The Waves

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Incredible
Review: In my opinion, The Waves is the best English Novel ever written. Through this novel, Woolf solves one of the main problems of modern writing -- the problem of subjectivity, namely, how can we connect with other people in a real way, if we are limited by our own conscious experience. In the Waves, Woolf helps us transcend our own consciousness, helps us break down the divisions between ourselves and the rest of the world through her use of language.

In The Waves, Woolf does not merely drop us into the consciousness of her characters. For example, the language at the beginning of the novel describing the very first sensory experiences of each of her characters, is too complex for a new born infant. Instead, Woolf uses sophisticated language to place the reader in the same mindset as each character, and in doing so the reader comes to have direct experience of another person outside of themselves.

Every sentence in this book describes something real and true about the world. She puts voice to experience that I didn't know that I had. She communicates the very hardness of communicating and she does it beautifully. This book changed my whole life.

The Waves is definitely a challenging read, but well worth it. I believe that anyone can enjoy this book if they are willing to put in the effort. Read it -- you will thank yourself.

Rating:
Summary: Existence through the eye of eternity
Review: In this somewhat puzzling novel the sun rises and it sets, six people grow together from infant children to old age, and the waves crash endlessly upon the shore. That is about as close as you will get to a plot in this book. Everything else that happens, school, marriage, even death, seem to be nothing more than passing intensities amid the overbearing silence that is the roar of existence.

I picked up this book after reading Mrs Dalloway. I loved Dalloway. It was the first Woolf book I had read and it blew me away. In comparison, reading The Waves was like taking a sandblaster to my eyeballs. She uses stream of consciousness as a medium to delve as deep as she possibly can into the intricacy of existence. Not much happens on a specific and literal level outside of the rising of the sun, but the endless poetry pouring forth from the perceptive cores (I'd say "minds" but I think it goes a bit beyond even that) of these six characters speaks volumes on the fearsome intensity of beauty, the vast complexity of sadness, and the endless endless isolation of the human soul.

It is at times so deep and so personal that I felt more than a bit uncomfortable reading it. The effort is well worth it however. Woolf more than any other author I have read, struggles to communicate the hidden message contained in all stories and books... A message forever clouded in meanings and phrases... Lost in its own words.

Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful Book - But Only for Students of Literature
Review: One peculiar quality of many of Woolf's novels is the fact that they are more fun to talk about - afterwards - than they are to actually read, probably because the author had very peculiar ideas about what she wanted her novels to do. Because Woolf was always pushing the envelope of what a novel was, many of her books are very difficult to read. The Waves is probably the most difficult read this reviewer (and student of literature) has ever encountered.

The lives of six friends are presented from childhood in a series of interior monologues. There's a glacial slowness that challenges our yen for action, and the episodic nature of the book (covering decades) is not really designed to hold our attention. The point of the book is in how its characters perceive themselves and each other, but since we never get "outside" to form an objective opinion, it's difficult to care what's going to happen next. Maybe that's good, because there's only one significant event that transpires during this long novel (a sad death), and if there's even the slightest hint of humor in the book, this reviewer missed it.

Other "modern" novelists, such as William Faulkner, propose that each of us has our own unique inner voice, and they try to make their characters' interior monologues reflect these differences. But Woolf implies that these inner voices are all the same, or at least all six of these characters inner voices are all the same, perhaps by virtue of certain similarities in their environment. Or was it merely a shortage of imagination (or, dare one suggest, technique?) on the part of the author? In any case, this reviewer found that the sameness of the six characters' narrative voices tended to overpower the fact that they each had their own individual lives and personalities.

Lest one get the wrong impression, this is indeed a beautiful book. Woolf's prose has a sonorous quality that borders on poetry, yet is so exhausting that it's hard to get through more than a few pages at a sitting. The first few dozen pages are especially trying, since we are never formally introduced to the characters, and it takes some time before their personalities are established.

Some critics consider The Waves Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, and certainly it is the most extreme example of the interior monologue she ever produced. But because this review is for the general public rather than the literary press, I can not in good conscience recommend this book. Certainly it's a novel you'll either love or hate, and since you're reading reviews of Virginia Woolf novels, there's at least a chance you'll love it, but I'm giving it two stars, since despite its merits, the average man-on-the street won't get through 10 pages of it. Add one star if you are female, since you are likely more interested in the subtleties of human relationships than most men. Add another star if you majored in English at college, and one more if you've done graduate work in English. Satisfied? For the rest of us, Woolf's To the Lighthouse is a warm, delightful novel about art and family and the passage of time that nearly everyone should enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: Language as Action
Review: With Woolf, as with Proust, it is easy to accuse the writing of being "dull" and lacking action or even plot. But for these authors the language itself IS the action. Nothing happens and yet everything happens. Just as their work tends to shy away from the conventions of the novel, I believe they are to be read just as unconventionally as they were written. Specifically, The Waves reads like the longest prose poem in the history of the language. When read as a "novel" it does indeed become every bit as difficult as a lot of readers say it is. Though Woolf attempts to differentiate between characters as though straining to achieve at least the skeletal image of the "novel," she does this only superficially by drifting from one name to another. The unwavering language maintains precisely the same tone and intensity throughout, and the focus of Woolf's lucid inquiry never drifts far from its central themes. The book is a series of dramatic monologues that blend indistinguishably into one another. Woolf was preoccupied here with mortality, transience, loneliness and the meaning of friendship, not with telling a story (though a story does get told in the process). As a poem, though, it reads like a great lost chapter of the Bible; a curious, explosive and inward lexicon of the human experience so sacred in its expression as to be humanly impossible. "All mists curl off the roof of my being," Woolf muses in one of the book's most gorgeous lines. It is a perfect description of the alert reader's response: an exuberance bordering on epiphany. If Dickinson is right and the great poem makes one feel as though the top of one's head has been sawn off, then The Waves is a great poem. There have been many great writers, but few who approach the eloquent desperation of this text.