The Waves: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition

By Virginia Woolf and Mark Hussey

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”

Innovative and deeply poetic, The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece. It begins with six children—three boys and three girls—playing in a garden by the sea, and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing their inner lives: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jan 1, 1950
• ISBN: 9780547678849

Virginia Woolf

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.

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Copyright

The Waves

About the Author

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Copyright 1931 by Harcourt, Inc.

Copyright renewed 1959 by Leonard Woolf

All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Woolf, Virginia Stephen, 1882–1941.

The waves.

[A Harvest book]

Reprint of the ed. published by Harcourt Brace, New York

I. Title.

[PZ3.W884Wav 1978] [PR6045.072]

823'.9'12 77-92142

ISBN 0-15-694960-1

Cover design by Christopher Moisan

Cover illustration by Wayne Pate / Illustration Division

eISBN 978-0-547-67884-9

v3.0220

THE sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow, spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp reused it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue fingerprint of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.

I SEE a ring, said Bernard, hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.

I see a slab of pale yellow, said Susan, spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.

I hear a sound, said Rhoda, cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down.

I see a globe, said Neville, hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.

I see a crimson tassel, said Jinny, twisted with gold threads.

I hear something stamping, said Louis. A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.

Look at the spider’s web on the corner of the balcony, said Bernard. It has beads of water on it, drops of white light.

The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears, said Susan.

A shadow falls on the path, said Louis, like an elbow bent.

Islands of light are swimming on the grass, said Rhoda. They have fallen through the trees.

The birds’ eyes are bright in the tunnels between the leaves, said Neville.

The stalks are covered with harsh, short hairs, said Jinny, and drops of water have stuck to them.

A caterpillar is curled in a green ring, said Susan, notched with blunt feet.

The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the blades behind him, said Rhoda.

And burning lights from the window-panes flash in and out on the grasses, said Louis.

Stones are cold to my feet, said Neville. I feel each one, round or pointed, separately.

The back of my hand burns, said Jinny, but the palm is clammy and damp with dew.

Now the cock crows like a spurt of hard, red water in the white tide, said Bernard.

Birds are singing up and down and in and out all round us, said Susan.

The beast stamps; the elephant with its foot chained; the great brute on the beach stamps, said Louis.

Look at the house, said Jinny, with all its windows white with blinds.

Cold water begins to run from the scullery tap, said Rhoda, over the mackerel in the bowl.

The walls are cracked with gold cracks, said Bernard, and there are blue, finger-shaped shadows of leaves beneath the windows.

Now Mrs. Constable pulls up her thick, black stockings, said Susan.

When the smoke rises, sleep curls off the roof like a mist, said Louis.

The birds sang in chorus first, said Rhoda. Now the scullery door is unbarred. Off they fly. Off they fly like a fling of seed. But one sings by the bedroom window alone.

Bubbles form on the floor of the saucepan, said Jinny. Then they rise, quicker and quicker in a silver chain to the top.

Now Biddy scrapes the fish-scales with a jagged knife on to a wooden board, said Neville.

The dining-room window is dark blue now, said Bernard, and the air ripples above the chimneys.

A swallow is perched on the lightning-conductor, said Susan. And Biddy has smacked down the bucket on the kitchen flags.

That is the first stroke of the church bell, said Louis. Then the others follow; one, two; one, two; one, two.

Look at the table-cloth, flying white along the table, said Rhoda. Now there are rounds of white china, and silver streaks beside each plate.

Suddenly a bee booms in my ear, said Neville. It is here; it is past.

I burn, I shiver, said Jinny, out of this sun, into this shadow.

Now they have all gone, said Louis. "I am alone. They have gone into the house for breakfast, and I am left standing by the wall among the flowers. It is very early, before lessons. Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. Stalks rise from the black hollows beneath. The flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs. Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing. I am a boy in grey flannels with a belt fastened by a brass snake up here. Down there my eyes are the lidless eyes of a stone figure in a desert by the Nile. I see women passing with red pitchers to the river; I see camels swaying and men in turbans. I hear tramplings, tremblings, stirrings round me.

Up here Bernard, Neville, Jinny and Susan (but not Rhoda) skim the flower-beds with their nets. They skim the butterflies from the nodding tops of the flowers. They brush the surface of the world. Their nets are full of fluttering wings. ‘Louis! Louis! Louis!’ they shout. But they cannot see me. I am on the other side of the hedge. There are only little eyeholes among the leaves. Oh, Lord, let them pass. Lord, let them lay their butterflies on a pocket-handkerchief on the gravel. Let them count out their tortoise-shells, their red admirals and cabbage whites. But let me be unseen. I am green as a yew tree in the shade of the hedge. My hair is made of leaves. I am rooted to the middle of the earth. My body is a stalk. I press the stalk. A drop oozes from the hole at the mouth and slowly, thickly, grows larger and larger. Now something pink passes the eyehole. Now an eyebeam is slid through the chink. Its beam strikes me. I am a boy in a grey flannel suit. She has found me. I am struck on the nape of the neck. She has kissed me. All is shattered.

I was running, said Jinny, after breakfast. I saw leaves moving in a hole in the hedge. I thought, ‘That is a bird on its nest.’ I parted them and looked; but there was no bird on a nest. The leaves went on moving. I was frightened. I ran past Susan, past Rhoda, and Neville and Bernard in the tool-house talking. I cried as I ran, faster and faster. What moved the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs? And I dashed in here, seeing you green as a bush, like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed. ‘Is he dead?’ I thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving, though there is nothing to move them. Now I smell geraniums; I smell earth mould. I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering flung over you.

