one is more like attempting to get a sense of the Parthenon, but only by looking at shadows cast by the sun and the moon, from different directions, night and day, at different times. Eventually, one would understand - almost - a lot about the Parthenon. One might also listen, like a blind man, to the conversations of people going up and down the Acropolis. Women and men. Children. Tourists and Greeks. Again, the impressions of the Parthenon would sharpen, but never, quite, be clear.
This novel, which is more of just a character study, an experimental novel that has no direction except time, tries to examine Jacob indirectly through the impressions of those around him from his early years till he is in his twenties, pre-war. It is fragments. Noise. Smells. Hints. It is what we have. And really, it is amazing and beautiful. It also gives hints of later, fantastic Woolf novels like Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. We see in this novel, Woolf's huge potential. Her influence. The ship has turned.
March 16, 2024
What would she have made of Goodreads? Woolf gives us a clue.
"[L]etters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps - who knows? - we might talk by the way."
For we are, by tapping our keys, sending mail out, receiving and reading each others' thoughts, no less "bound together." I rather think she would say, as she does in this book, that "These [messages] are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe." There is much in her writing that is wise, true, and still relevant. I found myself reading passages several times over again.
You don't read Woolf for plot but her thoughts. And for prose as near to poetry as it comes. I've noticed people posting Woolf passages in what resembles poems on the internet. So, my ear isn't alone in hearing those songs. Slow. Sad. Yet, strong.
"[L]etters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps - who knows? - we might talk by the way."
For we are, by tapping our keys, sending mail out, receiving and reading each others' thoughts, no less "bound together." I rather think she would say, as she does in this book, that "These [messages] are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe." There is much in her writing that is wise, true, and still relevant. I found myself reading passages several times over again.
You don't read Woolf for plot but her thoughts. And for prose as near to poetry as it comes. I've noticed people posting Woolf passages in what resembles poems on the internet. So, my ear isn't alone in hearing those songs. Slow. Sad. Yet, strong.
July 12, 2020
طبق برنامهی وولف_خوانی گروهیمون( که عمیقا عاشقشم) این کتاب رو خوندم.
حسی که بهش دارم علاقه و شگفت زدگیه.
دوستای همگروهی خیلی درموردش مطالب جالب و مهمی گفتن که ذهن من رو هم بازتر کرد و خب بنظرم درستش اینه ریویووی خودشون خونده بشه برای دریافت اطلاعات مفید و ارزشمندشون
حالا ممکنه بعدها بتونم چیز به درد بخوری در مورد این کتاب بنویسم .
فعلا که در همون حد " این چی بود نوشتی خانم وولف!" کفایت میکنه بنظرم:)))
حسی که بهش دارم علاقه و شگفت زدگیه.
دوستای همگروهی خیلی درموردش مطالب جالب و مهمی گفتن که ذهن من رو هم بازتر کرد و خب بنظرم درستش اینه ریویووی خودشون خونده بشه برای دریافت اطلاعات مفید و ارزشمندشون
حالا ممکنه بعدها بتونم چیز به درد بخوری در مورد این کتاب بنویسم .
فعلا که در همون حد " این چی بود نوشتی خانم وولف!" کفایت میکنه بنظرم:)))
August 3, 2023
Cute! Fun! Certainly not for everyone, but a must for Woolf fans.
November 30, 2023
گذر زمان که ما را با شتاب بسیار غمانگیزی با جان کندن و یکنواختی ابدی به پیش میبرد، حالا دارد در شعلههای آتشین ، مثل آن توپهای کوچک زرد، بین برگهای سبز منفجر میشود. (داشت به درختهای پرتقال نگاه میکرد) بوسهها بر لبهایی که ناگزیر از مردن هستند، جهان میگردد، در پیچ و خمهای گرما و صوت میگردد... هرچند مطمئنا ��روب آرام با زرد کمرنگ و زیبایش وجود دارد.
چقدر جذاب و رمانتیک بود و چقدر توصیفات زیبا و خوبی داشت. حین خوندنش خیلی یاد کتاب خانم دالاوی شدم، که شاید دوباره سراغش برم و برای بار سوم بخونمش...
چقدر جذاب و رمانتیک بود و چقدر توصیفات زیبا و خوبی داشت. حین خوندنش خیلی یاد کتاب خانم دالاوی شدم، که شاید دوباره سراغش برم و برای بار سوم بخونمش...
September 4, 2020
ئەز دهگهڵ ئهمانه چی بکەم، بەڕێز بۆنامی؟
دایکێک جووتە پێڵاوێک لە دەستیدایە، ناشزانێ چییان لێ بکات، چون نازانێ لەگەڵ ڕابردوودا چی بکات. ڕابردوویەک کە تێیدا منداڵەکەی زیندووە و بەم پێڵاوانە بە شوێن ئاواتەکانی هەنگاوی ناوە. هەموو کات وەکوو ئێستا لە ژێر خۆڵدا ئاسوودە نەخەوتووە...بە خوێندنی هەر لاپەڕەیەک خەم و پەژارە دایئەگرتم، بە درێژایی خوێندنی ئەم کتێبە، تەنیا بیرەوەرییەکانی جیکوبم نەدەخوێندەوە، بەڵکوو هاوکات ڕۆحی منیش بەرەو ڕابردووی خۆم دەچوو و لە دواهەمین لاپەڕەشدا بیرەوەریەکان بابم بۆم زیندوو دەبوونەوە، ئەوەی کە بەدوای مردنی نەماندەزانی پێڵاوەکانی چی لێبکەین، ئەو پێڵاوانەی کە نوێ بوون و چاوەڕێ ئەوەیان دەکرد پاکان باوکم لە باوەش بگرن.... و ئێستا بە دەم گریانەوەوە، بیر دەکەمەوە کە بەدوای تێپەڕبوونی ٢٠ساڵ ئەم خەمە هەر لە ناخمدایە و ناڕەوێتەوە، منیش وەکوو هەملێت بۆ هەتاهەتایە لەگەڵیدام.
Di tarîya şeva reşda
min dît xwîya bû
Carek nêrî dûr kenîya
dîsa wenda bû
Li pey ketim,
min nezanî xewna şevê bû,
Xewna şevê bû
Bave min çû ax,
negihîştime,
xewna şevê bû
Sekinî bû
bi forsa berê,
dest li kêlekê
Tizbî dikişand,
şewqe li serî,
xarbû li hilekê
http://s11.picofile.com/d/8407341684/...
awazê bazîdê - xewna şevê bû
February 24, 2021
[16th book of 2021. Artist for this review is one of my father’s favourites: French painter Claude Monet.]
Jacob’s Room is a life-story, but it also marks Woolf’s first step away from the traditional and more conventional style of her first two novels. The question that sits at the centre of this novel is, Who is Jacob? A character study, but one through a telescope rather than a microscope. Jacob is never quite in the foreground and so we are drawn into a character study by observing strangers, characters who appear for a short period of time and then are forgotten, in the head-hopping nature of Woolf’s later books. Woolf allows Jacob to be built through other’s perceptions of him, rather than allowing the reader to see him clearly themselves. So, even by the end, we have these half-formed, distant, slightly abstract ideas of “Jacob”, but we do not know him ourselves; and this novel feels complete, but complete as a half-formed thing.
“Morning by the Sea”—1881
This half-formed novel feels abstract, distant, aloof and cold. Its coldness doesn’t resist any emotion though, particularly not at the end, but makes us more aware of it. I think its tone is quite brilliant when considering Jacob’s Room as a post-WW1 novel. The footnotes in my novel draw comparisons between Jacob and Stephen Dedalus and they were feelings I was having myself. The novel feels, vaguely, like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Though the comparison is actually discussed between Ulysses and this novel, I think it is closer in feel to the former. Stephen Dedalus appears in both novels, anyway. As my footnote reads,
Woolf’s writing is as beautiful as ever as we oscillate between characters and place. As with other Woolf novels, it bloomed in my mind when I was away from the novel, rather than reading it. The fragmented images, it’s vacancy, its holes, they were all filled-in by mind when I put the book down, tried to fall asleep. The whole novel feels Impressionist. When reading Woolf, I often feel as if she is not allowing me into whatever she is writing, that I’m standing too far away to glimpse the novel, which appears to be happening on another shore. And yet, when the book is placed down, that is when everything opens itself to me, and my brain runs through the gaps left in her prose.
“Houses of Parliament in Winter”—1903
In the end, the sum of all these shattered images and ideas is a life, a life lived, and, really, a life wasted too.
