u/notveryamused_

National Archeological Museum in Athens overwhelmed me a bit, there were seemingly billions of absolutely wonderful monuments and artefacts. I wanted to share a different one though. It's from a room full of absolutely wonderful carvings from the graves of rich families: it was very interesting to see all those depictions of living relatives handshaking the ones who were departing to Hades, quite a poignant sight. They were all splendidly made.

What caught my attention was a much more modest one of an otherwise unknown woman called Hediste (literally 'sweet'). Just a simple painting of a ribbon, nothing fancy, among elaborate family graves showing off their wealth; the only one of its kind in the museum. Hymmetian marble, minimalism, it was somehow more elegant and made quite an impression on me. Rip girl.

I got some shit for not being kind enough about “what to read next?” posts, but it’s really difficult to have an interesting debate when the stacks posted are made of completely disconnected books (and the obligatory Dumas ;)) – it doesn’t really lead anywhere, does it? But, truth be told, I do enjoy thinking about literature as moving constellations, where one thing leads to another and interesting connections between writers and between books are being created live.

One such starting point for me has always been Virginia Woolf. One of the few writers I keep coming back to, keep rereading to check how I’ve changed, keep rereading because I always notice something new. Her novels are short but rich enough to merit a much longer and more thorough conversation than simply reading and putting them away. Reading is hardly the best way to connect with literature anyway; it’s only a start ;)

Woolf’s fancy. She lived in interesting times, she read interesting books, she had interesting friends, and she left a large variety of writings. Her diaries are truly fascinating (and the new Granta edition is worth its price!); her correspondence is truly captivating (who doesn’t love peeking at other people’s relations?). And her essays – one could write a very curious history of English literature textbook simply by collecting them (with a gap at its very centre: she never wrote an essay on Shakespeare directly; he was too important for her to do away with once and for all). But I’ll focus on her main novels – disregarding the first two (which are still rather traditional) and the last two (which remain worth reading, yeah, but not as a place to begin).

Jacob’s Room – the trickiest one. Nothing happens in the novel, nothing makes sense, and even the protagonist is missing (quite literally, the novel begins with a mother running around the beach shouting “Jacob, where are you?!”; it’s about a boy who wasn’t there). She destroys the realist novel here, and that makes it terribly difficult to read. These are snapshots: sharp but fleeting. And it leads bloody nowhere; the novel ends abruptly and we’re left with nothing but confusion: is this all? Is this everything? So what really happened? And this is exactly where she wanted her readers. It’s a bloody difficult novel, but read slowly and attentively, it's also the most satisfying one. The OWC edition has a great introduction, which is quite needed because the book will leave you confused, but once you learn to embrace it, you’ve found a brilliant key to modernism in general, not just Woolf.

Mrs Dalloway – the standard one. “Standard” might sound trivial, but not when someone’s every novel is a brand new experiment with form, a brand new perspective and tone. It’s the most stable one, with the unity of one day but not one person. There’s a hilarious irony in relating to a conservative housewife throwing a party which is going to be attended by the Tory PM himself, and yet Woolf manages to make us sympathise, probably to her own amusement. At the same time, there’s a second main character in the novel, a shell-shocked war veteran, into whom Woolf wrote a lot of herself. The best book to begin with if you’re not brave enough for Jacob’s Room. Well, the second best book to begin with, then.

Selected Essays – the real laboratory. Woolf writes a lot about literature, giving not only hints for us, the readers, on how to read her – and learn to read her we must – but it’s also a conversation with herself about her future projects; they’re the place where she concocts her poisons. Bradshaw’s selection isn’t the best, but the sheer number of essays, reviews, and polemics she wrote is overwhelming and rather tricky to choose from. Apart from literature – well maybe not really, she writes about writing constantly – she tackles quite a lot of everyday experiences, from walking through London in the 1920s to air raids in the 1940s. This is all as Woolfy as her novels; it is the same fascinating glance at everyday life. We have two functions running constantly in the background: we breathe and we try to understand what the hell is going on. Woolf’s good at the latter.

To the Lighthouse – the mature one. It’s a staged confrontation with everyday life, with family and family history, with creativity and the passing of time. It’s a very serious one, too—both personal and wonderfully universal. Woolf takes fragments of her own life and makes you think she’s just described yours. Interestingly, it’s the only one from this list which I never truly enjoyed. But every time I read it (and it’s been three or four times), I kept thinking: not yet. I’m still at a very different point in life. I’ll get there (I’m afraid…).

Orlando – the galloping one. Described rather aptly as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature”, it was written about and for her lover, Vita Sackville-West. But the real story, very rarely told for some reason, is a bit more complicated: it was actually written when Vita’s emotions for Virginia started to fade. And the novel starts so wonderfully; it’s funny, it’s galloping after her love, but it’s also desperate, dead serious, and at some point the novel gets away from her – the thread escapes. Indeed, she had a lot of trouble finishing it and didn’t like the ending. I bloody hate biographical interpretations, but it’s quite poignant, isn't it?

The Waves – the poetic one. It’s often called her most experimental book and her most difficult one. Wrong on both counts, actually. Again, that would be Jacob’s Room. It’s a shift of perspective from her previous ones, yeah, because it’s a novel, a play, and a poem all in one. But, once you understand the point of view, it’s actually her most straightforward work: there are six characters and we hear their thoughts mingling, and again, just like in Jacob's Room, there’s a ghost at the centre. And, again, there’s a lingering question: is that life, is this all, really? “We live, it seems, out of habit”, one of the characters says. And yet it’s about the joys of creativity, of weaving texts with one hand and unweaving them with the other.

Jacob’s Room and The Waves, written a decade apart, form such a wonderful frame – perhaps the best in the whole of modernism.

Woolf became a cultural icon and pretty much everyone knows something about her. Feminism, suicide, sex life, mental problems, Bloomsbury snobbery – okay, okay, okay, stop it. I’m not saying Woolf wasn’t a very interesting feminist (A Room of One’s Own is still a better introduction to Judith Butler than anything Judith Butler ever wrote lol). Nor am I saying that her biography and personal issues aren’t of huge importance to her work; they were – she kept rewriting her own experiences in various ways, of course. But before reading her, try to leave it all aside. Being a diagnostician, trying to put your favourite writer on the couch, is the least interesting way of reading. Try the opposite: let her diagnose you instead. We remember Woolf because she was a fucking brilliant writer. She lived for writing; she took it perfectly seriously and so should any reader, first and foremost.

So, what should you read next? If there’s no Woolf on your shelves, look online for her short story Kew Gardens and her essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. Both are really short but show the unique strategy she came up with and perfected in her later major works. Very few pages, worth reading very slowly and very carefully, and they pay off immensely.

What a dumb waste of everyone's time. It's anonymous bullet, I'd defend a queen down for the sheer fun of playing, but you can't bear the thought of playing a piece down? Cowardice lol.