A Friend of mine found the narrative of Virgnia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse too chaotic to understand and he decided to pass it up as holiday reading. Instead he chose Joseph Conrad’s Victory. Here’s what he said to me:
“I’ve temporarily abandoned To the Lighthouse. It doesn’t seem suitable as holiday reading. I’ll borrow it from the library in Macau. I’ve switched to Victory by Joseph Conrad, which is more a narrative, though different in that the narrator is always present but ‘unreliable’” .
I replied to him:
You either love Virginia Woolf’s novels, or you don’t—there’s rarely any middle ground. My first encounter with To the Lighthouse was as a prescribed text during my matriculation, sometime between 1976 and 1978. I’ve often wondered why it was chosen for the A-level syllabus, and I suspect it was because of its deceptively short length. But at the time, calling it “difficult” would have been an understatement—it felt utterly impenetrable, even obfuscating.
The experience wasn’t helped by our lackluster literature teacher (I still remember calling him Mr. Harrison). Even now, fifty years later, I still remember him simply reading the text aloud to us, offering little in the way of critique, commentary, or analysis. It was as though he, too, was overwhelmed by the novel’s complexity and beauty, unable to guide us through its intricate layers.
Yet, despite these challenges, my young mind was already captivated by something in Woolf’s writing. I couldn’t articulate it back then, but I fell in love with her poetic language and the unspeakable poignancy that seemed to linger between the lines. There was a haunting quality to the prose, a rhythm and texture that moved me, even if I didn’t fully understand it.
Over the years, as I grew older—my being adding rings like a tree—and revisited the book casually a few more times, something began to shift. Each re-reading awakened me further to the sheer beauty of it. What had once seemed opaque and elusive now revealed itself as luminous and profound. The novel’s exploration of time, memory, and the fleeting nature of human existence resonated more deeply with each passing year. It’s as though the book itself matured alongside me, offering new insights as I grew into the person capable of appreciating them.
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