Take a photo of a barcode or cover
carduelia_carduelis 's review for:
The Waves
by Virginia Woolf
What a beautiful and bizarre novel.
The Waves ebbs and flows with the comings and goings of 6 members of a group, bound by a shared childhood.
It's a series of soliloquies, that initially are arranged in a round. You can see the children ring-a-ring-o'-roses: exploring each other's presence, inhabiting each other's spaces. As the characters grow older so too do their narratives gradually separate. Hints and impressions in childhood are grown into character traits.
The six join us in the circle at unevenly spaced periods: I would guess at ages 5, 10, 16, 20, 25, 40, 50, ...
And then, curiously, the last 50 or so pages are voiced only by Bernard. His was one of the more developed characters of the bunch but I wish he hadn't overtaken the novel at the end.
Regardless, a sense of development and individual moments permeates this novel. It is Woolf's great triumph to infuse so much detailed quiet, personal observation whilst still retaining the connectedness of the characters to their burdens and their flaws.
Be warned that it is difficult, and despite it's brief length I read it over a few weeks. The language is prose-poetry, the structure is confusing until you're at least 50 pages in, and the characters in their youth merge together (by design or not). I ended up rereading it immediately, which helped recover the structure and the details missed in the beginning the first time around - would that it were so simple for real life! Being of one of the ages the characters are visited in during the book I anticipate rereading it at a later stage and seeing if it still rings true then.
Woolf hasn't disappointed yet. Stunning.
The Waves ebbs and flows with the comings and goings of 6 members of a group, bound by a shared childhood.
It's a series of soliloquies, that initially are arranged in a round. You can see the children ring-a-ring-o'-roses: exploring each other's presence, inhabiting each other's spaces. As the characters grow older so too do their narratives gradually separate. Hints and impressions in childhood are grown into character traits.
The six join us in the circle at unevenly spaced periods: I would guess at ages 5, 10, 16, 20, 25, 40, 50, ...
And then, curiously, the last 50 or so pages are voiced only by Bernard. His was one of the more developed characters of the bunch but I wish he hadn't overtaken the novel at the end.
Regardless, a sense of development and individual moments permeates this novel. It is Woolf's great triumph to infuse so much detailed quiet, personal observation whilst still retaining the connectedness of the characters to their burdens and their flaws.
Be warned that it is difficult, and despite it's brief length I read it over a few weeks. The language is prose-poetry, the structure is confusing until you're at least 50 pages in, and the characters in their youth merge together (by design or not). I ended up rereading it immediately, which helped recover the structure and the details missed in the beginning the first time around - would that it were so simple for real life! Being of one of the ages the characters are visited in during the book I anticipate rereading it at a later stage and seeing if it still rings true then.
Woolf hasn't disappointed yet. Stunning.