Jacob’s Room is a life-story, but it also marks Woolf’s first step away from the traditional and more conventional style of her first two novels. The question that sits at the centre of this novel is, Who is Jacob? A character study, but one through a telescope rather than a microscope. Jacob is never quite in the foreground and so we are drawn into a character study by observing strangers, characters who appear for a short period of time and then are forgotten, in the head-hopping nature of Woolf’s later books. Woolf allows Jacob to be built through other’s perceptions of him, rather than allowing the reader to see him clearly themselves. So, even by the end, we have these half-formed, distant, slightly abstract ideas of “Jacob”, but we do not know him ourselves; and this novel feels complete, but complete as a half-formed thing.
“Morning by the Sea”—1881
This half-formed novel feels abstract, distant, aloof and cold. Its coldness doesn’t resist any emotion though, particularly not at the end, but makes us more aware of it. I think its tone is quite brilliant when considering Jacob’s Room as a post-WW1 novel. The footnotes in my novel draw comparisons between Jacob and Stephen Dedalus and they were feelings I was having myself. The novel feels, vaguely, like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Though the comparison is actually discussed between Ulysses and this novel, I think it is closer in feel to the former. Stephen Dedalus appears in both novels, anyway. As my footnote reads,
“Both Stephen Dedalus and Jacob Flanders are from poor families with a missing parent, both have a romantic interest in art and culture and both journey to Paris to round off their education. But while Jacob is comfortable, even complacent in his environment, Stephen is isolated.”
Woolf’s writing is as beautiful as ever as we oscillate between characters and place. As with other Woolf novels, it bloomed in my mind when I was away from the novel, rather than reading it. The fragmented images, it’s vacancy, its holes, they were all filled-in by mind when I put the book down, tried to fall asleep. The whole novel feels Impressionist. When reading Woolf, I often feel as if she is not allowing me into whatever she is writing, that I’m standing too far away to glimpse the novel, which appears to be happening on another shore. And yet, when the book is placed down, that is when everything opens itself to me, and my brain runs through the gaps left in her prose.
“Houses of Parliament in Winter”—1903
In the end, the sum of all these shattered images and ideas is a life, a life lived, and, really, a life wasted too.
October 8, 2023
Jacob’s Room presents the traces of a life, Jacob Flanders destined to die on the battlefields of WW1. Published in 1922, it’s the novel that’s seen to mark Woolf’s full flight from more traditional narrative to wholly experimental: when this first appeared, some critics compared it to jazz and novelist E. M. Forster labelled it a ‘new form of fiction’ altogether. Fragmented, episodic, often caught up in portraying sensations, I was particularly fascinated by Woolf’s vivid, painterly play on perspective, light, and colour – Woolf was drawing directly on ideas about art as much as about writing. The intricate structure takes readers full circle from Jacob as a little boy lost on a beach to Jacob an adult lost in the war. In its early stages there are multiple, menacing invocations of death, dying, and casual violence: Jacob as a child obsessed with collecting insects from butterflies and beetles, throwing up images of helpless creatures at the mercy of the more powerful, a trapped crab engaged in a futile attempt to escape his bucket prison, a barely alive beetle pinned down, butterflies mounted and lifeless.
This impressionistic, atmospheric piece is often read biographically as a version of the possible futures of Virginia Woolf’s brother Thoby who died in 1906 or as Woolf’s elegy for a generation devastated by WW1, although I think it’s far more complex than that. Time and possibility, transience and lost connections are key themes, ideas about how to live or the impossibility of really knowing life or people run through its pages. Although it can also be scathing and witty in its dissection of society interactions. Woolf is concerned too with space and place, from the Scarborough of Jacob’s youth to the London streets he inhabits as a young man.
Jacob swiftly morphs from child to student to young man in search of a self but our sense of him is nearly always at a distance, seen mostly through the observations of the people around him. In Scarborough, his mother Betty and her neighbours whose everyday possesses an almost unchanging rhythm. Later in the more frenetic university scenes, Jacob’s Cambridge friends become key observers. And then the women he encounters from those who represent missed connections to those he actively pursues. Jacob’s relationships, his form of misogyny, his different expectations of the men he knows versus the women bring up issues about gender: the men set on a path composed of the ideas that will lead them to fight, women barred from certain forms of learning, caught up in emotion or rituals which they embrace or struggle to escape. Women encased in history dictated by men. But it’s also a novel about queerness and forms of masculinity, traced through the character of Bonamy, Jacob’s close friend and later the only one left, with Jacob’s mother, to sift through his things in Jacob’s now-vacant room. I didn’t always think things came together- sometimes a little underdeveloped, sometimes a little overpacked - and this doesn’t reach the heights of later novels like Mrs Dalloway but it was still memorable and striking.
Rating: 3.5
This impressionistic, atmospheric piece is often read biographically as a version of the possible futures of Virginia Woolf’s brother Thoby who died in 1906 or as Woolf’s elegy for a generation devastated by WW1, although I think it’s far more complex than that. Time and possibility, transience and lost connections are key themes, ideas about how to live or the impossibility of really knowing life or people run through its pages. Although it can also be scathing and witty in its dissection of society interactions. Woolf is concerned too with space and place, from the Scarborough of Jacob’s youth to the London streets he inhabits as a young man.
Jacob swiftly morphs from child to student to young man in search of a self but our sense of him is nearly always at a distance, seen mostly through the observations of the people around him. In Scarborough, his mother Betty and her neighbours whose everyday possesses an almost unchanging rhythm. Later in the more frenetic university scenes, Jacob’s Cambridge friends become key observers. And then the women he encounters from those who represent missed connections to those he actively pursues. Jacob’s relationships, his form of misogyny, his different expectations of the men he knows versus the women bring up issues about gender: the men set on a path composed of the ideas that will lead them to fight, women barred from certain forms of learning, caught up in emotion or rituals which they embrace or struggle to escape. Women encased in history dictated by men. But it’s also a novel about queerness and forms of masculinity, traced through the character of Bonamy, Jacob’s close friend and later the only one left, with Jacob’s mother, to sift through his things in Jacob’s now-vacant room. I didn’t always think things came together- sometimes a little underdeveloped, sometimes a little overpacked - and this doesn’t reach the heights of later novels like Mrs Dalloway but it was still memorable and striking.
Rating: 3.5
October 9, 2023
Inca nu ma pot decide daca mi-a placut sau nu acest roman. Chiar si dupa 3 zile de la terminarea sa inca ma mai intreb ce au vrut cu adevarat sa insemne unele pasaje sau unele gesturi ale lui Jacob...
In mod cert te pune pe ganduri chiar daca se doreste a fi o biografie a protagonisului, prezentandu-i viata de la nastere pana la moarte ca intr-un bildungsroman.
Ceea ce m-a derutat este maniera in care ne sunt infatisate faptele, sub forma de franturi, flashuri, treceri rapide si bucatele din viata personajului principal, ca intr-un mozaic. Avem impresia ca am rasfoi foile unei carti, oprindu-ne din cand in cand la cate o pagina, citind cate un paragraf, apoi trecand repede mai departe. Tot ce nu ni se spune despre Jacob, ne face sa dorim sa aflam mai mult, totodata conferindu-i si o aura de mister.
Eroul cartii este in mare parte caracterizat prin prisma altor personaje de care cartea abunda, multe fiind doar episodice. Unele cuvinte din conversatiile pe care acesta le poarta cu ceilalti nu sunt redate integral, ca si cum nu ar mai fi importante pentru autoare, trimitandu-ne cu gandul la un tablou neterminat, de factura moderna.
In camera lui Jacob patrundem in lipsa lui, ca si cum nu am dori sa-l tulburam si analizam toate obiectele, mai ales ceea ce citeste, printre care gasim operele lui Spinoza, Jane Austen, Dickens dar si carti despre pictorii italieni ai Renasterii si biografii ale ducelui de Wellington. Avem de-a face asadar cu un personaj destul de erudit.
In ochii celorlalti, Jacob trece drept un tanar cu o "figura distinsa" dar "cat se poate de stangaci". Fetele il plac dar il considera "tanarul cel tacut" care "daca vrea sa razbata in viata va trebui sa-si dezlege limba".
Cel mai mult m-a impresionat faptul ca atunci cand isi citeste propriul eseu prietenilor se emotioneaza. Ulterior acesta este refuzat de publicatii si Jacob il arunca intr-o lada neagra unde mai pastreaza si scrisorile de la mama sa. Lada neagra este un simbol pentru locul unde se gasesc cele mai dragi amintiri din viata sa, poate chiar inima lui.
