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 | | The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf ISBN-10: 9781605972572 ISBN-10: 1-60597-257-6 ISBN-13: 9781605972572 ISBN-13: 978-1-60597-257-2 Paperback 2008-03-13 Book Jungle Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Virginia Woolf was a prominent British literary figure during the time between World War 1 and World War 2. The Voyage Out was the first novel written by Virginia Woolf. It is a satirical novel about Rachel who while traveling to South America on her father's ship and travels on a voyage of self-discovery. The variety of passengers on the ship provides a means for satirizing Edwardian life. | ||
Reviews | ||
Edition was unreadable! This is a horrible edition! FULL of printing mistakes that made it absolutely unreadable. Really looks like the book was just scanned and process with OCR without anyone ever bothering to read what came out of it, not even the first page, which was just as unreadable as the rest of them. As I had to read the book for class, I had to run over to the closest book store to buy a normal copy. Really, a very annoying experience. A review titled "Hideous unedited OCR garbage" by Antony W. Serio describes this edition best. | ||
Great book, and great writing! Can't say enough, this is a perfect edition, and a great book by Woolf. It was as good, or better, than I remember.....truly wonderful | ||
Perfect edition! Perfect edition! This is a charming, and totally wonderful edition, if you are ordering the Voyage Out with the charming cover of the painting, you will be very happy. | ||
Hideous unedited OCR garbage This review is for the General Books LLC edition of this book, and is not a critique of Virginia Woolf herself or her writing style. My neighbor made the mistake of purchasing this book on Amazon, actually thinking that it would be readable. It was not. From the looks of things, the contents of this edition were taken from an OCR scan, and just dumped on the page willy-nilly by a high speed book printer. There was not even the slightest attempt to edit the contents of this edition. No spellcheck was completed, and I doubt if anybody even looked at the contents of this edition before it was sold. I was unable to read even a few paragraphs without being forced to parse out garbage characters, odd paragraph breaks, obvious errors, and missing punctuation. In a few cases, entire sentences are illegible. In fact, there is a disclaimer opposite the Table Of Contents which claims: "Limit of liability, disclaimer of warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose." It sounds as if the publisher knows that their edition is unedited garbage. "No warranty may be created ore extended by sales representatives or written sales materials." Note that there is a typo in the disclaimer. Does the publisher even have employees that speak English? "We have recreated this book from the original using Optical Character Recognition software to keep the cost of the book as low as possible. Therefore, could you please forgive any spelling mistakes, missing or extraneous characters that may have resulted from worn or smudged pages? When in doubt, please consult the original scanned book which may be available from our website." Think about it. If you had the chance to read this disclaimer before purchasing this book, would you actually pay money for it? I've dealt with raw OCR scans before, and it does take quite a bit of editing to clean them up enough to be legible. A simple spell-check would have found most of these errors. Given the raw data and PDFs of the scans, I could probably do it myself in a day or so. The problem is that this publisher didn't even make an effort to do so. In fact, I doubt if they even have one editor on their staff. The fact that they have typos in their legal boilerplate is probably proof of that theory. I think the publisher is doing a serious disservice to Virginia Woolf, Amazon's customers, and Amazon.com itself by attempting to market this book as anything but kindling. It is a waste of paper, ink, money, and time. | ||
A Voyage Out, and into the deep murky Unknown. For me, after having read Mrs. Dalloway, I quite loathed Virginia Woolf and her experimental style, which defied all styles. This novel was not easy to get through, though much more manageable than her later works because it mimics an actual novel style, rather than her signature, stream of conscious. Then again, I have yet to fully realize this first woeful tale by Woolf, other than to truly appreciate this woman's incredible talent. To be honest, the only reason I bothered with this first venture of Woolf's was by design rather than my choice. A friend and I decided to form our own book club, and her favorite, of course, was Woolf. And thus, I was committed. Meet Rachel Vinrace, a twenty-four year old young woman, adrift and impressionable, considered very 'unformed' and vague by those around her. Under the care of her aunt and uncle, Ridley and Helen Ambrose, she journeys across the ocean from England to a resort town in South America, and thrust into a world of humanity and emotion, nature and variegated personalities that are at once overwhelming and instructive. Her birth of understanding, which are both strange and exciting experiences, Rachel begins to conceive and formulate herself through a series of experimental interactions with her relatives, especially Helen, as well as with colorful, if not seemingly stolid characters from the nearby hotel. Unshaped perceptions leave her breathless yet wiser, and barely does she scrape the surface of life, experience and self-understanding before Rachel herself is extinguished. This is a haunting, romantically tragic tale of something gained and then fleetingly, it is all lost, leaving everything, and everyone in turmoil and yet, continuing on. At first, the story is incoherent, boring, at times scattered and frustrating to read. Characters and events which seemed, at first, to have no purpose, at times appearing to be trivial, begin to take shape and form. All these intricately woven pieces which become the very basis in which Rachel can experience her world, the real world and herself, slowly and so powerfully are pieced together and you may not even realize it until much later on, like I did and still piecing together. These descriptions of other British people in a remote exotic port is a contrast to Rachel's own growing sense of awareness and independence, each interaction is carefully placed and not random. This is where Woolf excels, providing the seemingly unimportant and even dismissive scenes and making them relevant, later on, when the reader has read the book. A few chapters are painfully aware and poignant and wonderful, heady and traumatic in its sharp intuitive vocalization of human emotions and realization of defects in human nature itself. And all against the beautiful backdrop of a South America that I, as a reader, have never experienced. You will ask yourself for the first whole half, What Is The Point? And then, like a train wreck, it's there, hitting you in the face, as Woolf weaves people and experiences, emotions and underlying tones of social mores and scripted human behaviors, all of which presses upon every character like a net, and ensnares the reader. It is layer upon layer and easy to miss the subtle influence and connections that Woolf effortlessly weaves and throws right before your eyes. Call it genius or magic, you will be astounded, or numbed. And if you're careful enough, you'll glimpse what Woolf was trying to say. You will look upon pain, and will flinch. Don't look away, or you may miss it. I for one am still reeling from the sensory onslaught, her words like water over rocks and I have to admit, I loved this book, and I was utterly perplexed by it. It is, like most rare and profound stories, an emotional voyage, filled with symbols and allusions, and something which leaves THAT something inside you, burrowing and forever embedded in your very thoughts. I want to read it again, mark the pages and remember those eerie descriptions of human frailty and human experiences rendered in such a way to leave me breathless and engrossed. It's safe to say, that I am quite taken and can't wait to read the next Woolf story. So read on, good reader, read on, if you dare. | ||