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A review by emmaisnotavampire
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Have you ever looked at someone and wondered, what is going on inside their head? Well, it seems like Virginia Woolf tries to answer that very same question with this book.
Being the Pirandello nerd that I am, this felt like Woolf’s version of Sei Personaggi in Cerca di Autore, but if Pirandello’s characters look for someone to tell their story so that they can live, these live without the need for a story, telling themselves only through their thoughts. From innocence and infancy to old age and death, a bildungsroman of the brain.
The book is a beautiful exploration of the mechanisms of the mind, split into different sensibilities and mindsets with one thing in common: dissatisfaction. Bernard looks for sense, Neville for beauty, Louis for perfection, Susan for peace, Jinny for fun, Rhoda for self. They are all after a goal, a purpose, happiness and contempt, but they fail: what Woolf seems to say is that ultimately we are all doomed to succumb to the innate melancholy of the human conscience, whatever we do to try and escape it.
As always, the author’s prose is mesmerisingly poetic, and I especially appreciated the parallels she built between the characters’ inner worlds and the outside one, through highly metaphorical natural descriptions. However, it is precisely the lyrical quality of the soliloquies which makes it difficult to follow the narrative, and though it surely fascinates the reader its abstract elements also leave them lost.
I love Virginia Woolf, but I will never cease to believe it takes a lot of brains to fully understand her work.
Being the Pirandello nerd that I am, this felt like Woolf’s version of Sei Personaggi in Cerca di Autore, but if Pirandello’s characters look for someone to tell their story so that they can live, these live without the need for a story, telling themselves only through their thoughts. From innocence and infancy to old age and death, a bildungsroman of the brain.
The book is a beautiful exploration of the mechanisms of the mind, split into different sensibilities and mindsets with one thing in common: dissatisfaction. Bernard looks for sense, Neville for beauty, Louis for perfection, Susan for peace, Jinny for fun, Rhoda for self. They are all after a goal, a purpose, happiness and contempt, but they fail: what Woolf seems to say is that ultimately we are all doomed to succumb to the innate melancholy of the human conscience, whatever we do to try and escape it.
As always, the author’s prose is mesmerisingly poetic, and I especially appreciated the parallels she built between the characters’ inner worlds and the outside one, through highly metaphorical natural descriptions. However, it is precisely the lyrical quality of the soliloquies which makes it difficult to follow the narrative, and though it surely fascinates the reader its abstract elements also leave them lost.
I love Virginia Woolf, but I will never cease to believe it takes a lot of brains to fully understand her work.