Jacob’s Room

De: Virginia Woolf

Narrado por: Juliet Stevenson

Published in 1922, the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room is Virginia Woolf’s own modernist manifesto. Ostensibly a study of a young man’s life on the eve of the Great War, it is really a bomb thrown into the world of the conventional novel, as she attempts to capture the richness and randomness of life’s encounters. Jacob Flanders is a mere point of contact between a crowd of people, appearing and disappearing in a tableau in which all is flux, without certainty and without a controlling viewpoint. But it seems that the author could not maintain this rigorous impersonality, and the radical technique breaks down, so that we finally see Jacob as a person, just as his world is blown apart.

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great performance!

As always, this reader performs beautifully. Woolf's story is haunting. it's experimental style is challenging, but worth the effort. A prelude to her masterpiece, _To the Lighthouse_.

please read

I greatly enjoyed this book. Woolf is a master writer I would recommend this to anyone who likes English literature.

It is no use trying to sum people up

"It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done."
- Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

One of Woolf's first modern/stream of concicious novels. Woolf's two earlier novels (The Voyage Out & Night and Day) were more traditional. This one is more like attempting to get a sense of the Parthenon, but only by looking at shadows cast by the sun and the moon, from different directions, night and day, at different times. Eventually, one would understand - almost - a lot about the Parthenon. One might also listen, like a blind man, to the conversations of people going up and down the Acropolis. Women and men. Children. Tourists and Greeks. Again, the impressions of the Parthenon would sharpen, but never, quite, be clear.

This novel, which is more of just a character study, an experimental novel that has no direction except time, tries to examine Jacob indirectly through the impressions of those around him from his early years till he is in his twenties, pre-war. It is fragments. Noise. Smells. Hints. It is what we have. And really, it is amazing and beautiful. It also gives hints of later, fantastic Woolf novels like Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. We see in this novel, Woolf's huge potential. Her influence. The ship has turned.