The Waves

Violet wells

Rating: really liked it
For the unprepared reader the first fifty 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.”

Seddrah

Rating: really liked it
a great recommendation from a friend. Seems like it could be life-changing, or possibly a little sad or maybe both. The hand-written inscription in the copy I found used was worth the entire purchase anyway, read it:

2/14/84

Martin-

I'm sure you know that you've been on my mind a great deal over the last few days. I've struggled for words to capture my own grief at your mom's death, to express my appreciation for yours, and perhaps, to offer some solace by explaining to you how strong an impression she made on me during the few months that I knew her.

I haven't yet decided which of my memories of Elma will be my favorite--her stealing my blackberry pie, fingering my brand new Perry Ellis coat as a potential rug, beating the pants off me at Shanghia Rummy, or just gazing out the window at the beach. But I do know that she was a deeply loving and strong woman, who had the grace and breadth of vision to raise a lovely, creative, and infinitely diverse family; and who was able to make me feel welcome and cared for within minutes of entering her home.

Your mom's spirituality also affected me powefully. In fact it was while I was thinking over the weekend about this aspect of her personality that it occured to me to give you a copy of The Waves. The Waves is not "about" anything so much as it is a chronicle of the pain of separation, and a celebration of the spiritual unity that finally connects everyone and everything that is, irrespective of death. It's a lovely, mystical, and moving work, that I believe will comfort you more than anything which could ever come from my pen.

Laurene.

[and then in darker pen, it continues]

Finished first reading March 5, 1984.

Jonathan

Rating: really liked it
The Waves Playlist

Pop songs, not classical or Jazz.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/7q9qxb4kvl...

The characters

Rules: One song each. Gender matching. Must express as many of the key character traits as possible. I must love it.

Bernard: Bob Dylan – To Ramona
Susan: Kate bush - Mrs. Bartolozzi
Rhoda: Throwing Muses – Fear
Neville: Anthony and the Johnsons – Crazy in Love
Jinny: Julia Holter - Gold Dust Woman
Louis: Jeff Buckley - A Satisfied Mind

[Percival: John Cage - 4'33]

The novel

4 rules here - reference to water in title or song (mist or fog counts), thematic connection over and above this to the novel, something about the feel matches the novel too, and it has to be a song I love.

Grouper – Heavy Water/I'd rather be sleeping
Joanna Newsom - Time, a symptom
Joanna Newsom - Divers
Smog - Rock bottom riser
Judee Sill - Kiss
Julie Holter - Sea calls me home
Beach house - On the sea


*******************

This is It. This is The Book. The One. The collection of carefully crafted words I hold most dear in the world.

It is for this very reason I cannot write a reasonable review, I cannot simply tell you that this is a masterpiece, that this deals with the most profound and important issues of Being in the most beautiful ways imaginable, nor can I simply say that, though I have read it many times, I still find new pearls to treasure in almost every line.

So I will take a quote, a relatively famous one, and ramble on a little about what makes it so wonderful. From this one can extrapolate the rest…

Towards the end of the novel, Bernard says the following:

"How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably. Lying in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining, then enormous clouds come marching over the sky, tattered clouds, wisps of cloud. What delights me then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great clouds always changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of story, of design, I do not see a trace then."


This is, of course, a comment by Woolf on her art, and illuminates some of her key concerns as they relate to the confused and tattered nature of reality. But I do not wish to speak of that here. I want to talk about the music of this passage, the song of her writing.

We begin with an old Rhetorical trick: repetition. He is tired, that much is clear, and do we not feel a similar fatigue? The fall of those sentences, like an exhausted sigh raising themselves up to the exclamation point at the end. Then alliteration, that echo of anglo-saxon origin, propels us through the next, short sentence. All those hard "d"s, the rippling between "life" and "half" (deep ripples those, though I will not explore them here)…

And the alliterative magic continues, bouncing like bows on taught strings, "L"'s for longing, little, language and lovers, the repetition of "words", shuffling the sentence like those feet on the pavement.

Then, as if to prove such shattering and shuffling inevitable, a sentence which falls on its own sword, ending with its feet over its head and undeniably unstuck.

