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The Waves
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The Waves by Virginia Woolf
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The only one I've really liked so far is Flush and, alas, it's not on the list.. I think I was expecting too much from Orlando, even when I read it for the second time- otherwise I might have liked it, too. I love her essays, letters, and diaries, she's so authentic and wickedly funny there. I wish she had brought more of this to her novels. But I haven't read The Waves yet, maybe I'll give it a try now. Thank you for the review!
Definitely give The Waves a try, Manda. I know a couple of people who enjoyed Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, so don't discount them! I don't think there's anything to be scared of, her fiction isn't impenetrable, but I have struggled to find anything to empathise with before I read The Waves.Wolf, that's part of my problem with her - her reputation makes me expect too much. I haven't tried any of her nonfiction. Perhaps I will!
Rating: 5 StarsRead: February 2017
The writing in this book is absolutely gorgeous. It is really more like poetry than prose. I typically don't care for stream of consciousness, but Woolf makes it flow more naturally and beautifully than most. In the book, we follow the lives of six friends and their innermost thoughts. There isn't much of a plot, but that really isn't the point of the book.
I tend to really love Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and Night and Day are some of my favorite books of all time. This one wasn't quite that impactful for me, but it was really good and I gave it 4 stars. I tend to agree with some others here that the lyrical quality of the writing and its ability to portray the inner life /thought process of somebody are its greatest qualities. Many of characters are allegedly heavily based on several family members/writer friends of hers, which I think is neat.
I don't know that I can say I've "finished" it, but I've gotten to the end. I think I will probably read it again some day- I feel like a second reading will better allow me to follow Woolf's thoughts and ideas. It's quite an exploration of identity and how personality and sense of self change in time, how we are at once the same person and not the same person at all.The link Cynda provided to the coursehero site I found useful not only for the small character summary but also for the chapter summaries. https://www.coursehero.com/lit/The-Wa...
If I could really follow most of the writing, I would perhaps give a five star rating, so my four star rating may be more one of myself as a reader than of the book.
This was the first book I ever read by Virginia Woolf. I also went into reading her work with zero expectations, as no one told me anything about her or her writing until I started reading them. I'm sure that must have changed how I read her books, based on other reviews. But I love Woolf's work, and this one is my favorite. She had an innate ability to write down the emotional complexities of many different personalities, not just her own. What a fantastic observer she must have been! And maybe a difficult friend to have around sometimes.
Woolf’s lyrical writing, while undoubtedly beautiful, is often too overpowering for me. It’s like eating so much chocolate that it makes you feel a bit queasy! In The Waves, Woolf vividly captures details of the landscapes and of the light on the sea, and the thoughts of her characters.What makes this novel more enjoyable for me, is that Woolf has a clear structure which holds everything together, and keeps the reader from drowning in her prose. The six voices - Bernard, Louis, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda - are clearly distinguishable and their voices rise and fall together like the waves. Each stage of their lives from childhood to old age is separated by a descriptive passage that matches it perfectly.
It’s clever and complex, but also accessible, and beautifully constructed and written.
@Pamela That's a fair point. I have a tendency to read only a few pages at a time in anything by Woolf, in order to give myself more time to fully absorb and process her writing. She packs so much into every sentence it seems!
Hannah wrote: "She packs so much into every sentence it seems! ..."She really does! But she also comes back round to ideas and themes over and over, so if I read too slowly I miss some of that rhythm. It’s a real dilemma with Woolf.
Mod
An experimental and stream-of-consciousness "novel" meandering through the life and experiences of six characters, always witnessed from their inner thoughts. Poetic at times, but it requires so much concentration to grasp the ever-changing shape of the individual waves of each of the lifes of the characters. But you can get a general idea of what she aimed to achieve through the use of repeated patterns and words, rapidly shifting focus, etc. Perhaps a re-read would be in order in a few years' time.
I loved hearing this read by seven actors for the six characters and narrator. The attention to details in each moment, the way they saw themselves and each other, how that changed with the years and yet a thread ran through their whole lives - all of that I thought was wonderful. I do agree with previous reviewer Jan that "Woolf has to spoil it in the final section of the book by casting aside her innovative chorus of inner feelings and reverting to a standard, dull narrative. Bernard drones on about how his life has passed, and it breaks the spell." That section seemed so unnecessary.
Read 31/01/2016-05/02/2016
Let’s start with some context. I have a few issues with Virginia Woolf. Prior to this one, I had read three of her novels. I read Orlando when I was at university. I found it entertaining and clever, with interesting things to say about gender politics. I appreciated its time travelling nature, and the sexual fluidity of the main character.
