Finally read past the famous first line

Clarissa Dalloway, a high-society woman in post-World War I England, walks through London on a fine June morning after the famous first line–“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”  We follow Mrs. Dalloway as she prepares for that evening’s party and although the plot takes place over the course of only one day, the thoughts, dreams, emotions, and memories of the characters cover a lifetime of choices and experiences.

Clarissa is the main character, of course, but the narration weaves in and out of her story, spending long, beautiful sentences on those whose lives brush hers: Peter Walsh, a lover she spurned years ago; her beautiful daughter Elizabeth; Elizabeth’s teacher, Doris Kilman; Septimus Smith, a WWI veteran clearly struggling with PTSD, and his Italian wife Rezia; Sally Seton, an old friend with whom Clarissa once shared a love–and a kiss.

I didn’t fall into this book until about halfway through–that’s when the characters started meaning something to me.  And it wasn’t a page-turner that you get lost in, I think because it’s not a plot-driven story.  It’s hard to know where to start with a review of one of the Great Works like this–the recognizable, identifiable characters, drawn so precisely with so few words; the visceral descriptions of the tangible surroundings seamlessly joined with the exploration of memories, regrets, emotions; the deft handling of punctuation that makes stream-of-consciousness feel like, well, stream-of-consciousness rather than run-on sentences?

So I’ll mention the thing that stands out to me about this book, and about good fiction in general: empathy.  Each character is drawn with such empathy. I kept comparing it to a (completely different) book I read earlier this year, The Joys of Motherhood–both center on one woman, mostly, and how she tries to Be A Woman in her context, her struggles, her fears, the limits on her behavior, society’s expectations of her, her regrets, her (limited) role(s).  They’re wildly different books that address wildly different struggles, but it’s the glory of good fiction that you can, in the space of a few hours and a few hundred pages, identify so deeply with both a WWI-era high-society British woman  and a traditional Nigerian woman in the 1930s.  (In short: yay, books!)