Woolf’s claim that this is a new kind of novel is spot on, for it does not adhere to any of the standard rules of the genre. The opening reads like a short story, there are no major protagonists, progression nor plot, no earthly reason, really for us to keep turning the pages. Yet turn them we do, for what we have instead is a most rare and precious gift; an elegiac and profound meditation on the meaning of life and the nature of experience.
The work is very visual and reminds me of an Ingmar Bergman film, where nothing much ever happens but which leaves the profound impression that here we have lived. We don’t really have a guide or reliable narrator, instead we are thrown straight into the – what? Not action, but into the lives of people who, by the end of the book, are as familiar as our own families
Pam Hunter 2013.