Personal, imi place ca dupa ce termin o carte sa am o viziune completa asupra personajelor, sa le pot cumva asimila, sa treaca de la autor la cititor. Pe Jacob insa, l-am simtit in continuare strain ca si cum ar fi ramas tot al Virginiei Woolf.
Ca incheiere las aici unul dintre cele mai frumoase citate pe care le-am citit in ultima vreme intr-o carte: "Suntem fie barbati, fie femei. Fie ca suntem reci, fie ca suntem sentimentali. Ori suntem tineri, ori imbatranim. In orice caz, viata nu este decat un cortegiu de umbre si Dumnezeu stie de ce le imbratisam cu atata nerabdare si cand ne despartim de ele suferim atata, nefiind decat niste umbre."
In mod cert te pune pe ganduri chiar daca se doreste a fi o biografie a protagonisului, prezentandu-i viata de la nastere pana la moarte ca intr-un bildungsroman.
Ceea ce m-a derutat este maniera in care ne sunt infatisate faptele, sub forma de franturi, flashuri, treceri rapide si bucatele din viata personajului principal, ca intr-un mozaic. Avem impresia ca am rasfoi foile unei carti, oprindu-ne din cand in cand la cate o pagina, citind cate un paragraf, apoi trecand repede mai departe. Tot ce nu ni se spune despre Jacob, ne face sa dorim sa aflam mai mult, totodata conferindu-i si o aura de mister.
Eroul cartii este in mare parte caracterizat prin prisma altor personaje de care cartea abunda, multe fiind doar episodice. Unele cuvinte din conversatiile pe care acesta le poarta cu ceilalti nu sunt redate integral, ca si cum nu ar mai fi importante pentru autoare, trimitandu-ne cu gandul la un tablou neterminat, de factura moderna.
In camera lui Jacob patrundem in lipsa lui, ca si cum nu am dori sa-l tulburam si analizam toate obiectele, mai ales ceea ce citeste, printre care gasim operele lui Spinoza, Jane Austen, Dickens dar si carti despre pictorii italieni ai Renasterii si biografii ale ducelui de Wellington. Avem de-a face asadar cu un personaj destul de erudit.
In ochii celorlalti, Jacob trece drept un tanar cu o "figura distinsa" dar "cat se poate de stangaci". Fetele il plac dar il considera "tanarul cel tacut" care "daca vrea sa razbata in viata va trebui sa-si dezlege limba".
Cel mai mult m-a impresionat faptul ca atunci cand isi citeste propriul eseu prietenilor se emotioneaza. Ulterior acesta este refuzat de publicatii si Jacob il arunca intr-o lada neagra unde mai pastreaza si scrisorile de la mama sa. Lada neagra este un simbol pentru locul unde se gasesc cele mai dragi amintiri din viata sa, poate chiar inima lui.
Personal, imi place ca dupa ce termin o carte sa am o viziune completa asupra personajelor, sa le pot cumva asimila, sa treaca de la autor la cititor. Pe Jacob insa, l-am simtit in continuare strain ca si cum ar fi ramas tot al Virginiei Woolf.
Ca incheiere las aici unul dintre cele mai frumoase citate pe care le-am citit in ultima vreme intr-o carte: "Suntem fie barbati, fie femei. Fie ca suntem reci, fie ca suntem sentimentali. Ori suntem tineri, ori imbatranim. In orice caz, viata nu este decat un cortegiu de umbre si Dumnezeu stie de ce le imbratisam cu atata nerabdare si cand ne despartim de ele suferim atata, nefiind decat niste umbre."
August 5, 2020
This is Virginia Woolf’s third novel. It was published in 1922. It is considered her most experimental. It is definitely my favorite!
What Woolf was trying to do, and which I think she marvelously succeeds with, is to capture how it feels to experience life. There is less of a focus on what a person does, more on how we internally perceive and react to everyday events. She seems to me to be attempting to capture the inner life of individuals, and not just one individual but many. We are delivered a smattering of emotional and thought-oriented reactions to what is happening around the characters in the novel. For example, how does a person react to the opening of a window? How does it resonate within us? What one hears when you open a window, go out your door or walk in the night has to be captured accurately, but also how we respond to our senses has to be captured too. As well as the multiplicity of individuals’ reactions. For Woolf, an ordinary story, tied tightly to a plot line and an all-knowing narrator cannot portray real life; such is not how individuals actually perceive life.
There is plot in the story, but it is characters´ perception of each other and of events that is the essential. We follow Jacob Flanders. We hear what other people, mostly women, think of him. There is first an episode with him as a child. Then he is nineteen and off to Cambridge. The year is 1906. Through the women around him we get a clear idea of who he is - of his ways and of his manner. He is silent. He is awkward. He is distinguished-looking too. We follow him until he is twenty-six and a bit more. He travels to Paris, to Italy and to Greece, and then he is back to London. We are at London parties. We are in a reading room at the British museum. We are in his room as he ponders a chess move and glances out his window. We are at a Guy Fawkes bonfire. Have you seen how faces are lit up by and distorted by firelight? It is such as this that makes the book special and unique and that divides it from ordinary writing.
There are many, many wonderful lines. Look at these:
* "Women are always, always talking about how they feel."
* "Perhaps it is beauty alone that is immortal."
* “It is no use trying to sum people up.”
* “Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole - they see all sorts of things - they see themselves.”
* “Indeed, there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins - of happiness and unhappiness.”
* “Anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.”
* “Multiplicity becomes unity.”
There is humor. We are told that nobody laughs in the reading room, but somebody does just that! Jacob is attracted to Florinda, but there is a problem because "a body is harnessed to a brain". Well, the words are expressed something like that! Imagine a dog at a church service. This is drawn for us too, in a very amusing fashion. Do you remember those little colored paper flowers that open up when thrown in water? You will smile when you read about these and a potential love affair.
Acclaimed, award-winning actress Juliet Stevenson narrates the audiobook. The reading is totally fantastic. She captures mood perfectly. Foreign accents and screams and giggles are authentically rendered. I personally recommend listening to this rather than reading it. One’s imagination cannot improve upon Stevenson’s performance.
These are the books I have read by Virginia Woolf:
Jacob's Room 4 stars
Mrs. Dalloway 4 stars
To the Lighthouse 3 stars
Night and Day 3 stars
The Voyage Out 3 stars
A Room of One's Own 1 star
The Waves 1 star
What Woolf was trying to do, and which I think she marvelously succeeds with, is to capture how it feels to experience life. There is less of a focus on what a person does, more on how we internally perceive and react to everyday events. She seems to me to be attempting to capture the inner life of individuals, and not just one individual but many. We are delivered a smattering of emotional and thought-oriented reactions to what is happening around the characters in the novel. For example, how does a person react to the opening of a window? How does it resonate within us? What one hears when you open a window, go out your door or walk in the night has to be captured accurately, but also how we respond to our senses has to be captured too. As well as the multiplicity of individuals’ reactions. For Woolf, an ordinary story, tied tightly to a plot line and an all-knowing narrator cannot portray real life; such is not how individuals actually perceive life.
There is plot in the story, but it is characters´ perception of each other and of events that is the essential. We follow Jacob Flanders. We hear what other people, mostly women, think of him. There is first an episode with him as a child. Then he is nineteen and off to Cambridge. The year is 1906. Through the women around him we get a clear idea of who he is - of his ways and of his manner. He is silent. He is awkward. He is distinguished-looking too. We follow him until he is twenty-six and a bit more. He travels to Paris, to Italy and to Greece, and then he is back to London. We are at London parties. We are in a reading room at the British museum. We are in his room as he ponders a chess move and glances out his window. We are at a Guy Fawkes bonfire. Have you seen how faces are lit up by and distorted by firelight? It is such as this that makes the book special and unique and that divides it from ordinary writing.
There are many, many wonderful lines. Look at these:
* "Women are always, always talking about how they feel."
* "Perhaps it is beauty alone that is immortal."
* “It is no use trying to sum people up.”
* “Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole - they see all sorts of things - they see themselves.”
* “Indeed, there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins - of happiness and unhappiness.”
* “Anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.”
* “Multiplicity becomes unity.”
There is humor. We are told that nobody laughs in the reading room, but somebody does just that! Jacob is attracted to Florinda, but there is a problem because "a body is harnessed to a brain". Well, the words are expressed something like that! Imagine a dog at a church service. This is drawn for us too, in a very amusing fashion. Do you remember those little colored paper flowers that open up when thrown in water? You will smile when you read about these and a potential love affair.
