Dalloway” again until I was in my thirties, when I was on a different kind of quest. I wrapped myself in an old blanket and read through the night, hoping it wouldn’t end badly for him. His thoughts, blazingly sad, seemed beautiful to me. All these old people talking about houses and parties and hats-what did they have to do with me? I skimmed over these other stories, noting here and there the stunning beauty of the language, then raced ahead to find more Septimus sections. I started the book over from the beginning and found that the darkness gathering around Septimus was woven into other narrative threads, ones I was less interested in. The world has raised its whip where will it descend? Yes, this. The world has raised its whip where will it descend? Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too. Before I sat down to read it properly, I opened it at random, and this sentence was given occultly to me: “The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.”

Instead, I went to the university library one night and checked out books I thought might contain clues about what was in store for me. I suspected I should tell someone about the buzzing and the whirring and the crying, but I couldn’t work up the nerve.

Why are you crying for no reason? I’d think, brushing my hands across my face.

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.

Dalloway novel