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Posts Tagged ‘Virginia Woolf in contemporary fiction’

Two recent novels inspired by Mrs. Dalloway

Posted in Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , , , , , on Sunday 6 February 2022| Leave a Comment »

Two recent novels that have garnered rave reviews are touted as being influenced by Mrs. Dalloway. Both are written by Black women, and both tackle the unholy trinity of race, class, and gender.

The Days of Afrekete by Asali Solomon

The New York Times review was titled “This Novel Nods to Virginia Woolf While Staring Down Modern Class Lines.” Inspired as well by Toni Morrison’s Sula and Audre Lorde’s Zami, Asali Solomon’s salute to Woolf is evident in the novel’s single-day-with-flashbacks structure and the culminating dinner party.

Liselle, a Black woman married to a white man, is giving a party for her husband’s associates. Her preparations, anticipation, and the dinner itself are the backdrop as she questions her life and dissatisfaction while moving in and out of the past, recalling earlier times and her college friend and lover, Selena.

Liselle isn’t heading out to buy the flowers herself; nor is she reveling in a lovely June day. It begins:

“Late one April afternoon, Liselle stood at the large kitchen window rubbing her hands together for warmth. She acknowledged that early spring was her least favorite time of year.”

A direct reference to Woolf is Liselle’s description of one of the guests: “Her face, its Virginia Woolf hollows….”

And the ending, which I won’t disclose, also pays homage to Mrs. Dalloway.

Assembly by Natasha Brown

The Guardian called Assembly “A modern Mrs. Dalloway … a short sharp shock of a novel … Assembly fulfils, with exquisite precision, Virginia Woolf’s exhortation to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall.”

Another reviewer saw it is “Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway meets Citizen by Claudia Rankine.

The nameless narrator is a young Black woman achieving success in the world of finance, while her grudging colleagues write her off as the company’s face of diversity. She isn’t giving a party; rather she’s preparing to attend one, hosted by her white boyfriend’s old-money family, who tolerate her on the assumption that she’s a passing phase, much as Clarissa Dalloway worried about but dismissed her daughter’s infatuation with Doris Kilman.

A first-person narration from an interior perspective, she questions her identity and her place in the world. Like Clarissa, unseen and unknown: “not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.”

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Translating Woolf and Clarissa in Beirut

Posted in Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , on Wednesday 5 February 2020| Leave a Comment »

An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine is described as “a nuanced rendering of one woman’s life in the Middle East.”

The author writes from the point of view of his reclusive septuagenarian Lebanese narrator, Aaliya, who muses on literature and philosophy as she manages her increasingly challenging life. A translator working from English and French into Arabic, Aaliya discourses at length about her work and the nuances and difficulties of translation, including a mixed assessment of Constance Garnett’s translations of the Russians.

Noting that Margaret Yourcenar translated Virginia Woolf’s The Waves into French, Aaliya the critic says, “I can’t bring myself to read her translation.” Later, she talks about projects she might yet undertake: “I can translate Mrs. Dalloway. I’ll spend that famous day inside Clarissa’s head as she prepares to host the party. Or work on A Room of One’s Own in a soggy apartment of my own.”

Further linking this novel with Woolf, Stacey Goldring, the creator of NPR’s Chapter Endnotes, remarks that “Aaliya is Clarissa. Beirut is her London. Virginia Woolf’s protagonist leaves her place to run errands to prep for a party. Aaliya has to escape her apartment in order to avoid a neighbor’s knock.”

 

 

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Rachel Cusk on Shakespeare’s Sisters

Posted in essays, Virginia Woolf, Woolf and writing, tagged , , , , , on Thursday 16 January 2020| Leave a Comment »

“Shakespeare’s Sisters” is an essay in Rachel Cusk’s 2019 collection, Coventry (and the first one I turned to, for obvious reasons). She begins by asking, “Can we, in the twenty-first century, identify something that could be called ‘women’s writing’?”

In that context she discusses The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. “Between them,” she says, “they shaped the discourse of twentieth-century women’s writing,”

War vs. feelings

Eighty years later, as Cusk sees it, “a book about war is still judged more important than a book about ‘the feelings of women.’ Most significantly, when a woman writes a book about war she is lauded: she has eschewed the vast unlit chamber and the serpentine caves; there is the sense that she has made proper use of her room and her money, her new rights of property.

The woman writer who confines herself to her female ‘reality’ is by the same token often criticized. She appears to have squandered her room, her money.”

