Drew Rhine’s Reviews > Jacob's Room & The Waves: Two Complete Novels > Status Update

Woolf has apparently built this story around how there is some terrible existential pain that occurs in childhood which seems never to be relieved, and is all-informing of our habits and desires forthwith. Is that the great stamping beast that she keeps mentioning? Maybe its the awareness of mortality striking every child in its own unique way. That seems to be only part of it. The not-knowing is the driving force.

They want a plot, do they? They want a reason? It is not enough for them, this ordinary scene. It is not enough to wait for the thing to be said as if it were written; to see the sentence lay its dab of clay precisely on the right place, making character; to perceive, suddenly some group in outline against the sky. Yet if they want violence, I have seen death and murder and suicide all in one room.

Reckless and random the cars race and roar and hunt us to death like bloodhounds. I am alone in a hostile world. The human face is hideous. This is to my liking. I want publicity and violence and to be dashed like a stone on the rocks. I like factory chimneys and cranes and lorries. I like the passing of face and face and face, deformed, indifferent. I am sick of prettiness; I am sick of privacy.

woolf is constantly reminding me of that unbearable feeling when everything seems as if it has too much meaning. too much art, too much emotion to be gleamed from all things, social and natural and scientific, subtle and immediate, and the realization that it is on you the observer to communicate these feelings, to either get them out of you or swallow them back. inner worlds examining and reflecting the outer! wowza

what tense is she even writing in here? first person soliloquies stitched together into a third-person narrative? told in past tense, everyone speaking in present tense? metaphors building on metaphors so that one person's wild horses' spectral riders are another person's body and soul? crazy shit. loving this very much

Maybe it's just because I'm catching on to what Woolf is doing quicker in The Waves, but I am loving it right away. I love this expression of "simple" childhood wonders through "mature" complex language, but at the same time it is still childish in its complete lack of self-awareness or cynicism. Through the kid's eyes and with her poetic language it's like the emotional perception of things is the only reality.

Finished Jacob's Room and it was lovely and meandering the whole way through. If there was connection between many events, it went over my head, but I was always able to appreciate Woolf's ability to languish in feeling. I love the empathy with which she writes, however the characters themselves being all well-off moody English folk are not so interesting on their own.