Acclaimed, award-winning actress Juliet Stevenson narrates the audiobook. The reading is totally fantastic. She captures mood perfectly. Foreign accents and screams and giggles are authentically rendered. I personally recommend listening to this rather than reading it. One’s imagination cannot improve upon Stevenson’s performance.
These are the books I have read by Virginia Woolf:
Jacob's Room 4 stars
Mrs. Dalloway 4 stars
To the Lighthouse 3 stars
Night and Day 3 stars
The Voyage Out 3 stars
A Room of One's Own 1 star
The Waves 1 star
January 10, 2022
“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”
― Jane Austen
This quote of Jane Austen is relevant here. The women in this novel never wanted to remain in calm waters. They are so many. And the poor fellow is just one. But this fellow, Jacob, remained calm and serene. Did he remain calm because life foisted on him such complexity of human relations one after other? Or did he remain calm just from outside, because from inside, there was seething a volcano of emotions in him? By the time I wanted this fact to reveal itself to me, the novel was already finished!
Women play an important role in the life of a lonely man. Lonely not in the worldly sense, but rather in the cognitive sense. A disconcerting young man, who is cognitively alone and keep wandering from one place to another when he grew to adulthood, and he is interested in atavistic and ancients. The Greeks, Museums, antiques, travel, and complex relations are the part of his life; He is serene both at the center and at the peripheral.
What will happen if, he is liked by so many women, they wish to take things further, yet this disinclined fellow, slumbers every time and gets his head down to all of them. What can be more than this to this poor fellow that after turning-down so many women, he gets his emotional comfort with a woman who is already married, but due to her marital status he again succumbs to an undesired affliction of a failed relationship?
Jacob Flanders is his full name and we are talking about his room. What is in the room? How big is the room and who else can adjust with him in his room?
He was unique, even in his childhood, once his mother Betty Flanders who was a widow, with her little boys, found him sleeping with a skull of a dead animal. He was good in studies and grew up studying in Cambridge and made friends there. And the story completely hovers around Jacob and his relationships, in many parts of the world, in fact, a story that neither started nor ended. He travels from London to Greece, and so on.
Now I will try to channelize my thought after reading the novel.
In the beginning, a lady named Betty Flanders is writing a letter with teary eyes to some Captain Barfoot who is seven hundred miles away from her place. Her small boys Archer and Jacob are playing in the sand at a bay, the entire bay is quivering and the lighthouse is wobbling in the background, the light is simmering. The natural portrayal and emotional pitch of the prose hooked me at once. The line of the plot systematically develops and it was only the third chapter that I was already getting mesmerized with the prose of Virginia; She is too much poetic, sometimes elegiac, sometimes sanguine!
But I lost interest in the plot, and for many next chapters, I read it half-heartedly and found nothing happening, It was prose and its complexity and its poetic metaphors, I was trying to comprehend, at times I was only praising this woman writer in my head and subtlety of the behavior of characters. But then entered the traveling phase of Jacob, and I also got back to the plot in an exhilarating mode, and from there onwards, I thoroughly enjoyed both prose and plot.
I will remember the book for the magical writing of Virginia, It was only her third book. I could see again the depth of her narrative. Kudos to her non-literal and figurative style of presenting her case! Last year I was reading her short stories and I can see how amazing is her range in the plane of perception and psychics.
I noticed that I began this review with a thought from a woman writer, talked about so many women in a book which is written by another woman writer, so I should finish the review with a quote from one more woman writer.
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
― Sylvia Plath
Now the most beguiling coincidence that I wish to declare in the end is that the next book I am reading has the title WOMEN!
― Jane Austen
This quote of Jane Austen is relevant here. The women in this novel never wanted to remain in calm waters. They are so many. And the poor fellow is just one. But this fellow, Jacob, remained calm and serene. Did he remain calm because life foisted on him such complexity of human relations one after other? Or did he remain calm just from outside, because from inside, there was seething a volcano of emotions in him? By the time I wanted this fact to reveal itself to me, the novel was already finished!
Women play an important role in the life of a lonely man. Lonely not in the worldly sense, but rather in the cognitive sense. A disconcerting young man, who is cognitively alone and keep wandering from one place to another when he grew to adulthood, and he is interested in atavistic and ancients. The Greeks, Museums, antiques, travel, and complex relations are the part of his life; He is serene both at the center and at the peripheral.
What will happen if, he is liked by so many women, they wish to take things further, yet this disinclined fellow, slumbers every time and gets his head down to all of them. What can be more than this to this poor fellow that after turning-down so many women, he gets his emotional comfort with a woman who is already married, but due to her marital status he again succumbs to an undesired affliction of a failed relationship?
Jacob Flanders is his full name and we are talking about his room. What is in the room? How big is the room and who else can adjust with him in his room?
“The worn voices of the clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long. Jacob, too, heard them and raked out the fire. He rose. He stretched himself. He went to bed.”
He was unique, even in his childhood, once his mother Betty Flanders who was a widow, with her little boys, found him sleeping with a skull of a dead animal. He was good in studies and grew up studying in Cambridge and made friends there. And the story completely hovers around Jacob and his relationships, in many parts of the world, in fact, a story that neither started nor ended. He travels from London to Greece, and so on.
“ Yet next day, as the train slowly rounded a hill on the way to Olympia, the Greek peasant women were out among the vines; the old greek men were sitting across the stations, sipping sweet wine. And though Jacob remained gloomy he never suspected how tremendously pleasant it is to be alone; out of England; on one’s own, cut off from the whole thing.”
Now I will try to channelize my thought after reading the novel.
In the beginning, a lady named Betty Flanders is writing a letter with teary eyes to some Captain Barfoot who is seven hundred miles away from her place. Her small boys Archer and Jacob are playing in the sand at a bay, the entire bay is quivering and the lighthouse is wobbling in the background, the light is simmering. The natural portrayal and emotional pitch of the prose hooked me at once. The line of the plot systematically develops and it was only the third chapter that I was already getting mesmerized with the prose of Virginia; She is too much poetic, sometimes elegiac, sometimes sanguine!
But I lost interest in the plot, and for many next chapters, I read it half-heartedly and found nothing happening, It was prose and its complexity and its poetic metaphors, I was trying to comprehend, at times I was only praising this woman writer in my head and subtlety of the behavior of characters. But then entered the traveling phase of Jacob, and I also got back to the plot in an exhilarating mode, and from there onwards, I thoroughly enjoyed both prose and plot.
I will remember the book for the magical writing of Virginia, It was only her third book. I could see again the depth of her narrative. Kudos to her non-literal and figurative style of presenting her case! Last year I was reading her short stories and I can see how amazing is her range in the plane of perception and psychics.
I noticed that I began this review with a thought from a woman writer, talked about so many women in a book which is written by another woman writer, so I should finish the review with a quote from one more woman writer.
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
― Sylvia Plath
Now the most beguiling coincidence that I wish to declare in the end is that the next book I am reading has the title WOMEN!
Read
November 3, 2021فرجينيا...يا فرجينيا...
أظن إن دارساً لأدب تيار الوعي هو من يستطع التحدث عن عالمك ولكنني عاشقة لعالمك فهل يشفع ذلك لي ؟!...
هل يُمكنني أن أغوص هناك قليلاً..؟
لا تنتظر نص مُحكم البنية...هنا كما لو كان سيلاً متدفقاً من الأفكار ينسكب على الأوراق البيضاء...يسعى لصياغة مونولوجات داخلية لأشخاص عديدة بصورة مُفككة ومُبعثرة..في جمل قصيرة غير مترابطة يصعب متابعتها ومع ذلك كلما انتزعت نفسك منها ، أعادتك ثانيةً لعالمها الزاخر بالإنطباعات الحسية والبصرية اللامتناهية...معها تستعيد رؤية الأشياء من جديد....
فهى كاتبة تُبجل الطبيعة...تقديساً وليس هياماً..أجل
أتدري لو أن عشبة خضراء صغيرة نبتت من رصيف حجري قديم لوجدت لها موضعاً في عالم فرجينيا....
تراءى لي أن النص لعبة مراوغة يتصارع فيها الضوء والظلال سواء فيما يتعلق بالأشخاص أو الأشياء..حيث يتسلل الضوء ناعماً يباغتك ..يوشي كل شيء وسرعان ما تتداخل خطوط الظلال بصورة خاطفة لتتدحرج العتمة تغمر كل شيء ومن ثم يزحف النور مُجدداً وتبدأ اللعبة من جديد....
