In The Mezzanine, we see Howie's total attention to every spec of detail, pretty much about everything, and from varying time periods as well. When reading Mrs. Dalloway, I imagined that it was going to be about something totally different but that turned out to be wrong.After I started reading Mrs. Dalloway, I immediately started comparing it to The Mezzanine; I found that the two novels are surprisingly similar in their manners of presenting the book.
Mrs. Dalloway takes place over the course of one day which to most readers is probably an incredibly short period of time for a story to take place: the book is literally about a woman’s entire life in one day (and people relating to her). In the Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker takes this to a whole different level: the story takes place over the course of less than a minute (an escalator ride). In a way, I almost felt as if the author, had he read Mrs. Dalloway, was laughing at Woolf as if it were a competition. The incredible amount of detail which is portrayed by Nicholson Baker and Virginia Woolf, in their respective works, making both the Mezzanine and Mrs.Dalloway so unique and interesting. Another similarity is the usage of time in both books. While the duration of the book lasts in one particular set, both books "switch" to diffrent periods of time in the past, specifically in the Mezzanine with Howie talking about his lunch hour, his bathroom trip and more, while in Mrs. Dalloway, expeiriances of charcters in the past and their respective stories like Sally Seden, Septimus' history, amogst a few.
Although people might think that these two books should be very different, at a closer look, we are able to find some rather perky similarities. Today, I would like to leave you with a question: what would Woolf have thought of Baker’s the Mezzanine? And Baker likewise to Mrs. Dalloway?
I noticed a lot of similarities between the Mezzanine and Mrs. Dalloway as well. There were only a few differences, one of the big differences (to me) was that the Mezzanine was a memoir; at the end of the book we have learned a lot about Howie (his childhood, his thoughts about almost everything). After reading the Mezzanine, I felt like I knew Howie really well. With Mrs. Dalloway, I feel like it wasn't really a memoir; just a story about a woman's day in London in the twentieth century. After reading Mrs. Dalloway, I didn't really feel like I knew Clarissa all too well.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that struck me to be the same was the way time passes; Howie used the escalator to keep time in the Mezzanine and in Mrs. Dalloway, Big Ben is referenced several times to help readers understand what time of day it is.
This comparison certainly occurred to me when I was first organizing the course--I see a number of connections between these two books, all having to do with the idea that everyday life, unspectacular experiences, should be the proper subject of fiction. I like your idea that, in some subtle ways, Baker might be "laughing at" Woolf (in a friendly, author-competitive way, maybe--not mean-spirited) by trying to "one-up" her version of a novel focused on "an ordinary mind on an ordinary day."
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