Well… if I ever were curious what it would be like to read an entire novel about absolutely nothing, I needn’t wonder any longer.
While working on my PhD coursework I took an entire class on Virginia Woolf, and despite that I still could find nothing to enjoy or appreciate about this novel, which I found to be completely and utterly inane, and, frankly, sinfully boring.
Jacob is in the title, and thus I searched for him throughout this book, but he never really materialized. Sure, he’s mentioned, often even, but I know as much about him or anyone or anything throughout the narrative as I did before starting it: namely, completely and absolutely nothing.
It’s as though this were simply a collection of words strewn together, leaving no lasting impression of any kind. It was a waste of time, for me at least, and it leaves me wondering what anyone could find to enjoy or appreciate about it. Woolf wrote some brilliant works, but this, in my opinion, is definitely not one of them.

The question remains: who really Jacob is?

"Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental novel."
"There is no first, no origin, no break, no fixture."
"The artists I favor most-- Fielding, Rhys, Wycherley, Comyns, Spark, Lerner, Adler, Woolf-- all write the same book over and over again, and, of course, I'm never the same. But there's something for me to hold onto, like watching a game show or a sunrise."
"There is also the highly respectable opinion that character-mongering is much overdone nowadays."
"It's empty or being emptied, this. Or a tumble down the side of a hill, lapsed yet so rapid it's a blur. Too much and not enough-- intermittently struck by the most astounding, dizzying pains and pleasures amid tense grappling."
"This, they say, is what we live by- this unseizable force."
"Ponderous small."

Blargh

"A doubt insinuates itself; is this the way to spend our days? the rare, the limited, so soon dealt out to us—drinking tea? dining out? And the notes accumulate. And the telephones ring. And everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that try to penetrate before the last card is dealt and the days are over. 'Try to penetrate,' for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be certain?" (93).

I have fond memories of reading this on the train whilst leaving St. Andrews, Scotland, and I finally picked it up to finish it today. I am astonished, as always, by Woolf; this time, she managed to create a thoroughly interesting novel, meditating on the significance of beauty and youth, about a completely and utterly disinteresting protagonist. My favorite part was pg. 106 when Julia Hedge, "the feminist," goes into the British Museum, frowns up at all of the carved names of famous men, and literally just says, "Oh damn, why didn't they leave room for an Eliot or a Brontë?" Same, sister.