Best book of all time

>>24491282 (OP)
Finally an OP who is 100% correct

>>24491282 (OP)
Too pretentious. To the Lighthouse is better.

>>24491299
nahhh, i like this one

>>24491408
I’ve read the Waves is more straightforward with less changes in perspective yet still retaining her distinctive lyricism. Is this accurate?

>>24491299
based

>>24491672
The perspective changes are pretty varied, sometimes it will stay on one character for four pages, sometimes it switches four times a page. not hard to follow though, and her lyricism is definitely at its peak

ive not actually read the lighthouse, im reading mrs dalloway rn but its next on the list fs

>woman
No thanks.

>>24491786

>>24491282 (OP)
I didn't get past the first five pages and I really like Woolf

>>24492477
this guy has only read Flush
>>24491686
lighthouse is great, too bad half the characters die

>>24491282 (OP)
If I liked Dalloway, will I like Lighthouse or Waves?

>>24492621
dunno, waves and to the lighthouse are two of my most favorite books, but i found mrs dalloway really mediocre and for some reason it just didnt really move me, so make of that what you will

question for all the Waves and to the lighthouse afficionados here, what books scratched a similar itch for you like these two. I am desperate for other books like these. They are the most beautifully written books ive ever come across

>>24492766
Bit of an off the wall suggestion, but you might like the Death of Virgil by Herman Broch. The content is quite different as it's set in Ancient Rome and deals with the rise and fall of empires, but it has a similar sort of dreamlike stream of consciousness like Woolf at her peak.

>>24492806
thanks anon, thats actually pretty much exactly what im looking for

>>24491282 (OP)
recently touched on why i think virginia woolf is a bad writer. she forces sensibility, resulting in a kind of intellectual melodrama - an exaggeration of totally fictitious states of feeling delivered through a succession of worked-up images whose sentimentality is only disguised by the unnecessary elaboration and disagreeable primness of the sentence-structure, and the images themselves are insistently tedious and unreal. i think there's less difference between v woolf and 'bestsellers', except stylistically, than at first appears.

>>24492841
but thats exactly why she is considered great; or not? To the lighthouse has the most mundane boring story ever, the characters arent anything special either, but she just has a super nice style of writing about such things and that elevates it above other stuff, i think im not that wrong if i dare to assume that this was her goal. To take veryday boring shit and to make even them feel magical

>>24492862
what i mean is that her analyses of what thoughts run through people’s heads, and what induces them to run, aren’t analyses, but syntheses

The scene had upon her, as the gentle sounds went on, for a few minutes yet, beating behind, or so it seemed, her ears under the faded grey hair, the power of recalling, in terms far more piercing than she would have thought possible when, some hours before ...

>>24492874
sorry i dont quite understand, am i correct if you want to say that the thoughts of the characters are more reactive, than creating and causing. Im sorry im an Esl. if so, you make a point i havent considered, i only have read it once years ago, but will read it again in a few weeks. But still it sounds more like she just doesnt appease to your subjective sensibilities of what may be good. I still cant fathom how this makes her a generally bad writer

It's very nice and I've never heard anybody talk about it. Somebody should make a version for smoothbrains like me where the lines are highlighted depending on who's talking to make it easier to keep track of))

>>24492841
i think the images are kind of fun to try to map the metaphor onto what you imagine is happening in the scene. What's most enjoyable to me though is how often the characters think something that is very relatable and often brutally honest. Its kind of like Peep Show in a way

>>24492874
>Bernard:
>(Here I am quoting my own biographer)

I do this all the time; imagine i'm being interviewed and thinking what I would say to questions, and what questions I wish people would ask me

>>24492921
there is no idea there, only the atmosphere of idea. the writing is a synthesis of signals meant to conjure emotional depth without actually providing any. a skeptical reader might reasonably say: 'i don’t believe a word of it.'

whenever you read VW, don't you find yourself murmuring 'no she didn't; no he didn't; she wouldn't have said that; he wouldn't have done that...'
a very bad indication of a novelist haplessly turning up the volume.

>>24492928
>>24492928
yeah exactly. a kind of reflexive self-dramatisation. not a deep engagement with interior life, but a rehearsal of it. a performative simulation of selfhood. i.e. exactly what woolf often mistakes for psychological realism.

>>24492896
there is no idea there, only the atmosphere of idea. the writing is a synthesis of signals meant to conjure emotional depth without actually providing any. a skeptical reader might reasonably say: 'i don’t believe a word of it.'

>>24492921
whenever you read VW, don't you find yourself murmuring 'no she didn't; no he didn't; she wouldn't have said that; he wouldn't have done that...'
a very bad indication of a novelist haplessly turning up the volume.

>>24492766
Very mainstream recs, but I’d say the roughly contemporaneous great modernists who also used stream-of-consciousness, Faulkner and Joyce.
Faulkner:
>As I Lay Dying
>The Sound and the Fury
>Absalom, Absalom!
>Light in August (underrated and underdiscussed one here)
For Joyce, well, Ulysses is the most relevant book here. Portrait almost has a burgeoning form of the stream-of-consciousness style he took to the maximum in Ulysses, but really it’s mostly made up of a free-indirect-discourse narration.

Woolf also LOVED Proust, was influenced a lot by him and desperately wished to be able to write like him, and you can see some of the influence when you read them both. Big investment of time to read all of ISOLT (In Search of Lost Time, or “Remembrance of Things Past” as Moncrieff’s title), but at minimum I’d recommend Swann’s Way, the first volume and the most acclaimed volume. The Moncrieff translation is great and a work of art in its own right. Failing that, there’s Lydia Davis’s translation, more modern but still pretty great in its own right, although I’m not sure if it was really needed; but it’s still beautifully done and highly praised, and some like it even more than Moncrieff’s translation. We’re lucky to have great translators of Proust, you can’t really go wrong with either translation.

>>24492949
>whenever you read VW, don't you find yourself murmuring 'no she didn't; no he didn't; she wouldn't have said that; he wouldn't have done that...' a very bad indication of a novelist haplessly turning up the volume.

im not sure what you mean