Wow wow wow wow. What an amaaaaazing book. It’s in fact the fourth Woolf that I’ve read but it blows everything she’s done before completely out of the water. There are hints of what is to come in the middle section of her previous novel To the Lighthouse but to pull off a 200 page novel of such astounding prose is nothing short of genius. Why did this woman never win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

There are six human characters in this book. Two other characters dominate them: the sea and time itself. The book opens with a beautiful short section describing dawn over the sea. These passages of the sea, in italics in my version, are scattered throughout the novel and encompass the span of a single day. But the ’story’ starts with the six characters as children and ends with their lives at the end of the book.

What makes the novel so wonderful is the style that Woolf has employed. It is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It is entirely composed of the speech of the characters but this speech is not conversation. Instead it’s like the characters are describing themselves, their thoughts, their lives, their world to the reader. It’s utterly ethereal and some of the most beautiful prose, if not the most beautiful, that I’ve come across.

And throughout the novel, there are observations on so many aspects of life and all its stages which are full of pathos or wit or a mixture of both. It’s just sumptious.

Best read in one sitting, in silence and in isolation. ( )

From my blog: http://weelittleactress.blogspot.com

"For now my body, my companion, which is always sending its signals, the rough black 'No,' the golden 'Come' in rapid running arrows of sensation, beckons. Some one moves. Did I raise my arm? Did I look? Did my yellow scarf with the strawberry spots float and signal? He has broken from the wall. He follows. I am pursued through the forest. All is rapt, all is nocturnal and the parrots go screaming through the branches. All my senses stand erect. Now I feel the roughness of the fibre of the curtain through which I push; now I feel the cold iron railing and its blistered paint beneath my palm. Now the cool tide of darkness breaks its waters over me. We are out of doors. Night opens; night traversed by wandering moths; night hiding lovers roaming to adventure. I smell roses; I smell violets; I see red and blue just hidden. Now gravel is under my shoes; now grass. Up reel the tall backs of houses guilty with lights. All London is uneasy with flashing lights. Now let us sing our love song - Come, come, come. Now my gold signal is like a dragon-fly flying taut. Jug, jug, jug, I sing like the nightingale whose melody is crowded in the too narrow passage of her throat. Now I hear crash and rending of boughs and the crack of antlers as if the beasts of the forest were all hunting, all rearing high and plunging down among the thorns. One has pierced me. One is driven deep within me. And velvet flowers and leaves whose coolness has been stood in water wash me round, and sheathe me, embalming me."

- Virginia Woolf's The Waves

Recommended Tea: The Republic of Tea's British Breakfast

When I think about explaining why I loved this book, I find myself completely overwhelmed. To put it as simply as possible, The Waves is probably the most honest, beautiful thing that I have ever read. I found myself sometimes reading a page two or three times, as if each sentence was a long hot bath that I desperately did not want to get out of.

Someone once said that Patsy Cline's singing voice was the voice that they always dreamed they had - the voice that, they felt, matched their soul. All I could think upon reading The Waves was - if my soul had a voice, I would want it to be Virginia Woolf's. The language is like music, the imagery is vivid, the characters are so real. Woolf once said that The Waves was not about different individuals, but rather about all of the different individuals that live inside of us that are provoked to appear at various points in our lives. There is the social butterfly, the great orator, the mother, the recluse, the outsider - all of these exist within us, and all of these are truthful as they exist within us.

Virginia Woolf understood that human nature - reality - is too complex to be summed up with words, but (miraculously!) she is able to do just that. With this work, Woolf has shown me, beautifully shown me, the truth about life - it is an ocean, and our souls are boats piled full of people attempting to brave the waves. ( )

I knew Woolf had written some experimental stuff and this book was amazing. It's all narrative, but inside quotes and voiced by the characters. Very dreamy and elegant diction, surreal in that it's young kids making grand pronouncements that they couldn't possibly be capable of thinking. It's nice to read a book that goes out and defines its own style and really does something with it. Best thing I've read since Infinite Jest. ( )

Lectura de grupo de 010/2007 ( )

I was in my mid-twenties when I first read THE WAVES. Frankly, it gave me the same willies (spooky feelings) that I got when I read Flannery O'Connor's short stories. Her contemporaries wer always complaining that Mrs. Woolf's novels were not quite real. Well, I ask you: have you ever come across a 'real' novel? Isn't it like wondering what Hamlet was doing before the play got started. Playing whist? Did Poldy REALLY have a bar of lemon soap in his pocket? Who can tell for sure, not even Harold.
A. Huxley felt that her novels were bloodless. So did Lawrence. I am certain of one thing: that we shouldn't be influenced by another opinion on the subject of novels or any other form of art. The redoubtable David Herbert Lawrence, notwithstanding.
By the way, it still gives me the shakes, but it is doubtlessly a powerful work of art. But don't take my word for it. ( )