It's one of those books that I began with the best of intentions, but somehow I found her stream of consciousness writing so tedious and overcooked. It was like seeing Salvador Dali's lobster phone for the first time. Sure, he's came up with the idea of surrealism, but then others that came along after him refined his technique. It may have been an innovation at the time, I thought, but god I wish she'd just get to the point occasionally.
And then, while I was doing the MA at Bath Spa, we looked at some of her short stories for our Poet's Eye workshops with Tim Liardet. Although others in the class declared that they 'can't stand the bitch' and threw the book across the room to prove it, gradually she won me over. Her words are – for me, anyway – best read aloud (I can do this silently, by imagining her posh, slightly trembling voice), and she won't be rushed. It's all about the particular, lilting rhythms of her carefully crafted sentences. The strangeness of her images.
And the occasional line that i just love. Like this one, decribing a guest at Mrs Dalloway's party:
'Nancy, dressed at enormous expense by the greatest artists in Paris, stood there looking as if her body had merely put forth, of its own accord, a green frill.'
That green frill stayed with me all day. And it made me think of another thing this fledgling blog might be good for: recording those strange, inspiring lines I come across while reading. So this is the first in the new 'what a line' category. It's tempting to start another whole blog just on this topic alone, but I don't want to get ahead of myself.
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