Through the chink in the hedge, said Susan, I saw her kiss him. I raised my head from my flower-pot and looked through a chink in the hedge. I saw her kiss him. I saw them, Jinny and Louis, kissing. Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons. I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and die there.

Susan has passed us, said Bernard. "She has passed the tool-house door with her handkerchief screwed into a ball. She was not crying, but her eyes, which are so beautiful, were narrow as cats’ eyes before they spring. I shall follow her, Neville. I shall go gently behind her, to be at hand, with my curiosity, to comfort her when she bursts out in a rage and thinks, I am alone.’

Now she walks across the field with a swing, nonchalantly, to deceive us. Then she comes to the dip; she thinks she is unseen; she begins to run with her fists clenched in front of her. Her nails meet in the ball of her pocket-handkerchief. She is making for the beech woods out of the light. She spreads her arms as she comes to them and takes to the shade like a swimmer. But she is blind after the light and trips and flings herself down on the roots under the trees, where the light seems to pant in and out, in and out. The branches heave up and down. There is agitation and trouble here. There is gloom. The light is fitful. There is anguish here. The roots make a skeleton on the ground, with dead leaves heaped in the angles. Susan has spread her anguish out. Her pocket-handkerchief is laid on the roots of the beech trees and she sobs, sitting crumpled where she has fallen.

I saw her kiss him, said Susan. I looked between the leaves and saw her. She danced in flecked with diamonds light as dust. And I am squat, Bernard, I am short. I have eyes that look close to the ground and see insects in the grass. The yellow warmth in my side turned to stone when I saw Jinny kiss Louis. I shall eat grass and die in a ditch in the brown water where dead leaves have rotted.

I saw you go, said Bernard. As you passed the door of the tool-house I heard you cry, ‘I am unhappy.’ I put down my knife. I was making boats out of firewood with Neville. And my hair is untidy, because when Mrs. Constable told me to brush it there was a fly in a web, and I asked, ‘Shall I free the fly? Shall I let the fly be eaten?’ So I am late always. My hair is unbrushed and these chips of wood stick in it. When I heard you cry I followed you, and saw you put down your handkerchief, screwed up, with its rage, with its hate, knotted in it. But soon that will cease. Our bodies are close now. You hear me breathe. You see the beetle too carrying off a leaf on its back. It runs this way, then that way, so that even your desire while you watch the beetle, to possess one single thing (it is Louis now) must waver, like the light in and out of the beech leaves; and then words, moving darkly, in the depths of your mind will break up this knot of hardness, screwed in your pocket-handkerchief.

I love, said Susan, and I hate. I desire one thing only. My eyes are hard. Jinny’s eyes break into a thousand lights. Rhoda’s are like those pale flowers to which moths come in the evening. Yours grow full and brim and never break. But I am already set on my pursuit. I see insects in the grass. Though my mother still knits white socks for me and hems pinafores and I am a child, I love and I hate.

But when we sit together, close, said Bernard, we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.

I see the beetle, said Susan. It is black, I see; it is green, I see; I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.

Now, said Bernard, "let us explore. There is the white house lying among the trees. It lies down there ever so far beneath us. We shall sink like swimmers just touching the ground with the tips of their toes. We shall sink through the green air of the leaves, Susan. We sink as we run. The waves close over us, the beech leaves meet above our heads. There is the stable clock with its gilt hands shining. Those are the flats and heights of the roofs of the great house. There is the stable-boy clattering in the yard in rubber-boots. That is Elvedon.

"Now we have fallen through the tree-tops to the earth. The air no longer rolls its long, unhappy, purple waves over us. We touch earth; we tread ground. That is the close-clipped hedge of the ladies’ garden. There they walk at noon, with scissors, clipping roses. Now we are in the ringed wood with the wall round it. This is Elvedon. I have seen signposts at the crossroads with one arm pointing ‘To Elvedon.’ No one has been there. The ferns smell very strong, and there are red funguses growing beneath them. Now we wake the sleeping daws who have never seen a human form; now we tread on rotten oak apples, red with age and slippery. There is a ring of wall round this wood; nobody comes here. Listen! That is the flop of a giant toad in the undergrowth; that is the patter of some primeval fir-cone falling to rot among the ferns.

Put your foot on this brick. Look over the wall. That is Elvedon. The lady sits between the two long windows, writing. The gardeners sweep the lawn with giant brooms. We are the first to come here. We are the discoverers of an unknown land. Do not stir; if the gardeners saw us they would shoot us. We should be nailed like stoats to the stable door. Look! Do not move. Grasp the ferns tight on the top of the wall.

I see the lady writing. I see the gardeners sweeping, said Susan. If we died here, nobody would bury us.

Run! said Bernard. "Run! The gardener with the black beard has seen us! We shall be shot! We shall be shot like jays and pinned to the wall! We are in a hostile country. We must escape to the beech wood. We must hide under the trees. I turned a twig as we came. There is a secret path. Bend as low as you can. Follow without looking back. They will think we are foxes. Run!

Now we are safe. Now we can stand upright again. Now we can stretch our arms in this high canopy, in this vast wood. I hear nothing. That is only the murmur of the waves in the air. That is a wood-pigeon breaking cover in the tops of the beech trees. The pigeon beats the air; the pigeon beats the air with wooden wings.