But we shall right ourselves. Pulled back by the gentle arms of another "L", and those commas, like the beats of a conductor's baton, getting us back up to speed, ready for the pounding out of those key words "confusion", "height", "indifference" and "fury". And we understand how fury can be delightful, how indifference can fill us with joyous awe.

The next sentence is, according to Microsoft Word, incorrect. It is a fragment which I should consider revising. But how can one truly speak of the fragmented without using broken and un-finished lines? Here too all our alliterative friends return – those "C"s, "L"s, "D"s and "S"s, the repetition of "ing", like light and dancing footsteps following the music they themselves create.

This is Design. This is Song. This is the tension between the beauty and craft of great prose, and the dirty, broken Truth of the World. Woolf is the Master of this tension, she walks on the thin thread tied tight between them. And when the thread broke, she drowned and the World lost too much to be easily comprehended.

Of all books in the world, of all the voices I have been lucky enough to overhear through the magic of literature, hers is the one I love most, and the one I miss most. Read her. Read all of her. Then go back and start all over again.

Sean Barrs

Rating: really liked it
The Waves is an absolute masterpiece: it’s an incredible novel that flows beautifully with torrents of majestic prose.

“I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.”

This is creative genius at its absolute finest within fiction. I felt like I was floating, awash in words, dreams and ideas. It’s a profound exploration of the human soul and I lack the words to describe it as eloquently as it deserves.

The very first chapter is an absolute feat of writing. I felt like I watching the scene from above, peering into the lives of these characters. And the constant wave imagery is perfect. It cements the emotions, complexity and intricacies of human experience in a very imaginative way. I wish I could capture the essence of it in a review, but I think this is one that really needs to be read in order to be understood.

The novel traces the development of six friends from childhood all the way through to the trappings of middle age. There are five of them and they grew up together. They finish school (bonding over how much they hate it) and break apart when they no longer have to sit in the classroom. Their friendships become more and more distant as the years pass, as the waves of the sea continue to crash, they experience the realities of growing old and the isolation that can come with it.

This is a hard book to read, some of it may wash over you, though that is the nature of stream of consciousness writing. It is governed by shifting patterns of thoughts and feelings. The voices of each section were also quite similar. In keeping this level of similarity Woolf explores identity. The voices cross over and sound alike; they merge into each other like separate facets of a greater whole. Identity is a shifting concept and can be different things in different places.

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

I knew there would be a Woolf novel I could love, and this is it. The language is poetical and deep. Woolf explores so much of human experience here and the way she has written it is so ridiculously clever. If anything, it’s a book about identity and how hard it can be to define it. In a way, others help to shape it as much as we do ourselves.

This, certainly, won’t be the last time I read it.

Ahmad Sharabiani

Rating: really liked it
(Book 654 From 1001 Books) - The Waves, Virginia Woolf

The Waves is a 1931 novel by Virginia Woolf.

It is considered her most experimental work, and consists of soliloquies spoken by the book's six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis.

Also important is Percival, the seventh character, though readers never hear him speak in his own voice.

The soliloquies that span the characters' lives are broken up by nine brief third-person interludes detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day from sunrise to sunset.

As the six characters or "voices" speak, Woolf explores concepts of individuality, self and community. Each character is distinct, yet together they compose (as Ida Klitgard has put it) a gestalt about a silent central consciousness.

عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «امواج (موج ها)»؛ «خیزابها»؛ ویرجینیا وولف (مهیا، صهبای دانش، افق) ادبیات؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: ماه دسامبر سال 1999میلادی

عنوان: امواج؛ اثر: ویرجینیا وولف؛ مترجم: فرشاد نجفی پور؛ تهران، محیا، 1377؛ در 248ص؛ چاپ سوم 1388؛ شابک 9789645577276؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، صهبای دانش؛ 1389، شابک 9786005692129؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده 20م

عنوان: موجها؛ اثر: ویرجینیا وولف؛ مترجم: مهدی غبرائی؛ تهران، افق، چاپ دوم 1386؛ در 398ص؛ چاپ سوم 1387؛ چاپ چهارم 1389؛ چاپ پنجم 1393؛ شابک 9789643692131؛