كل الوجوه التي تلتقيها هنا مشوشة..خدرة...مخطوفة...
كما ان الأمر لا يعني غرفة يعقوب..ولا يعقوب ، لقد كان شاباً ساذجاً يتعلق بوهم الحب ، صموتاً هادئاً ، يبدو للجميع إنه يتمتع بمظهر مميز ، مهتماً بالأدب والسياسة والحضارة الإغريقية...إهتماماً وليس إفتتاناً...
غرفة يعقوب الفندقية كأي غرفة شاب...دعنا لا نتعقب يعقوب إلى غرفته ، لا بأس ليمضي في سبيله...
هنا مرثية تضمرها الكلمات..تنطوي عليها هواجس الذات.. رفيف من الحزن الشفيف يلتف حول كل شيء ...
" الأشياء بسيطة ويلفها الغموض والأسى القاتل ، وهذا شيء محزن...محزن حقاً، لكن كل شيء بحد ذاته ينطوي على معنى ما..."
سعدت بمشاركة القراءة مع صديقتي العزيزة خلود ، بالرغم من إن نقاشاتنا كانت قليلة لكنها كانت ثرية وممتعة جداا...
أظن إن دارساً لأدب تيار الوعي هو من يستطع التحدث عن عالمك ولكنني عاشقة لعالمك فهل يشفع ذلك لي ؟!...
هل يُمكنني أن أغوص هناك قليلاً..؟
لا تنتظر نص مُحكم البنية...هنا كما لو كان سيلاً متدفقاً من الأفكار ينسكب على الأوراق البيضاء...يسعى لصياغة مونولوجات داخلية لأشخاص عديدة بصورة مُفككة ومُبعثرة..في جمل قصيرة غير مترابطة يصعب متابعتها ومع ذلك كلما انتزعت نفسك منها ، أعادتك ثانيةً لعالمها الزاخر بالإنطباعات الحسية والبصرية اللامتناهية...معها تستعيد رؤية الأشياء من جديد....
فهى كاتبة تُبجل الطبيعة...تقديساً وليس هياماً..أجل
أتدري لو أن عشبة خضراء صغيرة نبتت من رصيف حجري قديم لوجدت لها موضعاً في عالم فرجينيا....
تراءى لي أن النص لعبة مراوغة يتصارع فيها الضوء والظلال سواء فيما يتعلق بالأشخاص أو الأشياء..حيث يتسلل الضوء ناعماً يباغتك ..يوشي كل شيء وسرعان ما تتداخل خطوط الظلال بصورة خاطفة لتتدحرج العتمة تغمر كل شيء ومن ثم يزحف النور مُجدداً وتبدأ اللعبة من جديد....
كل الوجوه التي تلتقيها هنا مشوشة..خدرة...مخطوفة...
كما ان الأمر لا يعني غرفة يعقوب..ولا يعقوب ، لقد كان شاباً ساذجاً يتعلق بوهم الحب ، صموتاً هادئاً ، يبدو للجميع إنه يتمتع بمظهر مميز ، مهتماً بالأدب والسياسة والحضارة الإغريقية...إهتماماً وليس إفتتاناً...
غرفة يعقوب الفندقية كأي غرفة شاب...دعنا لا نتعقب يعقوب إلى غرفته ، لا بأس ليمضي في سبيله...
هنا مرثية تضمرها الكلمات..تنطوي عليها هواجس الذات.. رفيف من الحزن الشفيف يلتف حول كل شيء ...
" الأشياء بسيطة ويلفها الغموض والأسى القاتل ، وهذا شيء محزن...محزن حقاً، لكن كل شيء بحد ذاته ينطوي على معنى ما..."
سعدت بمشاركة القراءة مع صديقتي العزيزة خلود ، بالرغم من إن نقاشاتنا كانت قليلة لكنها كانت ثرية وممتعة جداا...
August 24, 2015
Having just concluded that I'm glad I didn't read Steinbeck's novels in chronological order, I now rather wish I'd started at the beginning with Woolf's novels. On the other hand, it's interesting to look back to the beginnings of Woolf's experimental writing after reading Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves.
Whereas listening to the audiobook of The Waves reminded me of listening to a cantata or an oratorio, listening to this novel (beautifully narrated by Juliet Stevenson) was more like looking at a series of snapshots in an old family photgraph album. Some of the photographs are clear and sharp, others are blurry. In some of the photographs the subject of the photograph is looking away from the camera or is almost out of the frame. And then in others, he's missing completely, and his family and friends are looking for him, gazing beyond the photographer.
Jacob Flanders, despite being the central character, is more of an absence than a presence in the work. While we see him from childhood to adulthood, it's through the eyes of others and we don't really get to know him. This makes it difficult to emotionally connect, but that may be the point. After all, from the beginning of the novel, we are aware that come 1914, Jacob will be in his twenties and it's a fair bet that Woolf is a believer in nominative determinism.
The poetic language and the highly visual quality of the prose were, for me, the highlights of the work. I don't love it as I have loved the other novels of Virginia Woolf that I've read, but I'm still deeply impressed.
September 1, 2007
Although I am very nearly obsessed with Virginia Woolf, this book only gets 3 stars because she is so clever and poetic with words, not because this book, as a whole, was a great read. This was the first of her experimental, inner monologue style of writing fiction for which she is known and which she writes expertly in subsequent novels. Maybe it's because this is the first of that style, but I couldn't find any connecting point. Jacob, the protagonist, is only the main character as viewed through other people. This, in my mind, is a brilliant idea, but left me feeling very disconnected from Jacob and I had no idea who he really was by the end, or even by the middle of the novel. It left me craving a connection with someone in the novel which was impossible to find. Woolf, as usual, describes scenes and even the characters with a beauty unsurpassed, but I would not pose it as one of my favorite of her novels. If you want the true Woolfian novel in all its brilliance and beauty, read 'To the Lighthouse'.
October 16, 2015
No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.
I’m glad I don’t have to try and explain what Jacob’s Room is about because there’s no real plot; rather, it’s a wonderfully poetic and peculiar glimpse of small things happening, people thinking, waves crashing, life cascading by. There’s a layered and voyeuristic darkness throughout. Life is happening to Jacob in remembered vignettes and half-memories, and we catch glimpses of Jacob but nothing is ever clear or absolute; everything is obstructed by the sea, the sky, the passing of time, and mostly, the contortion of other people’s perspective. However badly we wish to know somebody, or even to see ourselves clearly, we will never quite grasp it and we can never know just how we appear to another person. Jacob’s identity, Woolf’s mind, and our own lives ramble around chaotically and haphazardly and is filtered through other people’s moods and prejudices.
Life is a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.
And so much introspective melancholy. So much wondering and wandering. The stark loneliness in this book does not let up.
No doubt if this were Italy, or Greece, or even the shores of Spain, sadness would be routed by strangeness and excitement and the nudge of a classical education. But the Cornish hills have stark chimneys standing on them; and somehow or other, loveliness is infernally sad. Yes, the chimneys and the coast-guard stations and the little bays with the waves breaking unseen by anyone make one remember overpowering sorrow. And what can this sorrow be?
How does one document sadness? A life gone by? Memories? Truth? In the end, how do we put down on paper how things really were? Fruitless. Who we are and how we will be remembered, if in fact we are, remains an internal mystery and there’s nothing we can do about it.
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?”
I’m glad I don’t have to try and explain what Jacob’s Room is about because there’s no real plot; rather, it’s a wonderfully poetic and peculiar glimpse of small things happening, people thinking, waves crashing, life cascading by. There’s a layered and voyeuristic darkness throughout. Life is happening to Jacob in remembered vignettes and half-memories, and we catch glimpses of Jacob but nothing is ever clear or absolute; everything is obstructed by the sea, the sky, the passing of time, and mostly, the contortion of other people’s perspective. However badly we wish to know somebody, or even to see ourselves clearly, we will never quite grasp it and we can never know just how we appear to another person. Jacob’s identity, Woolf’s mind, and our own lives ramble around chaotically and haphazardly and is filtered through other people’s moods and prejudices.
Life is a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.
And so much introspective melancholy. So much wondering and wandering. The stark loneliness in this book does not let up.
No doubt if this were Italy, or Greece, or even the shores of Spain, sadness would be routed by strangeness and excitement and the nudge of a classical education. But the Cornish hills have stark chimneys standing on them; and somehow or other, loveliness is infernally sad. Yes, the chimneys and the coast-guard stations and the little bays with the waves breaking unseen by anyone make one remember overpowering sorrow. And what can this sorrow be?