Now you trail away, said Susan, making phrases. Now you mount like an air-ball’s string, higher and higher through the layers of the leaves, out of reach. Now you lag. Now you tug at my skirts, looking back, making phrases. You have escaped me. Here is the garden. Here is the hedge. Here is Rhoda on the path rocking petals to and fro in her brown basin.

All my ships are white, said Rhoda. I do not want red petals of hollyhocks or geranium. I want white petals that float when I tip the basin up. I have a fleet now swimming from shore to shore. I will drop a twig in as a raft for a drowning sailor. I will drop a stone in and see bubbles rise from the depths of the sea. Neville has gone and Susan has gone; Jinny is in the kitchen garden picking currants with Louis perhaps. I have a short time alone, while Miss Hudson spreads our copy-books on the schoolroom table. I have a short space of freedom. I have picked all the fallen petals and made them swim. I have put raindrops in some. I will plant a lighthouse here, a head of Sweet Alice. And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves. Some will founder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chains. The waves rise; their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter and the creepers . . .

Where is Bernard? said Neville. He has my knife. We were in the tool-shed making boats, and Susan came past the door. And Bernard dropped his boat and went after her taking my knife, the sharp one that cuts the keel. He is like a dangling wire, a broken bell-pull, always twangling. He is like the seaweed hung outside the window, damp now, now dry. He leaves me in the lurch; he follows Susan; and if Susan cries he will take my knife and tell her stories. The big blade is an emperor; the broken blade a Negro. I hate dangling things; I hate dampish things. I hate wandering and mixing things together. Now the bell rings and we shall be late. Now we must drop our toys. Now we must go in together. The copy-books are laid out side by side on the green baize table.

I will not conjugate the verb, said Louis, until Bernard has said it. My father is a banker in Brisbane and I speak with an Australian accent. I will wait and copy Bernard. He is English. They are all English. Susan’s father is a clergyman. Rhoda has no father. Bernard and Neville are the sons of gentlemen. Jinny lives with her grandmother in London. Now they suck their pens. Now they twist their copy-books, and, looking sideways at Miss Hudson, count the purple buttons on her bodice. Bernard has a chip in his hair. Susan has a red look in her eyes. Both are flushed. But I am pale; I am neat, and my knickerbockers are drawn together by a belt with a brass snake. I know the lesson by heart. I know more than they will ever know. I know my cases and my genders; I could know everything in the world if I wished. But I do not wish to come to the top and say my lesson. My roots are threaded, like fibres in a flower-pot, round and round about the world. I do not wish to come to the top and live in the light of this great clock, yellow-faced, which ticks and ticks. Jinny and Susan, Bernard and Neville bind themselves into a thong with which to lash me. They laugh at my neatness, at my Australian accent. I will now try to imitate Bernard softly lisping Latin.

Those are white words, said Susan, like stones one picks up by the seashore.

They flick their tails right and left as I speak them, said Bernard. They wag their tails; they flick their tails; they move through the air in flocks, now this way, now that way, moving all together, now dividing, now coming together.

Those are yellow words, those are fiery words, said Jinny. I should like a fiery dress, a yellow dress, a fulvous dress to wear in the evening.

Each tense, said Neville, means differently. There is an order in this world; there are distinctions, there are differences in this world, upon whose verge I step. For this is only a beginning.

Now Miss Hudson, said Rhoda, "has shut the book. Now the terror is beginning. Now taking her lump of chalk she draws figures, six, seven, eight, and then a cross and then a line on the blackboard. What is the answer? The others look; they look with understanding. Louis writes; Susan writes; Neville writes; Jinny writes; even Bernard has now begun to write. But I cannot write. I see only figures. The others are handing in their answers, one by one. Now it is my turn. But I

Reviews for The Waves

[funstm · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I really want to love Virginia Woolf. But I don't. Her writing is exhausting and I just don't get it.

[andy5185 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh Virginia Woolf...my greatest inspiration for writing style and gender. She was way ahead of her time in so many ways. The Waves is my favorite because it introduced me to the stream of consciousness style of writing, of the intimacy of being inside the head of a character. It is an experimental style novel with prose that reads a lot like poetry and the story is told through six children's own soliloquies. Themes of individuality, self, community also seem almost to be a part of the same one consciousness. When I first encountered this book I was stunned by the concept and fell in love with it. There is nothing else like reading Virginia Woolf.

[jonbrammer-788089 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The rare five star review. Woolf as much as any modernist writer is able to capture the feeling of consciousness, the particular impressionistic moment in nature, in a restaurant, on the tube. Here we have a Faulknerian changing of perspective that she plays with in To the Lighthouse and Orlando. The whole thing has to wash over you, like a Renoir; you can spend time lost in the details. The paragraphs stand alone as prose poems. It rewards slow reading, the teasing out meaning as the characters shift and age and mourn and experience the world.

[ghost_boy-691444 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Woolf has done it again with the cross genre novels. Yes this is a novel, but it is also a long poem. The best thing about this story is that all you have to know about the plot is that six friends are talking about the life and death of their friend. Why would a reader want to read a book with little plot and hardly any action? This book is all about the words and imagery. Like the title says, just sit back and listen to waves.

There were several things I liked abut this book. One reason is that I really liked how she constantly used words about the ocean. She also did a good job using the colors of green and blue. Then when the day was almost over, she used the colors of the sunset. Perfect. She also used the them of valuing life and death, like she does in her other books. I should also note that this book really shows her stream of consciousness writing style.

