I worked an early shift at a bakery, and I’d ride there on my bike before dawn, the whoosh of the darkness soft and creaturely around me. I was seventeen, I think, eighteen maybe. Everything seemed connected to everything else, but in ways I didn’t dare try to explain. My brain buzzed and whirred in terrifying ways. I didn’t need to sleep anymore, it seemed. The middle register of experience had abruptly fallen away. Some dark wing was crossing over me that fall. The first time I read Virginia Woolf, it was for extraliterary reasons. In between these modest plot points, Clarissa Dalloway wanders around London, lies down for a rest, and takes note of Big Ben striking out the hours again and again.īut, wait, I am leaving out everything. In the midst of all this, she hears news of a stranger’s violent death. Later, guests pour into her house for the party. She remembers an alluring girl she once kissed. A man she almost married drops by for a visit. In a posh part of London, a middle-aged woman plans a party. The Great War is over, but the memory of its unprecedented destruction still hangs over England. The novel depicts a single day in June from the perspective of a number of characters. In fact, on the surface, it sounds suspiciously dull. Nothing you might read in a plot summary prepares you for the multitudes it contains. Dalloway” is a remarkably expansive and an irreducibly strange book. New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
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