How does one document sadness? A life gone by? Memories? Truth? In the end, how do we put down on paper how things really were? Fruitless. Who we are and how we will be remembered, if in fact we are, remains an internal mystery and there’s nothing we can do about it.
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?”
August 25, 2020
این کتاب برای من مثل یه خواب بود. همونطور گذرا و چرخان بین وقایع و شخصیتها.
با این دید که دارم جزئیات یه خوابی رو میخونم و همونطور رها بین کلمهها میچرخم، خوندمش و ازش لذت بردم.
سراسر حس دریایی بودن داشت انگار که روی یه موج شناور باشی و هی بالا و پایین بری، کوبیده شی به صخره یا گاهی آورده شی به ساحل و آروم باشی و گاهی مواج.
سراسر حس از دست دادن و سوگ هم همراهش بود.
خیلی خوشحالم که کتاب رو با گروه خوندم و به درک بهترش کمک کرد، تنهایی وولف خوندن واقعا سخته.
از اون کتابهاییه که نمیتونم بخوام به کسی پیشنهاد بدم. واقعا روحیه و حال خاص خودش رو میطلبه.
| بعد چنین مینماید که مردها و زنها به یک اندازه در اشتباهاند. انگار نظری عمیق، بیطرفانه و کاملا درست و عادلانه در مورد همنوعانمان کاملا ناشناخته است. ما یا مردیم یا زن. یا سرد و بیاحساسیم یا پرشور و احساساتی. یا جوانیم یا پیر میشویم. در هر حال، زندگی نمایش آیینیِ سایههاست و خدا میداند که چرا آنها را اینطور مشتاقانه در آغوش میکشیم و با درد و رنج فراوان نظارهگر عزیمتشان میمانیم، چون آنها سایهاند. و چرا، اگر این و بسیار بیش از این درست باشد، چرا در گوشهی پنجره با این درک ناگهانی که مرد جوان نشسته بر صندلی واقعیترین چیز دنیا و بیکموکاستترین و آشناترین چیز برای ماست، تا این حد شگفتزده میشویم، واقعا چرا؟ چون یک لحظه بعد احساس میکنیم که در مورد آن جوان هیچچیز نمیدانیم.
این است سبک و سیاق دیدن ما. این است شرایط عشق ما. | ص۸۴
| جمعبندی کلی خصلتهای مردم بیفایده است. باید رفت پی نشانهها، نه اینکه دقیقا چه حرفی زده میشود و نه حتی کاملا اینکه چه کارهایی انجام میشود. این درست است که بعضی از آدمها بلافاصله پس از روبهرو شدن با دیگران از شخصیت آنها برداشتی همیشگی با نقشی نازدودنی پیدا میکنند. بعضی دیگر وقت تلف میکنند و مدام به این سو و آن سو سوق مییابند. | ص ۱۸۰
با این دید که دارم جزئیات یه خوابی رو میخونم و همونطور رها بین کلمهها میچرخم، خوندمش و ازش لذت بردم.
سراسر حس دریایی بودن داشت انگار که روی یه موج شناور باشی و هی بالا و پایین بری، کوبیده شی به صخره یا گاهی آورده شی به ساحل و آروم باشی و گاهی مواج.
سراسر حس از دست دادن و سوگ هم همراهش بود.
خیلی خوشحالم که کتاب رو با گروه خوندم و به درک بهترش کمک کرد، تنهایی وولف خوندن واقعا سخته.
از اون کتابهاییه که نمیتونم بخوام به کسی پیشنهاد بدم. واقعا روحیه و حال خاص خودش رو میطلبه.
| بعد چنین مینماید که مردها و زنها به یک اندازه در اشتباهاند. انگار نظری عمیق، بیطرفانه و کاملا درست و عادلانه در مورد همنوعانمان کاملا ناشناخته است. ما یا مردیم یا زن. یا سرد و بیاحساسیم یا پرشور و احساساتی. یا جوانیم یا پیر میشویم. در هر حال، زندگی نمایش آیینیِ سایههاست و خدا میداند که چرا آنها را اینطور مشتاقانه در آغوش میکشیم و با درد و رنج فراوان نظارهگر عزیمتشان میمانیم، چون آنها سایهاند. و چرا، اگر این و بسیار بیش از این درست باشد، چرا در گوشهی پنجره با این درک ناگهانی که مرد جوان نشسته بر صندلی واقعیترین چیز دنیا و بیکموکاستترین و آشناترین چیز برای ماست، تا این حد شگفتزده میشویم، واقعا چرا؟ چون یک لحظه بعد احساس میکنیم که در مورد آن جوان هیچچیز نمیدانیم.
این است سبک و سیاق دیدن ما. این است شرایط عشق ما. | ص۸۴
| جمعبندی کلی خصلتهای مردم بیفایده است. باید رفت پی نشانهها، نه اینکه دقیقا چه حرفی زده میشود و نه حتی کاملا اینکه چه کارهایی انجام میشود. این درست است که بعضی از آدمها بلافاصله پس از روبهرو شدن با دیگران از شخصیت آنها برداشتی همیشگی با نقشی نازدودنی پیدا میکنند. بعضی دیگر وقت تلف میکنند و مدام به این سو و آن سو سوق مییابند. | ص ۱۸۰
July 21, 2023
It is probably well known that I have an obsession for anything with Woolf's stamp on it, and I probably will until my dying day, but this book was in the middle for me, as even though it was written in true Woolf Style, I struggled to make a connection with any of the characters.
The way in which Woolf writes is remarkable, and the beauty that literally seeps through the pages sometimes makes me need to catch my breath. She was truly wonderful in that sense, and I cannot fault her there. The issue lay with Jacob himself. I didn't fully understand who he really was, and I think much of this is due to watching him from a distance. I was detached from the story.
This was Woolf's first attempt at a modernist novel, and although I'm glad I read it, I wouldn't say that I entirely loved it. (The front cover is sublime, though.)
The way in which Woolf writes is remarkable, and the beauty that literally seeps through the pages sometimes makes me need to catch my breath. She was truly wonderful in that sense, and I cannot fault her there. The issue lay with Jacob himself. I didn't fully understand who he really was, and I think much of this is due to watching him from a distance. I was detached from the story.
This was Woolf's first attempt at a modernist novel, and although I'm glad I read it, I wouldn't say that I entirely loved it. (The front cover is sublime, though.)
January 14, 2016
I was unwilling to read this book, which had been on my shelf for a long time, had risen to the top of the pile, been bypassed many times by more 'urgent' selections and finally became too accusing in its familiarity for me to put off any longer. Why the antipathy? I opened it a few times, leafed through the introduction, and reached for something contemporary instead, something that felt, maybe, more 'relevant'.
To continue the rambling personal preamble (just skip to the next paragraph, dear reader, if you'd rather read about the book), during the recently seasonal holiday I half-watched the film I loved best from the first time I saw it until I became a pretentious and arrogant 18 year old, The Labyrinth, staring David Bowie in fabulous make up and dodgy kecks. As one of the songs began, my dad commented that the bass line was a bit dated, and my mum replied 'the whole thing's dated, isn't it, but that's part of its charm.' Indeed! Indeed! What is datedness but the precious archaeological material of a thickly textured history? Before CGI, studios made polystyrene rocks, cute little fox puppets, and... really huge mullets. If your kids don't believe you, show them this movie.
My pleasure in Jacob's Room is akin to my pleasure in archaeology, in immersing myself in stories or among artefacts from some era whose narrative or material culture I have enough experience of to be transported to in my mind. That power in this novel, of evocation, which is extremely successful (and economical at less than 250 pages) because of Woolf's impressionistic style, is salient to me because of the Big Subject, the elephant in Jacob's Room, the war. The place and time and state of being showed here, fashioned in the arrangement of figures, transmitted with a strange purity, like a scent on a breeze that opens some inner floodgate holding back a tide of nostalgia, is a state that was swept away, we have only the room, the testament of shoes and crumpled bills and thumbed books.
