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    The Waves
    The Waves
    The Waves
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Waves

    Written by Virginia Woolf

    Narrated by Frances Jeater

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    About this audiobook

    The Waves traces the lives of six friends from childhood to old age. It was written when Virginia Woolf was at the height of her experimental powers, and she allows each character to tell their own story, through powerful, poetic monologues. By listening to these voices struggling to impose order and meaning on their lives, we are drawn into a literary journey that stunningly reproduces the complex, confusing and contradictory nature of human experience. It is read with affection and skill by Frances Jeater.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateJun 30, 2014
    ISBN9781843798361
    Author

    Virginia Woolf

    Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, short story writer, publisher, critic and member of the Bloomsbury group, as well as being regarded as both a hugely significant modernist and feminist figure. Her most famous works include Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.

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    Reviews for The Waves

    4/5

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    • 2/5
      I know I am supposed to love Virginia Woolf, and I am really trying to, but this is now my third go around with her and I just can't do it. This book was all but impossible for me. I do not get the love affair people have with her. Maybe my mind is not wired the right way to understand her writing style. I honestly could not tell you what the story was even about. I read a summary of the book and I did not pick up on most of what I should have. I would have given this one star but I must admit that the imagery and writing could be quite beautiful at times. But at least for me, I could not follow a plot no matter how hard I tried.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I was surprised by how much I liked this book. It is more interesting than the other books I've read by Virginia Woolf. In it, Woolf has finally succeeded in breaking free of traditional narrative form. It ceases completely to be a narrative and becomes a sense. The book is part play, part extended poem. It is an incredible flow of individual self awareness eddying and combining to form a communal sense of self written like a spoken word performance. The style made me think of Walt Whitman’s essay-like poetry, and also of Greek tragedy, with the chorus narrating the action. I thought that Woolf got across the inner voices, and I mean deep inner voices, of the six narrating characters very well indeed. It was like overhearing how it feels to be performing the actions described, rather than imagining yourself in the place of the characters whose story is being narrated to you. We don’t overhear an internalised conversation about what has happened. Instead Woolf puts words to the sensations we feel when we are in the midst of acting. Very clever. I felt lifted out of myself as I was reading, as though I was hovering above, looking down, and at the same time as though I was seeing the action through a macro lens, so close to the characters they might feel my breath. The depiction of grief was astonishing in the way it embodied the sense of time stopping, of other people's continuation being offensive, of nothing mattering when the person who acted as anchor in your life has gone. I remember that from when my dad died. The changes that friendships undergo as we age and experience shapes us were also well depicted and caused me to reflect on the friendships that I have had for many years. How easy some are, how others take more effort and a forgiving nature to sustain.Louis and Rhoda were my favourite characters early on, although I liked Bernard, too. Louis and Rhoda are outsiders, one desperate to break in, the other trying to escape notice. Louis knows he is cleverer than his more privileged friends, but the accident of his colonial birth means he will never have the same opportunities as them. Rhoda wants to be left alone with her rich interior world. She has no interest in being fêted or admired like Jinny, and she doesn't find fulfilment in practicalities like Susan. She lacks confidence, though, because she feels that her self is the wrong kind of self to be. Bernard revels in his multiple personalities, yearns to be famous, and always has one eye on what his legacy might be. His awareness that he only really has a self while being observed by others fascinated me. Towards the end, I preferred Neville and Susan. They seemed to distill into something I understand, in this moment when I am of a similar age to them, post-Percival.All good, then. But no. Woolf has to spoil it in the final section of the book by casting aside her innovative chorus of inner feelings and reverting to a standard, dull narrative. Bernard drones on about how his life has passed, and it breaks the spell. From a magical sphere of disembodied voices, I was pulled back to a sort of mundanity, and I had to force myself to read to the end, even though Bernard was telling me what I had worked out, even though I wasn't interested in his conscious perspective. I wonder why Woolf chose to end the book that way.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      What a book! I thought Orlando was my favorite but here I am with my mine blown by the simplicity and beauty of this book!
      Make sure to follow along the text as you listen to the book and preferably do not multi task while reading it. I found it confusing and hard to follow the narrative while I was doing other tasks and was trying to listen to this book in the background
    • 5/5
      Six individual narrators, six individual biographies and six individual journeys to conquer life. Between the acts, a mere day is told. The waves, crashing violently on shore, moving on from tide to tide. And yet this frame "story" serves as a parable for the lives that are told. Nothing ever happens. The question is: "It goes on, but why?" All of the protagonists fail - or don't they?It's one of these books where, due to all experimentalism, prose becomes poetry, and just as you finish the novel, you feel to have already forgotten its content. A feeling is all that remains. A feeling deeper than all that could have happened within the pages.Woolf was such a great, great mind and one feels sorry for all the truth one has overlooked due to having been overwhelmed by it.Read this book on a sunny day for the certain "St. Ives feeling" which always swings by with Woolf's works.If you enjoyed "The Waves", I can suggest "Kusamakura" by Natsume Souseki, which is in some way the earlier Japanese counterpart, concerning its introverted prose-poetry.
    • 3/5
      Evocatie van hoe de breinen van zes verschillende mensen werken. Zeer moeizame lectuur, maar wel fascinerend: geleidelijk worden de brokstenen duidelijk. Belangrijke rol van de taal. Is duidelijk voor de liefhebbers
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      I really want to love Virginia Woolf. But I don't. Her writing is exhausting and I just don't get it.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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....]
    • 5/5
      "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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      very experimental writing; six characters; six voices
    • 5/5
      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.”
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      past and future favorite book.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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."
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      Her Best !
    • 5/5
      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.