Bluejake

With all the Oscar talk about The Hours, I guess I had Virginia Woolf on my mind last week. Whatever the reason, I picked up Jacob's Room at Barnes & Noble and started reading it. It's not one of her easier books. Impressionistic in style, the blurb on the back says. That's an understatement. Sometimes she goes on for two or three pages without returning to basic thread of the plot, about a young man named Jacob and the England that existed in the very first years of this century. Anyway, I wasn't much impressed until I ran across the following passage:

“Holborn straight ahead of you” says the policeman. Ah, but where are you going if instead of brushing past the old man with the white beard, the silver medal, and the cheap violin, you let him go on with his story, which ends in an invitation to step somewhere, to his room, presumably, off Queen’s Square, and there he shows you a collection of birds’ eggs and a letter from the Prince of Wales’s secretary, and this (skipping the intermediate stages) brings you one winter’s day to the Essex coast, where the little boat makes off to the ship, and the ship sails and you behold on the skyline the Azores; and the flamingoes rise; and there you sit on the verge of the marsh drinking rum–punch, an outcast from civilization, for you have committed a crime, are infected with yellow fever as likely as not, and—fill in the sketch as you like.

As frequent as street corners in Holborn are these chasms in the continuity of our ways. Yet we keep straight on.

What else can I say about Virginia Woolf? Not much: she's been dead since March 28, 1941 and I don't think that I've read more than two of her other books. I've decided to try to do better- you can't say you love literature without reading at least a few books written by women. And who better to start with than her?

Books