[kristykay22 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'd say that 80% of the reason I started a Virginia Woolf book club was so that I could re-read this one with a group of friends. Here Woolf follows a group of six friends from their early childhood through old age, but what we see are their thoughts, impressions, and inner workings, with just a hint of what is happening in their outside life. Much like Mrs. Dalloway, reading this again when you are in your mid-40s makes the book hit a lot differently than it did when I was in my early 20s. The chapter in their young adulthood where the characters react to their idolized school friend Percival's death is one of the most affecting and accurate descriptions of grieving that I've ever read, and it brought back my own first brush with death as a young adult (love you, Carlos) with an unexpected gut punch. Not Woolf's easiest read, but one of her most rewarding. Stick with it for the final chapter with Bernard which is one of the best things I've ever read. [Also working on a The Waves is the Breakfast Club theory -- Rhoda is obviously Ally Sheedy and Jinny is definitely Molly Ringwald. Still need to flesh out the rest of this hypothesis....]

[lethalmauve · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart."The trench of memories runs deep and dark. Whenever pulled down its depths, they engulf with resounding, blinding pressure vivid and vibrant. A hundred emotions hit all at once, successively, divisibly, conflictingly. Virginia Woolf's The Waves is not only a trench but the shoreline, the rocks, the ship where these memories caress, crash, and cradle. It isn't only about reminiscences. But also the intimate creation of memories in different dimensions of time and space. They overlap, split, dance.In sometimes dreamlike, other times too tangible soliloquies of six friends, this extraordinary, profound novel transports to montages of lives interconnected; some of them graze each other for seconds, at times touch for years, others make irreversible dents. Their pivot is a voiceless seventh friend whose departure rippled throughout earthly time. Death, like love, is a cosmic event; mourning is sporadic but perpetual. And breathing doesn't come easy with reading Woolf's prose; it holds at the sight of beauty; it sighs at familiarity; it labours at the captured entirety and poetry of living ("I said life has been imperfect, an unfinished phrase.") What an intense, tearful 200 pages as it eventually leaves for the arms of the gloaming skies. And bodies consumed by its waters will be washed ashore, choking but alive.

[stillatim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

At last, I have read a Woolf book which doesn't live up to the hype. The Waves is an interesting experiment, as most of her books are, but this one feels much clunkier than the others. That's perhaps by design; if, say, Dalloway is an opera, this is an oratorio, or perhaps just someone standing on stage reading a script with excessive use of recitativo.

Others have become rapt by the language. I was, comparatively, unmoved; it reminds me of the way mediocre poets... read... their... POETRY ... inpublic, as if every line and every word were too freighted with meaning to be passed over, until the poem's end, when the poet collapses under the weight of his own genius. I'm sure Woolf knew that, but wanted to give it a go anyway.

Despite these flaws, it's still Woolf, and she's still trying new things, and almost every other novelist is, at best, worse than her worst, and less interesting than her least interesting.

[margaretfield · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

very experimental writing; six characters; six voices

[wellsie-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For the unprepared reader the first hundred pages can be as baffling as an unknown code. But once the code is cracked, the whole experiment has a brilliant simplicity. Imagine this: a biography of you and your five best friends. From early childhood to death. Told not within the usual matrix of bald accountable facts, social landmarks of achievement and failure. But through a linguistic transposition of the ebb and flow, the forging and eroding, of the waves of our inner life. Those secret and unspoken moments known only to ourselves when we feel at our most isolated or connected, our most transfigured, lost or unknowable. The narrative a fluid continuum where all six of you are continually merging and separating in a fellowship and divorce of feeling. The six of you ultimately becoming one voice endeavouring to give shape to this one shared life. So The Waves is the biography of six characters, all of whom speak for the other five as much as for themselves. But it's a new kind of biography. A biography of sensibility. A kind of archaeology excavating identity entirely from what’s buried and sacrosanct. Epiphanies, private moments of triumph and failure - or what Virginia Woolf called "moments of being". Virginia Woolf speaks somewhere of her earliest childhood memory – of being in bed as a very young child and listening to the sound of the waves distantly breaking on the beach out in the night. She believed the experience remained at the very heart of her inner life, a kind of oracle. The native ground from where all her shoots would spring forth. Authenticity, for her, was to be found in the secret and unspoken experiences of life, her “moments of being”. All six characters in The Waves experience a similar crucible childhood moment. A haunting moment of sensibility which will subsequently act as a motif in the quest to know intimacy and achieve identity. The opening section of The Waves, a depiction of the dawning of day, calls to mind the act of creation itself. For she is questioning the origins and nature of consciousness in this novel. Except no god appears. Instead we see nature as a dispassionate encompassing force locked into its relentless merciless rhythms. The first section introduces us to the six children and their first impressions of the world around them. Baptism comes here, not in church, but when the nurse squeezes a sponge and sends rivulets of sensation down the spines of the six children. An early indication of how Woolf will concentrate on private rather than public events to build the biographies of her six characters. By the end of the first part all six are identifying themselves in relation to each other, all six are struggling with fears and insecurities, all six jarred and flailing in their attempts to achieve identity – as for example Rhoda: “Let me pull myself out of these waters. But they heap themselves on me; they sweep me between their great shoulders; I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing.”Each section depicts the next phase in the lifespan of the characters. And in each section prevails the endless repetition of the sound and rhythm of the waves. Ultimately the suggestion is that it’s only through sensibility, our creative inner life, that we are able to achieve love, forge abiding worth and find the fellowship that are the principle sources of light and warmth in life. It’s left to Bernard, the writer, to draw some sort of conclusion: “And in me too the wave rises.it swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man’s, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death.”

