Wolf Hall: A Dissenting View
A dissenting view for at least the audio performance of Wolf Hall. (Although I'm in the minority, I do tend to agree with the overall evaluation of the novel.
Structures--Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf was well known to have little patience with Ulysses. Joyce Carol Oates, in her book The Faith of a Writer suggests that part of this may have been the jealousy of one genius admiring the aplomb and power of another. Following is a quotation from Virginia Woolf's diary available from Fathom.
"I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses] so far," Virginia Woolf writes in her diary for 16 August 1922, and reports that she has been "amused, stimulated, charmed[,] interested ... to the end of the Cemetery scene." As "Hades" gives way to "Aeolus," however, and the novel of character and private sensibility yields to a farrago of styles, she is "puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned"--by no grand master of language, in her characterization, but "by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." No artifact of elite difficulty, Ulysses becomes for Woolf the "illiterate, underbred book ... of a self taught wor…
"I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses] so far," Virginia Woolf writes in her diary for 16 August 1922, and reports that she has been "amused, stimulated, charmed[,] interested ... to the end of the Cemetery scene." As "Hades" gives way to "Aeolus," however, and the novel of character and private sensibility yields to a farrago of styles, she is "puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned"--by no grand master of language, in her characterization, but "by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." No artifact of elite difficulty, Ulysses becomes for Woolf the "illiterate, underbred book ... of a self taught wor…
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