Jacob's Room

"Jacob's Room" was Woolf's third novel, but the first where she felt free to trace "the flight of the mind" and discard any dead conventions which did not help convey her vision. Nor is there any elaborate stream-of-consciousness, in the late Henry James or Proustian manner: the real world is set before us with effervescent sensory detail, in that terse, suggestive, and witty style which makes her letters and essays so engaging. We are shown what life was like for Jacob Flanders, his adventures, friendships, travels, loves, right up to its abrupt ending: "It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses." There isn't a dull page, and it reads as fresh and fast as if it had been written tomorrow morning. The special feature of this Signet Classic is the introduction by Regina Marler, which offers one pertinent quotation or observation after another to orient the first-time reader, or refresh a return visitor. Her short course in the varied achievements of the Bloomsbury Group, those friends central to Woolf's development, is both assured and nuanced. Her placement of "Jacob's Room" in Woolf's career and the literary temper of the times shows how it anticipates the novel of the future while reflecting the recent painful past---the Great War that had ended just four years before it was published in 1922. Signet has given the text a very handsome presentation, and the up-to-date suggestions for further reading make one itch to visit the library. Woolf tempts us to "Think of a book as a very dangerous and exciting game which it takes two to play at"---and Marler furnishes the context we need to play along.

Virginia Woolf is one of my favorite authors and Jacob's Room is my second favortie Woolf book (The Waves being the first).Jacob's Room is the highly impressionistic story of Jacob Flanders, a character based on Woolf's own brother. This is a coming-of-age story as we follow Jacob from the rocky coasts of Cornwall to the sun-drenched shores of Greece.Anyone looking for a conventional story or plot won't find it here. Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf during a highly experimental stage; a stage during which she was developing her pure stream-of-consciousness style.Jacob's Room is for very "literary" readers. This is definitely not light and fluffy and it's definitely not going to be everyone's cup of tea. Those who love good literature, however, will find Jacob's Room a pure poetic masterpiece of the highest order.

This was the first book by Virginia Woolf I read, and it remains my favorite. The language vacillates between normal prose and near-poetry; the narrator remains fairly distant throughout, offering the reader a great deal of insight without much emotional baggage. It is not, however, something you should read on the bus or on a plane; this book requires time, effort, and a certain calmness of mind before you can begin to understand and appreciate it.

This is the first Virginia Woolf book I've read and I can see why she is ranked as a great writer. Her writing is very dense and the prose reads like poetry. She writes Jacob's Room in the stream of consciousness style, like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. The stream tends to meander all over the lot, so just go with the flow. The reader hears snippets of conversation and characters come and go. We learn about Jacob Flanders, but in little bits, here and there, the way you learn about people in real life. The reader never knows what's going on inside Jacob's head. You observe Jacob the way you would in real life: from the outside. Size him up for yourself. The novel is set around World War I and Jacob Flanders (FLANDERS, as in Flanders' Field--World War I's killing field) is one of that Lost Generation. The novel is dark, questioning the futility of life, but the language is beautiful and the emotion is stabbingly true. Definitely read it, but have something more chipper around to read afterward, lest you brood too much.

From Woolf's innumerable unfinished sentences and unaccounted for colors, we begin to see that there are no traditional themes or plots, and she has not set down to cement a story from the point of view of her subject. At the beginning of the novel, and throughout, everyone is looking for Jacob, and he cannot be found. We learn little or nothing about his life except what seems like scattered thoughts and phrases, and learn more about who he is from where he is not than where he is. By not being tied down to one theme or the traditional explanation and nature of having this fixed subject, Woolf is then able to attack, from outside-in, the hollowness and darkness she sees before her. She sees the fractioning and diverging "chasm in the continuity of our ways", and wonders what it would be to let go of this driving thing that makes it necessary to fix her narrative on one subject in her book. By bringing in endless new characters, and then leaving them, she tries to approach the manner by which we know our subjects of observation. "The young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us - why indeed? For the moment after, we know nothing about him." This is how we float through our lives, seeing these subjects of people andn pathways, moving around countries and eras in our internal time, without a fixed linearity. Since Woolf has seen that assumed "core" of linearity in the traditional Victorian novel crumble into dissolution, she looks at that darkness and tries to find what is real about it. What ends up glittering in her flashlight of exploration is this possibility of pathways, and a realization of what is real. She wants to start catching reality the way we live it. She doesn't want a letter, a posted and fixed choice of how things "are" that doesn't reflect the inside of the room or life that creates it, she doesn't want to structure another hollow linearity, but instead she wishes, in all her seemingly incoherent, circular, and rambling images and phrases, to chart the motion of the reality that drives us. This reality is made real here: "They say that the novelists never catch it; that it goes hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what we live by - this unseizable force." What Woolf has created with Jacob's room is not an easy read - at times it will leave you crying, screaming, or just pensive, but it is, in my opinion, her best and most complex book. Naturally, it is also her most rewarding.