[japaul22 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In The Waves, Virginia Woolf has created a masterpiece. From the elegant prose to the innovative structure (yes, innovative even at a distance of almost 85 years) to the philosophy life and death, this book is a revelation. I found it both unsettling and oddly comforting. Woolf uses the friendship of six people, three men and three women, to discover both the living world and death. The book is written in an almost poetic style, sticking largely to interior speak. There is very little direct interaction between the friends. There are nine sections, presented chronologically that range from early childhood through school, middle age, and the end of life. The writing is odd – it’s hard to figure out if you’re supposed to believe these people are really thinking these poetic words or is it almost what the brain sees and processes before we’d actually put language to it? In the end it doesn’t matter because it’s beautiful and different and therefore more impactful. I read the paperback book with a pencil in hand – underlining passages, writing questions, and making connections – something I’ve not done since college but that made a big difference in my reading. This is a book that deserves to be analyzed and I intend to do some research on it after I let it settle and form some of my own opinions. It is also a book to be reread and I’m sure it will mean something different to me over the decades to come. On a personal note, many of you know that my dad died very quickly and unexpectedly this year way too young – only 63. I think this book meant something much different to me after that experience than it would have before. The whole last section of Bernard’s musing on his life and inevitable death really struck me as a gradual personal acceptance of death and separation from earthly matters. That is, until the last paragraph. I’m obviously pretty blown away by this book. It’s been a while since I read something both challenging to read and personal at the same time. I think it’s impressive that Woolf was able to do both – stretch a reader’s boundaries in language and form but still make a personal book that can be deeply connected to. Fascinating.

[danlai-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is poetry, and life, and insecurity, and growing, maturing, and love, and work, and pain, and more poetry, and summer and winter and spring and fall, and friendship, and desire, and time, and memory, then death, while the waves crash on.

[proustitute_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night; who turn over in their sleep, who utter their confused cries, who put out their phantom fingers and clutch at me as I try to escape—shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.My umpteenth reading of The Waves and it still floors me. There's not a wasted word here: Woolf's attention to rhythm—she was listening to Beethoven's String Quartet in B-flat Minor, Opus 130 while writing this novel, and Beethoven's nuances are found in her prose at all turns—and the ways in which she questions subjectivity, interpersonal relations, the ways in which we are connected and yet disparate from those around us are on display here more so than in any of her other fictional works.

The last section is sadly not as famous as the last section in Joyce's Ulysses, but it may well be even more gut-wrenchingly brutal in its philosophical underpinnings and the ways in which Woolf engages with poetics to sustain the flow of her inquiries into what it means to be human. On each reading there is something more to be found here, something more to be learned, something to relish and treasure, some keen diamond-edged truth that slices just as much as it illuminates.

A book that can never have an equal, hands down.

[amelish · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is such a confusing book, if you try and follow the plot exactly. Never mind what happens or doesn't happen, reading The Waves is like being underwater and glimpsing large shapes moving in the murky depths, and seeing wobbly shapes in the sky up through the water, and surfacing for brief moments in brilliant sunshine with salt spray splashing you in the eyes and a glittering city spread out in the near distance, before you're plunged bracingly into an icy pool or quietly re-embraced by the warm bath whence you came. Sometimes you're floating limply among fronds of seaweed with tropical fishies nibbling at your extremities, and sometimes there's a roar in your ears as you swim laps with bubbles streaming from your nose. It's a constantly changing experience, but there's a general sense of not seeing quite clearly but not really caring.

I used to give people this book for birthdays and what-have-you, which may have been obnoxious.

[helynrob · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

i tried! i really tried to like this one. beautiful writing, the narrative structure is interesting...but it left me with a sense of detachment that made it difficult to grow attached to the characters.

[miguelnunonave · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I actually enjoy experimental modern books - but this one simply didn't do it for me. Far too many introspective meanderings, far too much dwelling on feelings, no visible storyline... Granted, exactly like the waves. Granted, it's poetry in prose. But I simply could not be bothered to finish it.