Of course many many books do this. Attia Hosain does it in Sunlight on a Broken Column, Andrea Lee does it in Sarah Phillips, and Woolf's way of doing it, of lighting the lamps of an age out of reach, is... her own! An acquired taste. An artefact now 'dated' itself. Modernism, impressionism, technologies, inventions of a moment when, can I say, artists sought to look through their own eyes unaided, instead of the ones sanctioned and handed to them by authority? Here is, as exactly as possible, the world apprehended through the whole of the mind, sense data arranged artfully to feel as it does in the raw, in the first rush. It has disjointed scraps of rhythm and beauty, as an orchestra tuning up has. Woolf's sentences that break up into an agitated, poetic surface allow her to control and blend effects of excitement, of tension, of silence, or release. Thinking and feeling and being are not tidy, rounded experiences; Woolf expresses them with freshness, a sometimes breathtaking accuracy, and without the distraction of sub-narratives, plans, gossip. Her subject is not the biography of Jacob, but the illumination of his room, the tapestry scene he walks in, part of the people around him, part of (to repeat the ritual words of my spiritual belief) the universe that knows itself in difference through us.
As a novel of the war, this is... really not a novel of the war at all! I think of Doris Lessing's counterfactual history in Alfred and Emily, but nothing here is counter to the fact, only the war figures here only in so far as it creates the emptiness of the room, showing war's horror almost entirely in the negative, in the entirely unsentimental depiction of what it destroys entirely, what it makes impossible. In The Woman from Tantoura Radwa Ashour gives us the opening of a story, a story I want to hear, and is forced by the violent intrusion of real events to tell us another story instead. Likewise Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Half of a Yellow Sun. The herstories in these novels are subjugated narratives that demand attention and justice, while for me as a British reader, WWI as history is potentially old hat, frequently (like the other WW) an occasion for nauseating self-glorification. By simply showing its shadow, rather than take a radical position in relation to the conflict, as many authors have, Woolf adopts, I think, a fairly neutral pose of mourning loss. This pose is gendered, of course, because the men went to war, and the women lost them. If Jacob is presented to us here through the eyes of others, the majority of those eyes belong to women.
While Adichie's and Ashour's introductions show us that the other story would have been worth telling to invoke outrage at their destruction, Woolf tells the story before war partly to suggest how the culture Jacob belongs to shaped the disastrous conflict. She presents young men as naïve and posturing, easily influenced, entering an education system focussed on classical empires rather than knowledge of the world around them or themselves: when Jacob is actually in Greece, he is seized by the frustration of being unable, unaided, to form an opinion, of losing, rather than finding himself. Woolf makes little discernable (to me) effort here to think through relations of empire (or class), but she at least suggests that such thinking was needed and lacking.
As far as it goes, the anti-war argument here is located not in a narrative proof of the value of life, but in a portrait revealing an individual destroyed not even by death but by the death-machine of war that makes men into matchsticks or cornstalks in a field.
To continue the rambling personal preamble (just skip to the next paragraph, dear reader, if you'd rather read about the book), during the recently seasonal holiday I half-watched the film I loved best from the first time I saw it until I became a pretentious and arrogant 18 year old, The Labyrinth, staring David Bowie in fabulous make up and dodgy kecks. As one of the songs began, my dad commented that the bass line was a bit dated, and my mum replied 'the whole thing's dated, isn't it, but that's part of its charm.' Indeed! Indeed! What is datedness but the precious archaeological material of a thickly textured history? Before CGI, studios made polystyrene rocks, cute little fox puppets, and... really huge mullets. If your kids don't believe you, show them this movie.
My pleasure in Jacob's Room is akin to my pleasure in archaeology, in immersing myself in stories or among artefacts from some era whose narrative or material culture I have enough experience of to be transported to in my mind. That power in this novel, of evocation, which is extremely successful (and economical at less than 250 pages) because of Woolf's impressionistic style, is salient to me because of the Big Subject, the elephant in Jacob's Room, the war. The place and time and state of being showed here, fashioned in the arrangement of figures, transmitted with a strange purity, like a scent on a breeze that opens some inner floodgate holding back a tide of nostalgia, is a state that was swept away, we have only the room, the testament of shoes and crumpled bills and thumbed books.
Of course many many books do this. Attia Hosain does it in Sunlight on a Broken Column, Andrea Lee does it in Sarah Phillips, and Woolf's way of doing it, of lighting the lamps of an age out of reach, is... her own! An acquired taste. An artefact now 'dated' itself. Modernism, impressionism, technologies, inventions of a moment when, can I say, artists sought to look through their own eyes unaided, instead of the ones sanctioned and handed to them by authority? Here is, as exactly as possible, the world apprehended through the whole of the mind, sense data arranged artfully to feel as it does in the raw, in the first rush. It has disjointed scraps of rhythm and beauty, as an orchestra tuning up has. Woolf's sentences that break up into an agitated, poetic surface allow her to control and blend effects of excitement, of tension, of silence, or release. Thinking and feeling and being are not tidy, rounded experiences; Woolf expresses them with freshness, a sometimes breathtaking accuracy, and without the distraction of sub-narratives, plans, gossip. Her subject is not the biography of Jacob, but the illumination of his room, the tapestry scene he walks in, part of the people around him, part of (to repeat the ritual words of my spiritual belief) the universe that knows itself in difference through us.
As a novel of the war, this is... really not a novel of the war at all! I think of Doris Lessing's counterfactual history in Alfred and Emily, but nothing here is counter to the fact, only the war figures here only in so far as it creates the emptiness of the room, showing war's horror almost entirely in the negative, in the entirely unsentimental depiction of what it destroys entirely, what it makes impossible. In The Woman from Tantoura Radwa Ashour gives us the opening of a story, a story I want to hear, and is forced by the violent intrusion of real events to tell us another story instead. Likewise Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Half of a Yellow Sun. The herstories in these novels are subjugated narratives that demand attention and justice, while for me as a British reader, WWI as history is potentially old hat, frequently (like the other WW) an occasion for nauseating self-glorification. By simply showing its shadow, rather than take a radical position in relation to the conflict, as many authors have, Woolf adopts, I think, a fairly neutral pose of mourning loss. This pose is gendered, of course, because the men went to war, and the women lost them. If Jacob is presented to us here through the eyes of others, the majority of those eyes belong to women.
While Adichie's and Ashour's introductions show us that the other story would have been worth telling to invoke outrage at their destruction, Woolf tells the story before war partly to suggest how the culture Jacob belongs to shaped the disastrous conflict. She presents young men as naïve and posturing, easily influenced, entering an education system focussed on classical empires rather than knowledge of the world around them or themselves: when Jacob is actually in Greece, he is seized by the frustration of being unable, unaided, to form an opinion, of losing, rather than finding himself. Woolf makes little discernable (to me) effort here to think through relations of empire (or class), but she at least suggests that such thinking was needed and lacking.
As far as it goes, the anti-war argument here is located not in a narrative proof of the value of life, but in a portrait revealing an individual destroyed not even by death but by the death-machine of war that makes men into matchsticks or cornstalks in a field.
August 21, 2013
Not as good as To the Lighthouse, which is rather like quibbling over the comparative value of gold and diamonds. Much like Woolf's fictional concerns, both are, as legend has it, pretty much eternal. It is to her credit that Lighthouse shines bright even above the standards she established for herself and her readers: Jacob's Room burns with insight and wisdom. Many pages are truly beautiful. I'd write a love-letter to pages 56 and 57 which are actually peerless.
As usual, Woolf's concern for her human creatures shines through. The book is carried on a current of empathy. Men and women fall under Woolf's gaze, we overhear their yearnings and the beating of their hearts as they fall in love. Again, this finds its acme of expression in "Lighthouse" where here I found it was in a more nascent stage, but no less moving for that where it occurs.
This being Woolf too, there's darkness - a kind of benthic layer even under the gentleness towards her human actors. It's as if, which I guess really happened, that even without the upheavals of the 20th Century, events will overtake her characters concerns and loves and hopes. It is with deft tonal sfumato that Woolf's writing hints to us at the destruction of War to come, the squalid Mechanical age cities of man. We are a mote in God's eye, our cities will be a ruin much like the ones Jacob visits in Greece, our monuments like Ozymandias'. Like the topless towers of Ilium, one feels reading this, that Woolf thinks our human enterprise destined to become legend, or more likely - mute history. I have to stress that this is all merely implied. Woolf's writing is very delicate here, and she hints and suggests, from perspective of remove. Not for nothing did Woolf pen The Waves - it is as if she hopes that the waves will remove all human traces in gentle oblivion. So then it is no coincidence that from page one, Jacob plays by the sea, watched by his mother, as the waves swell and die in eternal pavane. Woolf's ultimate insight, a sorrow that runs through Jacob's Room, is that we are temporal: that our lives are as fleeting as Bede's sparrow flying through the lit festhall. And yet, how we struggle to live, as well we must. Woolf is the master of balancing the weight of tenderness with the sentence of our oblivion. Each sharpens the other. We are configured against the eternal, for good or ill. When Jacob finds a sheep's jaw on the beach, we know that really we are being shown the horrors of the Somme, Passchendaele, Loos, the battles which stripped England of the flower of her youth, men who like Jacob were up at Cambridge or Oxford, and full of the milk of youthful hope, men who drowned in shell holes, or suffocated in the mud, Soliders Known Only Unto God.