Later in my adult life, I felt I ought to read some more Woolf. ‘Ought’ is a key factor. I didn’t feel compelled to read her because I had enjoyed Orlando so much. I felt compelled because clever people who talk about books for a living say that Virginia is a Very Important Writer.
The other two books I have read are Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. I understand what Woolf was trying to achieve in each book, that she was aiming for a departure from the traditional narrative form of the novel. I can appreciate that both works are ground breaking in comparison with other works being produced at the same time. I recognise that she was a voice for women, that she wanted to demonstrate that women could be creative and experimental in art just as much as men could. Her focus on stories about her class and their drifting lack of real purpose wind me up, though. It's just dull.
In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf starts the process of detaching the narrator from the narrative form and introduces a more sensory style, where the focus is on feeling and being, rather than on telling. Unfortunately, as far as I’m concerned, Clarissa Dalloway doesn’t have a story worth telling, or feeling. She is a twittering fool, obsessed with appearance. In the context of my very English, very Northern, class-based chippiness, the book made me so angry that I wanted to burn it after I finished reading it. Oh to have a life where the worst you have to worry about is whether you married the right person, whether people will come to your party, and whether the flowers will arrive on time.
To the Lighthouse didn’t improve my opinion of Ms Woolf's writing. The trope of feeling/being rather than telling is developed further in this book, but the cast of characters left me cold. I didn’t care about Mrs Ramsay’s life. I didn’t care that she was viewed as some paragon of virtue. I didn’t care about Mr Ramsay or the acolytes who worshipped him. I didn’t care about the Young People, who seemed self obsessed to a fault. I didn’t care about Lily Briscoe or her paranoia about whether she was a good artist or not. The drifting narrative, couched in introspective recollections and observations, irked me.
Now that all of that is out of the way, let’s move on to my review of The Waves.
I was surprised by how much I liked this book. It is more interesting than the other books I've read by Virginia Woolf. In it, Woolf has succeeded in breaking free of traditional narrative form. It ceases (almost) completely to be a narrative and becomes a sense. The book is part play, part extended poem. It is an incredible flow of individual self awareness eddying and combining to form a communal sense of self, written like a spoken word performance. The style made me think of Walt Whitman’s essay-like poetry, and also of Greek tragedy, with the chorus narrating the action. I thought that Woolf got across the inner voices, and I mean deep inner voices, of the six narrating characters very well indeed. It was like overhearing how it feels to be performing the actions described, rather than imagining yourself in the place of the characters whose story is being narrated to you. We don’t overhear an internalised conversation about what has happened. Instead Woolf puts words to the sensations we feel when we are in the midst of acting. Very clever. I felt lifted out of myself as I was reading, as though I was hovering above, looking down, and at the same time as though I was seeing the action through a macro lens, so close to the characters they might feel my breath. The depiction of grief was astonishing in the way it embodied the sense of time stopping, of other people's continuation being offensive, of nothing mattering when the person who acted as anchor in your life has gone. I remember that from when my dad died. That lack of a person with which you can share the most intimate thoughts is what I feel about my mum's illness, which is itself a form of grief, but without anyone dying. The changes that friendships undergo as we age and experience shapes us were also well depicted and caused me to reflect on the friendships that I have had for many years. How easy some are, how others take more effort and a forgiving nature to sustain.
Louis and Rhoda were my favourite characters early on, although I liked Bernard, too. Louis and Rhoda are outsiders, one desperate to break in, the other trying to escape notice. Louis knows he is cleverer than his more privileged friends, but the accident of his colonial birth means he will never have the same opportunities as them. Rhoda wants to be left alone with her rich interior world. She has no interest in being fêted or admired like Jinny, and she doesn't find fulfilment in practicalities like Susan. She lacks confidence, though, because she feels that her self is the wrong kind of self to be. Bernard revels in his multiple personalities, yearns to be famous, and always has one eye on what his legacy might be. His awareness that he only really has a self while being observed by others fascinated me. Towards the end, I preferred Neville and Susan. They seemed to distill into something I understand, in this moment when I am of a similar age to them, post-Percival.
All good, then. But no. Woolf has to spoil it in the final section of the book by casting aside her innovative chorus of inner feelings and reverting to a standard, dull narrative. Bernard drones on about how his life has passed, and it breaks the spell. From a magical sphere of disembodied voices, I was pulled back to a sort of mundanity, and I had to force myself to read to the end, even though Bernard was telling me what I had worked out, even though I wasn't interested in his conscious perspective. I wonder why Woolf chose to end the book that way.
I would have rated it a 5 star read but for that last section. I still rate it a 4 star read, though. It's the best of the four books by Virginia Woolf that I've now read.