[audacity88_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Waves is a novel about six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, Louis. To one who has not read the novel, these names appear quite ordinary. To one who has, the appearance of these names in conjunction calls up memories of what happened to each of them, of who they were and of what they did and said. The degree to which their names give rise to such feelings is a testament to the success of The Waves as fiction.To say that The Waves is both a novel of experimental fiction and a success is to raise the question of whether its success is due to its structure, or in spite of that structure. In support of the latter case, let us consider one of the devices used by Woolf: an italicized descriptive section, devoid of human characters, that precedes each chapter. These interludes describe various reoccuring elements – the sun, a house, some birds – which will undoubtedly be endowed by some critics with a weighty significance. But in analyses of symbolism, the meaning assigned to any given symbolic element tends to reflect the intent of the critic more than that of the author. Still, here the author has made the symbolism to clear to ignore. So one must attempt to draw parallels between the occurences of the interludes and those of the chapters they precede. Some of them are clear enough; for example, the birds progress from isolation to togetherness in their song, just as they characters increasingly understand and work together with each other; similarly, the abrupt appearance of violence, as one of the birds kills a worm, mirrors Neville's “stabbing” Bernard with his rapier wit in the following chapter. However, The Waves is a character-driven novel, as much as any novel could possibly be, and whether such analyses can say anything about the characters that wasn't already known is the question that must be asked. Hence one must ask whether these realizations tell us anything about the characters' lives, or whether they merely appear clever in hindsight when paired with what we already know about their lives. The interludes do, it must be admitted, lend significance to the titular image, which is revealed in the final scene to refer to the waves of human experience that wash over us with such great power. But even this might have been conveyed within the main text, and indeed Woolf's character talk about waves well before the final scene: “the waves of my life”, “the protective waves of the ordinary”, “passions that … pound us with their waves”. In sum, it seems that the interludes work, to whatever extent they do, because of the power of the story, none of whose essential aspects would be excised by their removal. They are more of a distraction than anything else.Woolf's other primary device is to narrate the novel through speeches by each of the characters in turn. Rather than with “Bernard saw a ring,” the novel opens with the line, “'I see a ring', said Bernard”. While this may at first seem like dialogue, the characters fail to respond to each other's speech, and we soon see characters who are alone continuing to “say” things, leading us to think that this speech is not spoken aloud. But then one character criticizes another for “making phrases”, suggesting that the latter's speech was in fact said aloud; and later we have instances in which two characters speak to one another in private. One might compare this type of speech to a soliloquy in a play. Though in Shakespeare the soliloquies generally go unheard by other characters, this is not the case in Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo overhears Juliet's soliloquy. A soliloquy in a play provides a way for a character to project his inner life to the audience, which seems to be in line with the primary purpose of Woolf's soliloquies. So should Woolf have written The Waves as a play?Bernard: “I see a ring ...”One feels that it would not have come off as well. If the characters were to take turns speaking on a stage, we would feel that no real action had occurred. When Louis says, “There is Susan”, we would want to see Susan, or at least to see the actor who plays Louis pretending to see her. But in the book such speech somehow does not require the other character to speak for us to imagine their actions. It is something like reading the diaries of two people and seeing the actions of each recorded by the other – but of two people who are extremely close, say a husband and wife, such that it is assumed that whatever is inner becomes outer as well. The effect is an extreme intimacy with the characters to a degree unparallelled for a work with so many protagonists. In short, this device is a success.There is one instance when Woolf deviates from this model. In the final chapter, Bernard, who has come to serve as a sort of spokesman for the group (generally speaking first in the most important scenes) has dinner with a near-stranger at a restaurant. Speaking in the past tense, he narrates the story of his and the other character's lives. One wonders why Woolf wrote this chapter. Was she afraid that the reader would not have understood what came before, and did she want to fill in the gaps of our knowledge? Or did she wish to sum up what had happened? In either case, to be suddenly told what one had been delighted to have pieced together out of the narrative shards is disappointing and feels like a betrayal of Woolf's model, a withdrawing from it into conventional storytelling out of some trepidation.But as one of Woolf's rare missteps, this final chapter reminds us of how far superior to most fiction the rest of the novel is. When the stranger leaves and Bernard returns to narrating his present experience, we rejoice as to the return of an old friend. For such the characters are to us, by the end of the novel: old friends for whose grief we grieve and in whose joys we take joy. This novel carries human experience within it. Whether you empathize most with one particular character, as I did, or with all of them, Woolf provides a model for life of extraordinary truth, compassion, and depth, and one well worth reading.

[lizaha_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

past and future favorite book.

[luli81_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Poetry in prose.Woolf writes without rules, no punctuation, no paragraphs, pure sensations, disarrayed and irrational thoughts, explosion of feelings.We see life through the eyes of six characters, three men and three women, each one strikingly different from the other but close friends and lovers, from childhood to old age.Early innocence, pure thoughts, playful games become more and more complicated when the characters grow up. It was devastating to witness how everyday life could break the characters' dreams, how bitter disappointment and regret can be, how lonely we are all in the end.But what was more horrifying was the truth behind those words. Life is sad, everything beautiful is ephemeral, nothing lasts even though we believe we are eternal. It hurts when you are reminded in such a cruel way as Woolf does in this novel, her words are like sweet venom which slowly gets into your system, and you can't let it go, even if you want to.A sad but beautiful reading.

[nickelini · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is considered Woolf's most experimental text, and that's saying a lot. I'll admit right off that I didn't understand much of what I was reading. But like a highly complex piece of music, or a sophisticated painting, it isn't necessary for the audience to understand it completely in order to enjoy it. So I didn't stress that over what I didn't get--I just let the art wash over me. There is so much hauntingly beautiful imagery in this novel, and the structure of the book is very cool. I hope that some day I can study this text in a class with a really excellent prof, and understand more of what Woolf is trying to say in The Waves.----I wrote the above after I read The Waves in 2008. I did study Woolf with a really excellent prof the following year at university, although we did a different novel. But he taught me that "you can't understand Woolf until you reread Woolf." So, in retrospect, my "letting the art wash over me" approach was just fine, and my understanding will come with the second, third, ..... reads. And this is such a beautiful book, that I'm happy to reread this book over and over again for years to come.

