Semana 19 - 23 de octubre

 

At the beginning of this week, we first finished our discussion on T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' and  'Four Quartets'. The poems, although somewhat hard to understand after the first reading, are very profound and rich. After that, we started with the discussion on To the Lighthouse. To be completely honest, this is definetely not my type of reading. When I started it, after two or three pages, it immeadiately reminded me of Merce Rodoreda and La plaça del diamant. The story is told from the characters' perspective and what we read are not their dialogues, but their thoughts. Because of this, the reading becomes very tedious and tiresome. The whole plot is about a dysfunctional family with a father that is frustrated and obsessed with his work, a mother that is unhappy and feels an emptyness that she tries to fill by inviting friends to their house and having pointless conversations with them and eight children that, deep inside, hate their father and are resented towards him. I understand the fact that it is a book that inquires into the characters' inner world and that it is full of symbols and hidden meanings. I do find very interesting the stream of consciousness process and how the writing is supposed to portray our thoughts and mental procesess, but it is something I do not enjoy reading. Nevertheless, I cannot say that Virginia Woolf was not a brilliant writer. Some passages of the novel are very interesting and she just introduces, within the whole everyday-life thoughts of the characters, great ideas and themes to repflect upon.