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To the Lighthouse

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To the Lighthouse

Written by: Virginia Woolf
Narrated by: Nicole Kidman
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About this listen

To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s arresting analysis of domestic family life, centering on the Ramseys and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland in the early 1900s. Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge, Eyes Wide Shut), who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, brings the impressionistic prose of this classic to vibrant life.

Split into three parts, the story observes Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsey, and their children at their vacation house on the Isle of Skye. While the novel follows seemingly trivial events between the family members, the plot takes a backseat to philosophical introspection, which gave the novel its fame as an icon of modernist literature. The Ramseys’ quest to recapture meaning creates a powerful allegory of man’s impermanent battle with the tangible world.

©1927 Virginia Woolf (P)2012 Audible, Inc. Classics
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Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse is both a masterpiece and a mess of its own making. It breaks conventions and jumps deep into the psyche of the "modern" (early 1900s) family and their house guests. This analysis is what makes the book so incredible and so incredibly confusing. Part of me wonders if this would be a better read in physical format instead of audiobook format due to the fact that it switches perspectives but never seems to gaze upon the characters externally. I often found myself lost as to who was thinking what and when the perspective had shifted.

But, as always, Woolf is a master of prose and is worth reading for that reason alone.

Nicole Kidman makes for an immersive narrator, and has a very smooth voice that's easy to listen to. But unfortunately most of the characters were read in the same voice, making the narrative occasionally hard to follow.

"Veiled by memory, tinged by dreams."

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I've never read Woolf before and I'm now pretty amped to pick up more. The story was minimalistic but it's rarely just the story that makes a novel. The abundant philosophical reflections on life, death, love, art, family, etc. fill this novel to the brim. I'm eager to experience that again. As an aside, I wonder if professional voice actors are dismayed at Hollywood actors taking the opportunity to saturate another field with their presence. Nicole Kidman did a swell job for most of the reading but you could definitely hear the impact of her surgically altered wonk face on some of her words, like a lingering lip stuck on a tooth at an ill timed moment, or an inability of a paralyzed muscle to respond fast enough for the requisite linguistic gymnastics of a Woolf sentence.

A literary exercise

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