[magica28 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I don't have a huge collection of things that I've read at the time I'm writing this review, but I do know one of my favorite things (whether it's in reading or watching) is anything with a psychological aspect. Something that makes you think about life and your existence, or that just completely messes with your mind. Unfortunately, I'm finding books of this sort quite difficult to find thus far. I expect that when reading a book with lots of psychological aspects in it, that if it is good, it will certainly draw out some sort of emotion in me, be it good or bad. When I started reading The Waves, I fully expected that would happen (and was ecstatic to find something along the lines of what I had been looking for). Sadly, it didn't draw me in that much. I'm not at all saying this was a bad book. I did love the concept of it, the fact that there wasn't really a plot, you're just exploring the minds of a group of people. I also loved the way the surroundings were described, it painted quite an amazing picture of the landscape in my head. But that's about all I can think of that really interested me about this book. The story itself just didn't draw me in as much as I'd hoped. So while I do not think this was a bad book, I also didn't think it was spectacular. It was only mediocre to me.

[gbill_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Further experimentation in style from Virginia Woolf -- in "The Waves", she paints an impressionist picture of six lives through their own internal dialogues. I believe the point she was making was that while our lives are fleeting, separate, and largely unknown to others, we are all ultimately connected in our human condition, and must "live in the now", absurd though it may seem.It takes patience to read this book and taking notes helps; here is a brief summary of the characters which may also illustrate the tone of the novel since it is shaped largely by their perspectives:- Bernard, a writer who likes people and telling stories, though he is sloppy and has trouble finishing his stories. Bernard likes Susan.- Neville, who disdains people, the mediocrity of the world, and religion; he is aloof but inspired by nature and had a crush on Percival.- Louis, an outsider who is too smart to be a common man, but too poor to attend college; he thinks others are cruel and boastful but secretly envies them.- Susan, who says she does not wish to be admired, tears off calendar days "revenging herself" upon the day, and who cries remembering home. She's jealous seeing Louis and Jinny kissing.- Rhoda, a dreamer who cannot read or write, is unsure of herself and feels invisible and alone.- Jinny, a dancer who wishes to be loved, is "never cast down" and who likes men.Percival, the seventh character, is pieced together not through direction narration as the others but through the other's memories; he was admired as a leader and an inspiration for poetry, but died in India.Quotes:On change:"The clouds lose tufts of whiteness as the breeze dishevels them. If that blue could stay for ever; if that hole could remain for ever; if this moment could stay for ever...""There is nothing staid, nothing settled in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph."On having children:"It is, however, true that I cannot deny a sense that life for me is now mysteriously prolonged. Is it that I may have children, may cast a fling of seed wider, beyond this generation, this doom-encircled population, shuffling each other in endless competition along the street? My daughters shall come here, in other summers; my sons shall turn new fields. Hence we are not raindrops, soon dried by the wind; we make gardens blow and forests roar; we come up differently, for ever and ever."On death:"Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike my spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!'The waves broke on the shore."On friendship:"Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely. Our flame, the will-o'-the-wisp that dances in a few eyes is soon blown out and all will fade.""I condemn you. Yet my heart yearns towards you. I would go with you through the fires of death. Yet am happiest alone."On intellectuals:"It would be better to breed horses and live in one of those red villas than to run in and out of the skulls of Sophocles and Euripides like a maggot, with a high-minded wife, one of those University women. That, however, will be my fate. I shall suffer. I am already at eighteen capable of such contempt that horse-breeders hate me."On living life in the now:"I tremble, I quiver, like a leaf in the hedge, as I sit dangling my feet, on the edge of the bed, with a new day to break open. I have fifty years, I have sixty years to spend. I have not yet broken into my hoard. This is the beginning."On love:"There can be no doubt, I thought, pushing aside the newspaper, that our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour and have meaning only under the eyes of love."On memories, friendship, and change:"Some will not meet again. Neville, Bernard and I shall not meet here again. Life will divide us. But we have formed certain ties. Our boyish, our irresponsible years are over. But we have forged certain links. Above all, we have inherited traditions."On meaninglessness:"Oppose yourself to this illimitable chaos," said Neville, "this formless imbecility. Making love to a nursemaid behind a tree, that soldier is more admirable than all the stars. Yet sometimes one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lust."On nature, I sometimes think of this an analogy while walking on the beach:"The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as the move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping."On transience:"But we - against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all; the moment was enough. And then Neville, Jinny, Susan and I as a wave breaks, burst asunder, surrendered - to the next leaf, to the precise bird, to a child with a hoop, to a prancing dog, to the warmth that is hoarded in woods after a hot day, to the lights twisted like white ribbon on rippled waters. We drew apart; we were consumed in the darkness of the trees leaving Rhoda and Louis to stand on the terrace by the urn."

[porius_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[chris_v_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking work of imaginative fiction telling of a group of six close friends through the use of imagined thoughts and spoken words. A novel that needs the reader to just surrender oneself to it's hypnotic power.

[c_why · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Her Best !

[stantonk_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

English speakers everywhere should thank whatever higher power allowed for Virginia Woolf to write in their native tongue. They should, at the same time, thank her for gracing the world with books like "The Waves." Difficult? Of course, but so is existence, and no one, in any tradition, has been better at expressing the tumultuous inner space of being. This book, told as a series of interior monologues told by six characters, broken into chapters by brief descriptions of a beach at different times of day, is not an easy read, there is no doubt about that, but it is not obscure or pedantic. Its "difficultness" lies in its idiosyncrasies, in its subjective view toward reality, in its fragmentation, in its personality: its difficulty lies in how well it parallels individual experience and existence. By allowing each character to speak exclusively from its own private and self-serving platform, it makes a noble attempt at rectifying the artificiality of the text with the unknowableness of life, even if it fails to truly rectify the rift (which is impossible anyway). Perhaps, however, it would be better appreciated if other works are used as an introduction to Woolf's style; not to say that To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway are easy books, but they are easier for the novice to Woolf's style to wrap her/his mind around. Reading it requires concentration and effort, but like trying to truly know a person, all the travail is worth it in the end. Immerse yourself in the book, and feel how great literature truly can be.

