The Waves (1931)

The book follows the lives of 6 friends from their childhood until old age. I wish I had the words to express how wonderful this book is. It does not care about the plot, and focuses solely on the interiority of the characters, their perception of reality, of themselves and of others. Virginia Wolf explores with extraordinary talent the question of what constitutes the self, the masks we assume when communicating to others, and what constitutes community. ( )

I'd say that 80% of the reason I started a Virginia Woolf book club was so that I could re-read this one with a group of friends. Here Woolf follows a group of six friends from their early childhood through old age, but what we see are their thoughts, impressions, and inner workings, with just a hint of what is happening in their outside life. Much like Mrs. Dalloway, reading this again when you are in your mid-40s makes the book hit a lot differently than it did when I was in my early 20s. The chapter in their young adulthood where the characters react to their idolized school friend Percival's death is one of the most affecting and accurate descriptions of grieving that I've ever read, and it brought back my own first brush with death as a young adult (love you, Carlos) with an unexpected gut punch. Not Woolf's easiest read, but one of her most rewarding. Stick with it for the final chapter with Bernard which is one of the best things I've ever read.

[Also working on a The Waves is the Breakfast Club theory -- Rhoda is obviously Ally Sheedy and Jinny is definitely Molly Ringwald. Still need to flesh out the rest of this hypothesis....] ( )

NA

"I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart."

The trench of memories runs deep and dark. Whenever pulled down its depths, they engulf with resounding, blinding pressure vivid and vibrant. A hundred emotions hit all at once, successively, divisibly, conflictingly. Virginia Woolf's The Waves is not only a trench but the shoreline, the rocks, the ship where these memories caress, crash, and cradle. It isn't only about reminiscences. But also the intimate creation of memories in different dimensions of time and space. They overlap, split, dance.

In sometimes dreamlike, other times too tangible soliloquies of six friends, this extraordinary, profound novel transports to montages of lives interconnected; some of them graze each other for seconds, at times touch for years, others make irreversible dents. Their pivot is a voiceless seventh friend whose departure rippled throughout earthly time. Death, like love, is a cosmic event; mourning is sporadic but perpetual. And breathing doesn't come easy with reading Woolf's prose; it holds at the sight of beauty; it sighs at familiarity; it labours at the captured entirety and poetry of living ("I said life has been imperfect, an unfinished phrase.") What an intense, tearful 200 pages as it eventually leaves for the arms of the gloaming skies. And bodies consumed by its waters will be washed ashore, choking but alive. ( )

At last, I have read a Woolf book which doesn't live up to the hype. The Waves is an interesting experiment, as most of her books are, but this one feels much clunkier than the others. That's perhaps by design; if, say, Dalloway is an opera, this is an oratorio, or perhaps just someone standing on stage reading a script with excessive use of recitativo.

Others have become rapt by the language. I was, comparatively, unmoved; it reminds me of the way mediocre poets... read... their... POETRY ... inpublic, as if every line and every word were too freighted with meaning to be passed over, until the poem's end, when the poet collapses under the weight of his own genius. I'm sure Woolf knew that, but wanted to give it a go anyway.

Despite these flaws, it's still Woolf, and she's still trying new things, and almost every other novelist is, at best, worse than her worst, and less interesting than her least interesting. ( )