Just another women’s novel

Men have always written about the female experience–Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina come immediately to mind, as well as a number of novels by contemporary authors. I’ve seen some of these works praised to the skies, touted as the latest incarnation of the great American novel. Yet, still, too frequently, the women creating these novels are dismissed as writing just another woman’s novel.

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Reading Woolf in Anna Solomon’s Leaving Lucy Pear       

Posted in To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , , , , , on Sunday 30 July 2017| Leave a Comment »

Cape Ann, Massachusetts, 1928. Bea is on the porch reading the book her cousin Rose has handed her, The President’s Daughter, which Bea describes as the trashiest book she’s ever read, though she can’t resist it. Rose, in turn, has picked up To the Lighthouse, and admits that she doesn’t understand it.

Bea had finished the book last week and had not stopped thinking about it but she did not think that understanding—the way Rose meant it—was its point. She understood that Mrs. Ramsay was her mother and that she, Bea, was “the sudden silent trout” pinned against the glass (if she read again she would see they were not pinned but “hanging,” but that was the difference between this kind of understanding and Rose’s), and Bea understood that the book as a whole was about her own life and that other people probably understood it to be about theirs. But her understanding in this way was vague—the book had stayed with her through the week like a glowing, invisible pet she could not risk touching. “I think it’s about memory,” she said. “And about how the present is always becoming the past, both in our consciousness of it and in reality. And about the confusion, or maybe the elision, between the two, and also between reality and a person’s vision of reality. Very little happens but a lot is happening. A character can stand with a foot on a threshold and her whole world shifts.”  Bea had not known how good it would feel to talk about the book. The only educated women she spoke with on a regular basis—club women she courted at benefits or after her speeches—talked about Virginia Woolf like Lillian and her friends fawned over Parisian silk. “Also, it’s about women and men,” Bea concluded, starting to worry that she was making little sense. “And whether or not the children will get to the lighthouse.”

Another sign of Anna Solomon’s homage to Woolf in Leaving Lucy Pear is the occasional appearance of references to a Nurse Lugton, who tended Bea when she experienced a mental breakdown. Oh yes, there’s a ceramic lighthouse too….

In an interview on NPR’s “Here and Now,” Anna Solomon said that Woolf was an important influence on her consciousness both as a writer and as a human being, that Woolf helped her find her own voice. She added that it gave her pleasure to have her character reading the work that she herself loved.

Woolf aside, I found this an interesting and well-written novel, an unusual and compelling slice of life.

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Woolf and Barrett: The Years inspires Lucid Stars

Posted in The Years, Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , , , , on Monday 26 June 2017| Leave a Comment »

Andrea Barrett is one of my favorite contemporary writers. Her science-infused stories are extraordinary, but until recently I hadn’t read her early work from before the 1996 National Book Award winning Ship Fever.

Recently I came across Barrett’s 2015 essay in the literary journal Agni, “The Years and The Years.” Barrett starts by noting that while The Years isn’t considered one of Woolf’s finest novels, for her it “made possible the first I would publish.” I was thrilled to find this connection between Woolf and Barrett.

Crafting her first novel in the mid-eighties Barrett had her themes, her time and place. To fill them she had characters and relationships spanning three decades. But after writing hundreds of pages and discarding most of it, she couldn’t find a satisfactory way to shape the material. Then she read The Years. She describes the opening scene as an overture—“technically brilliant, profoundly moving”— in the way it introduced the characters and their lives with “ripples that reinforce each other as they intersect  …. Everything, it turns out, changes everything. Everything repeats and reverberates.”

Barrett went to Woolf’s diary, to where she sets out her ideas for The Years: “I want to give the whole of the present society …. with the most powerful and agile leaps, like a chamois, across precipices from 1880 to here and now.”

The structural elements of The Years became a framework from which Barrett was able to give shape to her story. She discovered that, like Woolf, she could skip over portions of time, “shining a beam on one moment and then, years later, on another, suggesting swiftly by thought and conversation what had happened in the space between.”

The result was Lucid Stars, published in 1988. Each of four sections is broken down into dated chapters, and each part’s block of years has a different central character with her own voice. Each section stands apart from the whole while at the same time knitting it together. Like The Years.

Woolf continued to influence Barrett. She tells how Orlando, Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves all showed her the intricacies of writing about biography, history, politics, and war in fiction. Barrett did all of this, in her own voice and style, in the stories and novels that followed Lucid Stars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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