Virginia Woolf: The Waves (Landmarks of World Literature) by Virginia Woolf (1986)

I knew Woolf had written some experimental stuff and this book was amazing. It's all narrative, but inside quotes and voiced by the characters. Very dreamy and elegant diction, surreal in that it's young kids making grand pronouncements that they couldn't possibly be capable of thinking. It's nice to read a book that goes out and defines its own style and really does something with it. Best thing I've read since Infinite Jest. ( )

I was in my mid-twenties when I first read THE WAVES. Frankly, it gave me the same willies (spooky feelings) that I got when I read Flannery O'Connor's short stories. Her contemporaries wer always complaining that Mrs. Woolf's novels were not quite real. Well, I ask you: have you ever come across a 'real' novel? Isn't it like wondering what Hamlet was doing before the play got started. Playing whist? Did Poldy REALLY have a bar of lemon soap in his pocket? Who can tell for sure, not even Harold.
A. Huxley felt that her novels were bloodless. So did Lawrence. I am certain of one thing: that we shouldn't be influenced by another opinion on the subject of novels or any other form of art. The redoubtable David Herbert Lawrence, notwithstanding.
By the way, it still gives me the shakes, but it is doubtlessly a powerful work of art. But don't take my word for it. ( )

Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking work of imaginative fiction telling of a group of six close friends through the use of imagined thoughts and spoken words. A novel that needs the reader to just surrender oneself to it's hypnotic power.

The culmination of Virginia Woolf's explorations of modernist narrative which builds to a vivid and powerful climax that could stand as an epitaph for her. ( )

Her Best ! ( )