Grade: C

I’m a bit baffled by this book. Did anything happen? At all? And where the heck did the ending come from? Our main character was there the whole time, until suddenly he wasn’t.

I’m just not a fan of the modernist way of writing where there is very little plot - which is unfortunate as I’m currently studying a modernism module

guys why am i the only person doing thesis with matz

anyways i liked the book. jacob sucks but that's kind of the whole point

I don't know if it's because I read it as an audiobook, or because this is different from Woolf's other work in some important way, but I wasn't gripped by this one and walked away feeling lukewarm, and wanting to re-read To The Lighthouse. I'm glad I read it so I can have my own sense of it, but I'm already starting to forget it in a way which I haven't forgotten Mrs Dalloway after several years, and I don't think I'll return to it.

Jacob's Room, meandering, impressionistic, and artfully written, is confusing but wonderful all at once. Set in pre-war England and ending admist The Great War, this novella follows Jacob and adds a twist to a typical bildungsroman. I can best describe Jacob’s Room as a series of vignettes, paintings, fragmented scenes, and views in which we observe the life of Jacob Flanders and many other people. This story is told in the perspective of the people in Jacob's life, whether they were in his world for thirty minutes or twenty years. Thus, we never get a close look at Jacob’s thoughts, rather we glimpse the details of the spaces he occupies: by the waves of a beach, sitting by the windowsill, his rooms in Cambridge and London, and the list goes on. While Jacob is the one constant figure in every chapter, he exists on the periphery of the scene, in the corners of the landscape, he's always there, but never quite doing much. He is a passive character, with life's events flying past him, and people around him going about their days with an indifference to the world around them. At the heart of this story is ordinary life. As readers, Virginia Woolf paints us the world in its expanse, but also its minute details.

Jacob’s last name, Flanders, is a nod to Flanders Fields, a major battlefield in World War One. This story is a war tragedy, in how one can dream, be educated, and attempt to find love, but then all is abruptly interrupted by the bloodshed of war. Woolf only references the war in passing comments, but the anticipation of imminent violence is a shadowing presence that grows and eventually brings the story to an end.

It felt like a movie

I don't think I'm ever going to get used to reading stream of conciousness

Beautiful writing as always but not my favorite by Woolf.

There are some absolutely beautiful passages in this; but I'm not sure that it all holds together. The character of Jacob is very distant from the reader, and we seem to be reading about his life as a slender excuse for the crystalline descriptions and meditations upon life that make up the bulk of the book, rather than for any compelling narrative or development of character related to Jacob himself.

This is, however, my first Woolf aside from A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas; perhaps that is simply her style. I'll find out, since I am taking a class on her.

Definitely not my type of story, but Virginia Woolf’s writing really intrigued me and I want to read more of her work