This is a book very difficult for me to review. I loved Woolf's look into her character's minds, how she looks into Dalloway's or Septimus's inner world. But at the same time there was no moment where I felt comfortable reading her jumbled writing style, where one character is thinking something, the next moment some other character is thinking something else, and then there is a description of something else and before you know we are back to the first character; but no, because now we are on a third, but back to the first, then second, then fourth... It becomes tiring, and, worse, it becomes very easy to disconnect. "Mrs. Dalloway" is a novel the understanding and enjoyment of it would probably be heightened by reading it at least a couple of times (with some months or at least weeks in between), but why would anyone go back to a book that is like one's own mind, when one moment you are thinking about what went wrong today, to then start thinking about what you need to prepare for lunch tomorrow, and afterwards to what is gonna happen when you are old and all by yourself? It may be realistic, and have some moments of brilliance, but it is also tiring and not particularly engaging.
The best: the way Woolf's gets into the character's minds; some more or less (not much) subtle social criticism
The worst: the writing style is a mess, and it is so easy to disconnect from one jump to another that it makes all jumbled and purposeless; it may be needed to be read four (ten?) times before one starts to get the gist of it
Further reading: "A Room of One's Own/Three Guineas", even if non-fiction, is way better than "Mrs. Dalloway"; the same could be said of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" or "The Blind Assassin". You could also read Lucia Berlin or Jane Austen. For a touch of male's inner worlds, Yasunari Kawabata or Kenzaburo Oe... So many options.
6/10
(Original English)
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