I just started reading Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and I’m finding it so hard to get into it. The prose goes into a thought and keeps meandering like the inner ramblings of the author’s mind. It becomes distracting and I lose focus. I know her prose is meant to be hard to follow but I really wanna get into the flow and be able to be immersed in the book. Please give some tips to do so apart from the fact that I need to be patient with the book. I’m just 16 pages in, in like two days.
by Scary_Giraffe_4996
2 Comments
I couldn’t get into it either and put down. A few years later, I saw The Hours and then read the book, which made me very eager to revisit Mrs Dalloway. It was much more enjoyable for me that way.
My personal experience with the book was that the challenges getting into the flow were caused by trying to get the book’s flow to mirror that of other reading experiences. What I mean is usually we expect all of the context upfront so each sentence makes sense. Ironically, I found the flow when I gave up trying to do that and just kept reading; accepting that, due to the meandering (one of my dad’s favourite words) nature of the prose, some sentences may not make sense initially.
It’s a bit like a Tarantino plot. Sometimes the action happens before the context for it and a few sentences later on your mind goes “oh so-and-so is narrating, I get it”