[thebooknerd · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Slap me sideways and call me Fanny. Virginia Woolf actually wrote something that didn't make me want to lobotamize myself with silverware. Not that this was, by any means, a treat to read. It was, though, interesting -- an interesting can exist along a whole spectrum of good to bad. What I'll say about this book is that it revolutionizes narrative form, written entirely from the stream-of-consciousness perspectives of six different characters. Confusing, certainly. Easily read, certainly not. Worth reading? I would say that if you had to read some of Woolf's fiction for some unstated yet dire reason, this would be likely choice.

[emmakendon_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This has taken me weeks to get through, and so each dip into The Waves has been very different. While that may be quite appropriate, particularly as it spans childhood to middle and old age (and death), it has meant that it has felt like a great labour with great emptiness at its core. Interspersed with chapters that felt to me like a collection of suicide notes, complete with extremely obvious clues as to 'how' (if not exactly 'where'), are chapters misinterpreting natural scenes of sunset, midday, dusk and so on over sea, garden and city. I was expecting these passages to be quite dull, but in fact one of the best parts, which I really thoroughly enjoyed, was a sunrise with ebullient birds grasping tight with effort to their boughs (utterly anatomically innaccurately) and belting out their songs followed exquisitely by Bernard arriving whimsical and daft in London.The moments of my deeply personal contact with the writing were many and may come back to me, but my memory is not good. Here are some: - Rhoda's pretending not to see Bernard at their last meeting at Hampton Court; - Bernard's fishing in what seems like a soup of encounters, spooning out Neville in his final soliloquy, and his not being sure who he is (is he Neville, Rhoda, Susan, Jinny, Louis or is he himself?); - Susan's desire to be a country wife and mother and her grumpiness when she achieves it; - Louis' sense of isolation; - even a bit of Jinny's vanityBut Percival didn't work for me at all, and the references to William III seemed all pretty gratuitous. That Bloomsbury scent of a bunch of people sitting around being either smug or sorry for themselves seeped out, but to be fair, tugged at but did not drown the other resonances; such as of alone we are in company except at those moments of current when we lose ourselves to it.Interestingly, although there are lots of literary and mythical references, ending with Pegasus, Shakespeare's 'Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore' doesn't make an appearance, and yet even just its first two lines permeate this book. There is a superb tension between the individual's minutes hastening to their end and the cyclic repetition of the waves and the tide and the sun's and moon's cycle seen by all individuals alive and dead.Incidentally, in the light of the recent coverage of a recent publication about Woolf's servants, the few references to laughing cooks and flirting house-staff, shopkeepers and Indian poor are fleeting and seen from the armchair of the upper classes. if Nellie was ever much present here, she's been virtually edited out before publication.Final comment: goes on a bit.

[misswinkle · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Probably my favourite of Woolf's amazing body of work, 'The Waves' is her most experimental piece; as such it is the one that deviates the most from the standard novel form; the language and structure of the novel are more similar to poetry than prose. It also, as with most modernist works, gives the most pleasure with repeated reading; a first reading just isn't enough to fully appreciate it.

[karlus_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

You have probably not read another novel like this at all, because, with The Waves, Ms Woolf set out to write a completely different kind of novel and, in fact, she succeeded very well. It breaks with your expectations in almost any way you can imagine.There is no central character, except perhaps for one Percival who is only remembered through the reveries of the other characters and lives and dies completely outside of the story. There are no minor characters; of major characters, there are six, all with equally major roles.The story of the book is told predominantly in the first person, meaning that each character is talking directly to you the reader about the things that interest them most; mainly their own lives, hopes, aspirations, loves, plans and doubts and, somewhat, their relations to the other characters. Being very human, it is always their own lives that are mainly of interest to themselves. So, how much can you stand of people talking about themselves? Probably not much, unless the people have interesting lives to talk about, and that is what you will get to decide if you read the book.You will follow the lives of the characters from childhood school days through their separate careers, to death for some of them. Each life is told in nine segments, interleaved, and set allegorically against interludes describing the image of the sun rising and falling throughout the course of a natural day."I see a ring," said Bernard, "hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light. ""I see a slab of pale yellow," said Susan, "spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.""I hear a sound," said Rhoda, "cheep chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down."Thus do the first three characters introduce themselves and, scanning forward a few pages you see immediately that the unusual style will continue for quite a while, in fact, pretty much throughout the book, even though the paragraphs will grow in length. I will let Virginia Woolf herself make her appeal to you (from"How Should One Read?")"Do not dictate to your author, try to become him. Be his fellow worker and accomplice. . . if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other.""I see a globe" said Neville, "hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.""I see a crimson tassel," said Jinny, "twisted with gold threads.""I hear something stamping," said Louis, "A great beast's foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps."Now you have met the six characters. Are you up to the challenge? Perhaps you will see some of yourself in each of those 54 vignettes of the character's lives. This book is, in fact, a story of people facing and living life.

[jbushnell_5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Not only one of the best explorations of the progression from youth to old age ever written, but also an exhilirating book-length experiment in utilizing omniscience as a mode for representing the irrepresentable experience of gnosis. The resultant book is a masterpiece: a flickering texture of epiphanies. Highly recommended.