Written in 1925. Clarissa Dalloway plans to throw a party tonight; so she
will get some flowers to decorate her home and will make all arrangements for
the great evening. Unexpectedly a visitor comes to her residence, an old
boyfriend of hers she hasn’t seen for a long time and so she spends a
short while having a superficial conversation in order to avoid alluding to
episodes that Peter Walsh does not want to reveal.
The story unfolds in the early twentieth century and describes the
features of English society at the time, being Mrs. Dalloway the typical
upper-class woman who organizes meetings in which the senior members of the
community regularly attend.
My score: 
This work is told in the third person by an omniscient narrator
alternating events and characters that are rarely interrelated. The novel
chronicles the events that take place over a period of 12 hours, with
flashbacks to past scenes from the life of the characters.
Considered the most representative work of the author, this work is
included in the list of the hundred most outstanding books of all times.
Well ... I differ from the high appreciations that has sparked this
book. To begin with, this reading is difficult to achieve, just the concentration exercise represents a heroic act to the reader, and it is inevitably
getting lost in its lines over and over again. This was my third attempt to
conclude this task and I finally got it, but not without having made a titanic
effort to overcome the boredom and tedium. I lost concentration and interest on
each page, and the experience became a masochistic measure to me.
Imagine a sack full of things of different nature that after being
shaken its content is poured and spread out on a table for the reader to
establish rhyme and reason: i-m-p-o-s-s-i-b-l-e m-i-s-s-i-o-n. Mrs. Dalloway is
a mixture of events, characters and disjointed reflections that are randomly picked
up and which together don’t make any sense. It is a story stopped in time and thronged
of thoughts and banal dissertations broken down to the most minute detail.
Reading this book is a bumpy journey that changes direction without warning, we
never know where we’re coming from and where we are heading to.
As for the central role, I do not know why Clarissa Dalloway was chosen
as the main character in the book. She has a practical character, sometimes
frivolous; and her contribution to the work is so tiny that it borders on
banality; hence the author invests long episodes introducing other characters
and forgetting about her almost completely.
The only point of interest, however, is Septimus Warren Smith, a subject
suffering from manic-depressive hallucinations that reflects the same condition
Virginia endured.
As stubborn as I can be I refused to think that ae work so famous did not
enclose some transcendental event in its outcome and naïvelye kept the hope of finding
an incident to justify the wait; but nothing happened in the end and I never
knew what the story was about. For the first time I didn’t feel the need of a
closer examination of the information before posting my review as I usually do in
order to not ruin the experience of the future reader, but quite frankly there is
nothing relevant to say about it.
In conclusion, I never got to intuit what the writer wanted to convey
and the only utility that this book has to offer, from my perspective, is that of
preventing my bedside table from wobbling.
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