در ادبیات «بریتانیا»، دشوار می‌توان رمانی را یافت، که بیش از «موج‌ها» به شعر نزدیک باشد؛ «استیون اسپندر»، «موج‌ها» را بزرگ‌ترین دستاورد بانو «ویرجینیا وولف» می‌دانند، از رمانهای پیچیده، و دشوارخوان بانو «ویرجینیا وولف» است؛ که در سال 1931میلادی انتشار یافت؛ «موج‌ها» که با تکنیک تک‌گویی درونی نوشته شده؛ «وولف» را در اوج تجربه‌ گرایی خویش، نشان می‌دهد؛ خود روانشاد «وولف»، اثر خویشتن را یک شعر-نمایش خوانده؛ نه یک رمان؛ کتاب با طلوع آفتاب آغاز، و با غروب آن به پایان میرسد

موج‌ها را شش راوی واگویه می‌کنند؛ «برنارد»، «سوزان»، «نویل»، «جینی»، «لوئیس» و «رودا»؛ روایتشان را از خردسالی و کودکی آغاز کرده و تا بزرگسالی و سال‌های واپسین عمرشان بر دوش می‌کشند؛ «ویرجینیا وولف» در این رمان به ژرفایی دور از دسترس فرو می‌رود، و بر چیزی غلبه می‌کند که او مشکل اساسی نوشته‌ های زنان می‌داند؛ «موج‌ها» بیانِ تن و تمنا می‌شود؛ در این کتاب است که گویا «وولف» غرق رؤیا می‌شوند و می‌گذارند خیالشان - بی‌قید و بند - به دنیایی در ژرفای هستیِ ناآگاه ما نیز سرک بکشاند؛ خیالشان سرریز می‌کند؛ در پی برکه‌ ها، ژرفناها، تاریکناها می‌رود؛ آن‌جا که درشت‌ترین ماهیان می‌آرامند

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 26/08/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 13/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Vit Babenco

Rating: really liked it
The Waves is like a song sung by the surf on a bright breezy 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.’
‘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.’

This is the way the world appears out of nocturnal nonexistence in the morning… This is the way consciousness dawns in a child in the beginning of life…
Six persons are telling the tale… And their lives are six waves in the ocean of mankind…
And there are intermissions in which Virginia Woolf draws parallels between the time of day and the time of life…

The sun rose. Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore, gilding the ribs of the eaten-out boat and making the sea-holly and its mailed leaves gleam blue as steel. Light almost pierced the thin swift waves as they raced fan-shaped over the beach. The girl who had shaken her head and made all the jewels, the topaz, the aquamarine, the water-coloured jewels with sparks of fire in them, dance, now bared her brows and with wide-opened eyes drove a straight pathway over the waves.

Everything in the world goes in cycles… Daybreak, morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night… Birth, infancy, childhood, youth, adulthood, old age, death… Wave follows wave… As soon as a wave breaks on the beach a new wave is born somewhere in the sea.

s.penkevich

Rating: really liked it
Easily one of my favorite books ever written. The 'waves' become a compound metaphor of sheer brilliance; we are all a harmony in the chorus of life, a part of a whole but each an individual part of beauty equally beautiful in solidarity as the whole. I wish I could write a single sentence as glorious as Woolf.

Jim Fonseca

Rating: really liked it
[Edited, pictures added 10/5/22]

Almost more poetry than prose, critics have called this Woolf's greatest work and also the most “difficult” one. It’s written in dreamy paragraphs creating an atmosphere but with little plot. I struggled with it, having trouble keeping the characters separate, even trying mnemonics at one point. Then I caught on. The book follows six people from when they were tots to old age; three men, three women; one of the men dies. You have to accept that five-year old kids playing on the lawn think complex philosophical thoughts.



