Virginia Woolf: The waves (1992, Hogarth)
203 pages
English language
Published Jan. 4, 1992 by Hogarth.
The Waves, first published in 1931, is Virginia Woolf's most experimental novel. It consists of soliloquies spoken by the book's six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis. Also important is Percival, the seventh character, though readers never hear him speak through his own voice. The monologues that span the characters' lives are broken up by nine brief third-person interludes detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day from sunrise to sunset.
a hot mess of six characters whose speech bleed into one anothers as they move through life and reflexively ruminate on themselves and how they relate to their friends and the world around them. if you like pretty writing and don't care for the deeper meaning, this could also be for you (i'd recommend at least reading ths first chapter).
One of the best novels I've ever read.
A play-poem you say? The alive-with-color perfectly-passe self-narrated arc of living of six -or-so friends. Even in telling our own stories are any of us able to control our lives or look directly at those off-stage players and settings we absorb from others tales?
This book is different from most novels. It's about six friends, Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Louis, Neville and Jinny, from childhood to old age, but it says little about their external circumstances. It is told entirely from the viewpoints of the people concerned, and is an internal description of how their friends and life affect them.
Describing it like that, it doesn't sound like much of a story. Seeing the world through six pairs of eyes, moving from one viewpoint to the other, sounds as though it will be like living in six separate boxes, but it isn't. It is a marvellous evocation of friendship. The trouble is that it is so evocative that my mind kept wandering, every paragraph at least, if not every sentence. When it describes the feelings of one character when leaving school, I was taken back to when I left school, aznd got so absorbed in …
This book is different from most novels. It's about six friends, Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Louis, Neville and Jinny, from childhood to old age, but it says little about their external circumstances. It is told entirely from the viewpoints of the people concerned, and is an internal description of how their friends and life affect them.
Describing it like that, it doesn't sound like much of a story. Seeing the world through six pairs of eyes, moving from one viewpoint to the other, sounds as though it will be like living in six separate boxes, but it isn't. It is a marvellous evocation of friendship. The trouble is that it is so evocative that my mind kept wandering, every paragraph at least, if not every sentence. When it describes the feelings of one character when leaving school, I was taken back to when I left school, aznd got so absorbed in the vivid recollection that I must have remained stuck on the same page for about 20 minutes or so,
It was the the same with the description of their leaving university, and I was taken back 46 years (gosh, was it as long ago as that) when I took the train from Grahamstown to Alicedale, and waited on Alicedale station for the train to Johannesburg, and the realisation suddenly struck me that I would never be a full-time student again. I hadn't been a student all the time before, but even working for two years full time I was still saving up to go to university, and suddenly it was all over. And Virginia Woolf captures that "it's all over" feeling brilliantly. To one character it's a drop of water gathering and growing, and then suddenly it drops, and life changes, irrevocably.
But at the same time there is a continuity. As the characters move from youth to age, so there are interludes describing, quite impersonally, the course of a day, the sun rising and setting over the sea shore, with the waves continuing to crash down, so there is also a repetition, and it reminded me of the verse of Psalm 41/42:
Deep is calling to deep
as your cataracts roar;
all your waves, your breakers
have rolled over me.
Actually there is a seventh friend, Percival, who was at school with the boys. We hear of his unrequited love for Susan, and Neville's unrequited love for him, and he goes to India and is killed in a fall from a horse. But his viewpoint never appears, he is seen only only through the eyes of the others, and the effects of his life and death on them.
