The Waves in Never too Late to Read Classics

May 28, 2019 Tim Callicutt rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2019-books

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This is the book I wanted The Hours to be! Woolf is at her evocative best here. Her beautiful prose, strong metaphors, and experimental tendencies all come together to produce a work more than the sum of its parts. While The Hours ultimately felt meandering, The Waves is enlightening. Woolf seems to have a fixation in exploring the ephemeral quality of life. To the Lighthouse and the Hours both explore the topic, while also utilizing time jumps and a central metaphor. But rather than endowing a This is the book I wanted The Hours to be! Woolf is at her evocative best here. Her beautiful prose, strong metaphors, and experimental tendencies all come together to produce a work more than the sum of its parts. While The Hours ultimately felt meandering, The Waves is enlightening. Woolf seems to have a fixation in exploring the ephemeral quality of life. To the Lighthouse and the Hours both explore the topic, while also utilizing time jumps and a central metaphor. But rather than endowing a life with significance and depth, both of these books seem to downplay the lives we lead as insignificant. The ordinariness of the lives of Woolf's characters do not lead her to wax poetic about the lack of vision they have in not being able to recognize the significance of the time they've spent alive - they just seem to wallow in it. There's no clear culmination. Of course, none of this is problematic if that was Woolf's aim, but I never got the sense that she wanted to downplay these people's lives in such a way. Instead, I felt that she had something more nuanced to say that wasn't quite breaking through.

That's where The Waves comes in. By essentially communicating the story through a series of interior monologues, we get a uniquely privy view into the mindset of her characters. Each of these characters has his or her share of anxieties and joys. Each of them wrestle with the central event - the death of Percival (a mutual friend from boyhood). And each of them incessantly strives for meaning. They are not always successful, of course. Rhoda ends up committing suicide, after a lifetime of striving for fulfillment.

But the character most attractive to me was Bernard. His struggle is unique. He wants to be a writer, and by all accounts is a gifted one. But he finds language a poor tool to properly communicate the experience of life. His monologues tend to wax poetic about his inability to translate an experience into the written word. He is the sole narrator in the last portion of the book, and there is a moment where he seems to hit it - a moment of transcendence. He seems to have a full experience of the life in front of him, even if he still fails to put it into words.

Each of the other characters also try his or her hand in crafting a meaning behind their lives. The backdrop of the sea works in service of this goal. Just as waves crash upon the shore, the characters experience their lives one wave at a time - each bringing both refreshment and destruction. And while the novel does not give us a clear indication that any character found true fulfillment, there are hints that they get a taste of it when they're all together (once with Percival and once without). Such moments do not come easily - both dinner parties have a fair share of anxiety, but they are present nonetheless.

Where The Waves succeeds for me is its plain desire for making a life significant. Woolf never becomes so didactic that she lays a meaning out. Nor does she even offer the suggestion that there is an overarching meaning for life. But she offers us a group of characters that constantly strive for such. As a result, she produces some of her most sympathetic characters yet, for their work is that of our own. ...more

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