PDF All the Lives We Ever Lived Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf Audible Audio Edition Katharine Smyth Brittany Pressley Random House Audio Books

Product details Audible Audiobook Listening Length 8 hours and 48 minutes Program Type Audiobook Version Unabridged Publisher Random House Audio Audible.com Release Date January 29, 2019 Whispersync for Voice Ready Language English, English ASIN B07M8D8JYX

All the Lives We Ever Lived Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf Audible Audio Edition Katharine Smyth Brittany Pressley Random House Audio Books Reviews

• All the Lives We Ever Lived is a difficult but rewarding book. One difficulty is it assumes a familiarity with Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I, like the author, love this book but it is not part of a standard American curricula. Another difficulty is its telling of the story of the passing of the author’s father. An unflinching look at death is, for better or for worse, rare in our culture. Finally, the book is not in the typical memoir genre. The author’s encounter with human mortality provides commentary on Woolf while Woolf helps her understand her own experiences. In other words, the book doesn’t engage in traditional literary criticism.
  
  It is, however, a unique account and perspective. The author writes so hauntingly of dying that I had to put the book down sometimes lest I fell into depression. The writing is at the same time so fluid, so beautiful in itself, that one wants to keep turning and turning the page.
  
  The questions the author deals with sound banal when not instantiated in real life. Why is nature so unfeeling? Does everything we love end in entropic nothingness? How do we best mourn our loved ones? Can secular humanity find any solace when confronted with death or is it merely one long bleak dance with winter?
  
  While both Woolf’s and the author’s experiences were harrowing, Smyth does find in Woolf some solace. She sees the unique striving for life embedded in the human heart as continuing, stripped of all individuality, from generation to generation. While memory fades and even the ephemera of our dwellings and belongings recede into not, that inchoate love of all things human does not die a second death but is passed on to our descendants. Banal in the recounting, one must read the book to get the full effect.
  
  I would recommend this book to everyone but the author’s choice of assuming basic knowledge of To the Lighthouse makes me think that only devotees of Woolf, or at least those familiar with her, will find the book as captivating as I did. Even so, maybe this book will persuade some non-devotees to read To the Lighthouse. Woolf’s heart beats on.
• "All the Lives We Ever Lived" feels like a new kind of book—one that uses great art, Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," as a lens to view more clearly the author's own loss, and ends up becoming a shelter itself for our losses as readers.
  
  We learn about the author's father, who was a larger-than-life figure (similar to Mrs. Ramsey in "To the Lighthouse") but battled with alcoholism and ultimately succumbed to cancer. The prose is elegant and precise, filled with insights that forced me to pause, put down the page, and consider my own relationships.
  
  Really powerful stuff. I hadn't read "To the Lighthouse" before reading "All the Lives" but that didn't impact my understanding. It actually inspired me to pick up Woolf's book.
  
  Highly recommend "All the Lives" for readers looking for a beautiful read that asks the big questions how can we even attempt to understand the loss of our favorite people, how can we come to terms with who those people really were, do we even want to know?
• All the lives we ever lived will not find a home on my library shelves. It reads like a Ph.D thesis, including some ten words I did not know existed in the English language (capuscular, for example) and another several that I had never spoken or needed to express myself, such as evanescent. I am certain the examining Board would be impressed.
  
  The mourning, which she correctly reminds us is done by one and all of us at some time, continues tiresomely, long after the point is made. She is brilliant but can be boring and tedious.
• I was really taken by this book, which caught me by surprise. I wanted to read it mostly out of clinical interest to how she would work a modern story around Virginia Woolf. I had never read Woolf's "Lighthouse" book, so I wasn't expecting to be that connected either way.
  
  But her story about her father, and reflections on how her father confronted disappointments and compromises was very affecting. Her father was not that old - 59 - and that's sure not as old as it used to be. A lot of the things she describes her father living through are a lot more relevant to me than they would have been a few years back. On the other hand, she's also writing about saying goodbye to a parent and that's something else that becomes more concrete and less abstract with age.
  
  I wasn't always excited about the Woolf digressions - because I'm not familiar with the book - but I could follow the connections she made. A few hit home - she relates how Woolf's characters go to a childhood home and stand outside. The feeling is of being a ghost - a shade from the past lurking at the doorstop, but never coming in. I've been that person too.
  
  I'm hesitant to give five stars, because the Woolf sections do require SOME knowledge for the most appreciation, which I didn't have. But the personal stories were all very affecting in a way that never drooped into mid-age ennui.
  
  Any audience of middle age adults will 'enjoy' the reckoning that Smyth is both experiencing and capturing. A fan of Woolf will no doubt appreciate these links. All in all, very, very good.