The Waves, To The Lighthouse, Jacob's Room - water everywhere. Not for nothing did Woolf walk into the River Ouse to die by her own choice. Her obsession was always with base nature and too, the hurt we do to each other: for Woolf the pain of our pasts and the threat of our own personal extinction was fictionally developed because personally lived. Thus she was imprisoned inescapably, her empathy a millstone, her fiction she felt, for nought, her existence a pain and burden for her husband. Depression, as they didn't quite call it then, is a sad thing. Thus decided, from the shore she plucked rocks and pebbles, those objects most worn and shaped by the flow of the water, to weigh her down. It was as if she stepped into the river in hope to become one with the flow of Time and life, to become only nature, to end the human pain of existence. A symbolic act perhaps, but at root, such a desperate and sad one. In the end, we must be grateful that Woolf left us works like this, which glister greater than gold. Her fictions worth more than diamonds. Her works are imperishable, their value beyond price. Sure, their insights won at great cost, but lucky us, to have the wise speak to us though they be dead.
As usual, Woolf's concern for her human creatures shines through. The book is carried on a current of empathy. Men and women fall under Woolf's gaze, we overhear their yearnings and the beating of their hearts as they fall in love. Again, this finds its acme of expression in "Lighthouse" where here I found it was in a more nascent stage, but no less moving for that where it occurs.
This being Woolf too, there's darkness - a kind of benthic layer even under the gentleness towards her human actors. It's as if, which I guess really happened, that even without the upheavals of the 20th Century, events will overtake her characters concerns and loves and hopes. It is with deft tonal sfumato that Woolf's writing hints to us at the destruction of War to come, the squalid Mechanical age cities of man. We are a mote in God's eye, our cities will be a ruin much like the ones Jacob visits in Greece, our monuments like Ozymandias'. Like the topless towers of Ilium, one feels reading this, that Woolf thinks our human enterprise destined to become legend, or more likely - mute history. I have to stress that this is all merely implied. Woolf's writing is very delicate here, and she hints and suggests, from perspective of remove. Not for nothing did Woolf pen The Waves - it is as if she hopes that the waves will remove all human traces in gentle oblivion. So then it is no coincidence that from page one, Jacob plays by the sea, watched by his mother, as the waves swell and die in eternal pavane. Woolf's ultimate insight, a sorrow that runs through Jacob's Room, is that we are temporal: that our lives are as fleeting as Bede's sparrow flying through the lit festhall. And yet, how we struggle to live, as well we must. Woolf is the master of balancing the weight of tenderness with the sentence of our oblivion. Each sharpens the other. We are configured against the eternal, for good or ill. When Jacob finds a sheep's jaw on the beach, we know that really we are being shown the horrors of the Somme, Passchendaele, Loos, the battles which stripped England of the flower of her youth, men who like Jacob were up at Cambridge or Oxford, and full of the milk of youthful hope, men who drowned in shell holes, or suffocated in the mud, Soliders Known Only Unto God.
The Waves, To The Lighthouse, Jacob's Room - water everywhere. Not for nothing did Woolf walk into the River Ouse to die by her own choice. Her obsession was always with base nature and too, the hurt we do to each other: for Woolf the pain of our pasts and the threat of our own personal extinction was fictionally developed because personally lived. Thus she was imprisoned inescapably, her empathy a millstone, her fiction she felt, for nought, her existence a pain and burden for her husband. Depression, as they didn't quite call it then, is a sad thing. Thus decided, from the shore she plucked rocks and pebbles, those objects most worn and shaped by the flow of the water, to weigh her down. It was as if she stepped into the river in hope to become one with the flow of Time and life, to become only nature, to end the human pain of existence. A symbolic act perhaps, but at root, such a desperate and sad one. In the end, we must be grateful that Woolf left us works like this, which glister greater than gold. Her fictions worth more than diamonds. Her works are imperishable, their value beyond price. Sure, their insights won at great cost, but lucky us, to have the wise speak to us though they be dead.
July 28, 2020
اتاق جیکب اثر خیلی خاصی است، در بین همین تعداد محدود کتابهایی که خواندهام شبیهش را ندیدهام. آمادگی و صبر و تمرکز و اعصاب آهنین میخواهد. چرا؟ چون میگویند اتاق جیکب تمرین وولف بوده برای شروع شیوهی نگارش جدیدی که در ذهن داشته و فرار از آن شیوهی کلاسیک و سنتی، چون انگار وولف اصلا نمیخواهد داستانی به آن شیوهی معمول و همیشگی برایمان تعریف کند. همهاش توصیف شعرگونهی برشهایی از زندگی جیکب است آن هم از نگاه دیگران، آن بیشمار شخصیتهای مهم و فرعی، دائم و گذرای داستان. جیکب دقیقا کیست نمیدانیم، فقط کوتاه میدانیم جیکب در برهههایی از زندگیش چه میکرده و به تفصیل میدانیم دیگرانی (اغلب زنانی) که در دنیای جیکب حضور کوتاه و بلند داشتهاند راجع به او چه با خود گفتند، چه نظری داشتند و چه فکر میکردند.
دیدهاید وقتی عزیزی دیگر بینمان نیست چطور به یاد میآوریمش؟ او دیگر نیست و ما فقط صحنههایی، برشهایی، تصویرهایی از زندگیشان را به خاطر میآوریم. دیگر آن موقع دست آدم به جایی بند نیست. تمامش میشود همین تصویرهای پاره پاره و مرور خاطراتی که هنوز در ذهن باقی هستند. اتاق جیکب چنین حسی را به خواننده القا میکند که شاید مرثیهای باشد برای جیکب، جیکبی که دیگر نیست، جنگ او را از بین برده، او را و همهی آن هزاران هزار جوان پرشور را با هزاران امید و آرزو و عشقشان
خوشحالم که این کتاب را خواندهام
خوشحالترم که قرار بر خواندن بقیهی آثار وولف است
که شور جمعی گروه کتابخوانیمان لذتش را صد چندان کرده است
وگرنه محال بود خودم به تنهایی جسارتش را پیدا کنم
دیدهاید وقتی عزیزی دیگر بینمان نیست چطور به یاد میآوریمش؟ او دیگر نیست و ما فقط صحنههایی، برشهایی، تصویرهایی از زندگیشان را به خاطر میآوریم. دیگر آن موقع دست آدم به جایی بند نیست. تمامش میشود همین تصویرهای پاره پاره و مرور خاطراتی که هنوز در ذهن باقی هستند. اتاق جیکب چنین حسی را به خواننده القا میکند که شاید مرثیهای باشد برای جیکب، جیکبی که دیگر نیست، جنگ او را از بین برده، او را و همهی آن هزاران هزار جوان پرشور را با هزاران امید و آرزو و عشقشان
خوشحالم که این کتاب را خواندهام
خوشحالترم که قرار بر خواندن بقیهی آثار وولف است
که شور جمعی گروه کتابخوانیمان لذتش را صد چندان کرده است
وگرنه محال بود خودم به تنهایی جسارتش را پیدا کنم
November 21, 2023
If this is the novel, Woolf's third, that breaks free from the tradition of the previous two, and experiments with a more unconventional narrative, then I would have been very, very surprised had Jacob's Room got anywhere near the perfected stream-of-consciousness brilliance of her late 20s/early 30s work. Woolf gives us a rich texture of impressions through a series of vignettes by those closest to Jacob Flanders where, being absent himself mostly in regards of an actual character, and despite being impressed with her thoughtful, nuanced and fragmentary style—very little plot here, nor was I expecting it—I still felt a void; a strange sort of emptiness, where I didn't feel as close and connected like I did with some of her other novels. Could this motif of absence be a tribute to those young men lost in the Great War?—which enters the novel later on, or possibly an elegy for her dead brother? I'd say it's most likely. I can't really go higher than three stars—again, because I have to compare this with what I believe to be her best work—but it still, in terms of prose, surpasses that of a lot of other writers.
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