To the Lighthouse is weird, or perhaps I am separated from it by too much time, born so long after it was written in 1927.

Virginia Woolf writes in a flowery language, and the thought runs like a brook in a forest: twisting its way around rocks and hiding from time to time only to emerge twenty feet farther jumping between characters when paragraphs end. It is a style we don’t see much anymore. It reminded me of Dostoevsky and a bit of Tolstoy (though they have the good manners to stick to one character throughout a chapter), and I can’t say that I enjoy reading either of those authors. But To the Lighthouse is a good book, and I like it.

Part of the reason for my liking it is that To the Lighthouse is of the rare slice of life genre. I don’t see it often in Western literature, whether contemporary or classic. It’s not a biography as such, and it has no plot. It’s just a story of a family—the Ramsays—and some things that happen to them and what they do over a dozen years. The story shows the importance of point of view, and captures brilliantly the wandering of human thought. It reminded me of the Japanese authors I love, and it was a pleasant discovery. I feel like this insight into the human mind is the only strong point of the book, but the intuition is deep and still relevant (despite some dated notions, especially about the sexes), and reading it has certainly taught me something I can’t express with words.

And yet the language could have been much simpler.

P.S. I can’t recommend To the Lighthouse for entertainment: the style is too heavy by modern standards. But if you are in the mood to take a stab at the classics, then it’s available at Project Gutenberg Australia for free.