dukegregory 's review for:

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

5.0

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Quite wonderful. Virginia woolf always seems to fit my inclinations sublimely. This is very much a more experimental work for an author already obsessed with pushing the sentence to its limit. This book is barely a novel, in many ways instead reading more like a play with novelistic leanings, but even that doesn't suffice to describe the form. There is melancholy seeping from every turn of phrase, every description of the sun's movements, every transition from soliloquy to soliloquy. A lot about death, the passage of time, how we never truly ascertain our identity as we age, how our perception of self in many ways is a refraction/accumulation of the perceptions that others hold of us. Maybe my new favorite Woolf? Who knows. She can do no wrong as far as I can tell.