If I were to pick a typical paragraph, I’d say one like this:

‘Yet we scarcely breathe,’ said Neville, ‘spent as we are. We are in that passive and exhausted frame of mind when we only wish to rejoin the body of our mother from whom we have been severed, All else is distasteful, forced and fatiguing. Jinny’s yellow scarf is moth-colored in this light; Susan’s eyes are quenched. We are scarcely to be distinguished from the river. One cigarette end is the only point of emphasis among us. And sadness tinges our content, that we should have left you, torn the fabric; yielded to the desire to press out, alone, some bitterer, some blacker juice, which was sweet too. But now we are worn out.’

Italicized paragraphs about nature (flowers, streams) act as chapter breaks as the characters move from one stage of life to another. The six meet periodically over the years, usually for dinner.

It’s Virginia Woolf so we expect and get great writing. Some of my favorite passages:

[a train]: "There is the very powerful, bottle-green engine without a neck, all back and thighs, breathing steam."

"Louis, glancing, tripping with the high step of a disdainful crane, picks up words as if in sugar-tongs."

"Nothing should be named lest by doing so we change it. Let it exist, this bank, this beauty, and I, for one instant, steeped in pleasure."

"The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice."

Like Nabokov, you have to have your dictionary on hand. A few I looked up were emulously (emulating); assegais (spear); guillemot (type of tern); charabanc (bus); conglobulated (just what you think – clustered); nacreous (pearly, iridescent).

I will definitely read this book again. It’s more a book that you “absorb” than read.



Top image: Painting by Peter Barker, Rolling Breakers, Pentreath Beach on mallgalleries.org.uk
The author (1882-1941) from newyorker.com

Garima

Rating: really liked it

The sun rose. Its rays fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice. Suddenly my copy of ‘The Waves’ became alive as the clouds on the cover page started floating in resplendent movements and the water of the ocean moved swiftly over the edges of several dog-eared pages carrying along thousands of words written upon them, to a world they rightfully belongs to. Drifting in the cradle of nature, under the roof of blue/black sky, amidst beauty they could equate with. Merging into the ubiquitous elements of the cosmos, they were finally home. The waves...finally broke out.

I’m stunned. I’m in a dire need of phrases. Right phrases. Perfect phrases. Phrases that can describe a smidgen of splendor this book contain. But I’m inadequate. Immensely inadequate. I wish I were a poet or a writer. I’m neither and I have no one to blame. Yet I’m vacillating between being angry and being envious. Angry with? Envious Of? I better avoid questions and negative words. This is not the right place when this is THE right book. I’m in awe of Virginia Woolf. That’s more like it. I’m...I, I, I, she busted this very ‘I’ with her mesmerizing sentences in The Waves. Waves that can’t exist in isolation. They need water, they need wind, and they need rhythm. They need to be the ‘sum total’ to be a ‘whole’. Likewise, Bernard, Susan, Louis, Jinny, Neville and Rhoda, who have their individual lives but they also exist to fulfill other lives. The lives of their friends, their lovers and eventually, their own.

This is my second outing with Virginia Woolf. By way of To the Lighthouse, I treaded my path towards the shore while assessing the depth of the ocean and the vastness of horizon in order to prepare myself to tackle the waves. But kindly mark my words here: nothing can prepare you for that. I have taken a vow after reading The Waves that I’ll never entitle any book as my favorite until and unless I read all the great novels the world of literature has to offer. It seems improbable but fascinating to think of because otherwise I believe it’s nothing but a folly, an unfair judgment on our part. I can say ‘never before’ though. Yes. Never before I’ve read a book like this. Its beauty is excruciating to the extent that on several occasions I had to stop reading it. It was intolerable to carry on with so much magnificence on display as if you’re witnessing the creation of the world with your naked eyes.

The book follows the lives of six friends and their individual thought processes from childhood to their youth, from marriage to children, from middle age to death. The whole book is in the form of internal monologues with few initial elucidations about who is thinking what but that too is later withdrawn by Woolf with a belief in readers (I suppose!) that they’ll identify the characters through their cerebration only. This does make it sound a bit difficult and apparently boring but it’s not, it can’t be. It can be slightly demanding of your concentration but it’s sure to hook you from the very first sentence so it won’t be hard to focus except when you start ruminating about your life only. That’s where another brilliance of this novel lies. It’s so easy to relate with it. May be not with specifics but the generalities it implies.

