Like Woolf, Like Mrs. Dalloway
there ´s a dinner party tonight!
Miranda Darling: Thunderhead. 2024.
Miranda Darling's novel Thunderhead opens with an epigraph from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, about life's "little daily miracles". Like Mrs Dalloway, another of Woolf's novels, Thunderhead is set over the course of a single day and follows a wealthy woman preparing for a dinner party. Darling's narrator, Winona Dalloway, even shares her surname and as I am a huge fan of internal sounds thundering in onés head, reading a story as if she is experiencing all this right now, right here, this was a match made in heaven for me.
I had never heard of Miranda Darling and her novel Thunderhead came out of nowhere available (and I am glad I found it, I read it and I liked it a lot!) but as said, I generally love inner talk, monologue, in a novel, love women « going mental » in novels, Virginia Woolf, all happenings in a course of a day.
So, the story unfolds through inner monologue, over one day before the dinner party, Winona getting ready for the night and Winona ´s voice, of so fluent, in her head spills over with abundant vocabulary.Her days are full, stressful even though she is used to career and it ´s demands. But, there is a husband "a local Figure of Note in the Community", he, who masteminds his wife making her Google calendar filled to every minute and he harasses her with endless texts, and yes, he has lost two wifes already to this idiotic behaviour of his (but nothing changes). And Winona, she, like Woolf, she observes the world, herself and all the time she wants to write and yes, she is writing a novel of a woman trying to leave her miserable marriage but now, before the novel, she lives (her quite diminished life, thanks to that idiotic husband!) as a mother of two, doing her mommy-duties in stead of her quite an impressive former career.
Loved it.