We have chosen now, or sometimes it seems the choice was made for us—a pair of tongs pinched us between the shoulders. I chose. I took the print of life not outwardly, but inwardly upon the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre. I am clouded and bruised with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have smell, colour, texture, substance, but no name.

Our lives are nothing but a multitude of moments, of choices made, of friends found and lost, of replacements, of connections made, of books read, of words written, of mistakes committed, of lessons learnt, of stories told, of finding ourselves. We know all this to some extent and probably Woolf also knew that everybody know this but still she went on to write something unique to show rather than tell. She aimed at finding a thread, a fine thread that binds us all together. She shows what makes us all different and yet makes us one. She shows the power of one single person, one single moment which is enough to act as a unifying force. There is poetry, yes. There is lyrical prose too. There is music and rhythm. There is no plot- I’m writing the waves to a rhythm not to a plot. True. There is saturation of every atom. Everything is here, everything. In the process of my reading, I was wondering if she used custom made words but no, I’ve come across them before but they never sound so enchanting to me. And that’s how it is. Sometimes we read thousands of words and not a single one of them rings true and sometimes we happen upon a book like The Waves in which every single word is conveying a truth of our being.

I’m not sure how consciously I have been able to follow the stream of thoughts of various characters but I know this much- I have read this book now and I found a part of my past in musings of Jinny and Louis, a part of my present in musings of Susan and Bernard, an appreciation and anticipation for my future in musings of Rhoda and Neville. I’ll read this book again, hoping to find a part of my then past, present and future. The equation of tenses will change but the words shall remain intact in their truth and beauty. Those of you, who haven’t read it, please do yourself a favor and read it soon. Read it coming Thursday or Saturday. Read it coming July or September. Read it in 2014 or 2025. Just read it before you die.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes.

Fionnuala

Rating: really liked it
I am in a fever.
Awareness is heightened.
Words have purple shadows.
Sentences gleam yellow-green
Paragraphs are lined in reddish gold
Everything shimmers, sharp as waves in sunlight.
The normal is abolished

Voices roll towards me, one upon another,
declaim their truth and roll away again, one upon another,
the arc of each voice different, the rhythm the same:
Bernard, Susan, Louis, Bernard.
Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, Bernard.
Louis, Neville, Susan, Bernard
Susan, Louis, Neville, Bernard,
Bernard, Bernard, Bernard, Bernard.

Six names, six faces, surging toward the light.
Six names, six faces, falling away, each in turn,
Until only one remains: Bernard.

And Bernard says, Sit with me, and I do.
And he describes the voices, describes them all.
And he drops phrases one upon another.
Measures out life, drop by drop,
I strike the table with a spoon.
If I could measure things with compasses I would,
but since my measure is a phrase, I make phrases.

And meantime, women shuffle past the window
And the clock ticks on.
And Bernard makes his phrases.

I conceive myself called upon to provide, some winter’s night,
a meaning for all my observations,
a line that runs from one to another
a summing up that completes...
But soliloquies in back streets soon pall.
I need an audience.
That is my downfall.

Bernard punctuates with repetitions,
a symphony with its concord and its discord,
and its tunes on top and its complicated bass beneath.

And meantime, women shuffle past with shopping bags
And always the chained beast stamping.
And Bernard's phrases.

I only come into existence when the plumber,
or the horse-dealer, or whoever it may be,
says something which sets me alight.
Then how lovely the smoke of my phrase is,
rising and falling, flaunting and falling,
upon red lobsters and yellow fruit,
wreathing them into one beauty.

And meantime, women carrying baskets
And the tablecloth and its yellow stain
And the recurring drop that falls.

And time, says Bernard, lets fall its drop.
The drop that has formed on the roof of the soul falls.
On the roof of my mind time, forming, lets fall its drop....
This falling drop is time tapering to a point.
As a drop falls from a glass heavy with some sediment, time falls.

And meantime, women carrying pitchers on their heads
And the constant naming of the days: Tuesday follows Monday: Wednesday, Tuesday. Each spreads the same ripple.

Drop upon drop, says Bernard, silence falls.
It forms on the roof of the mind and falls into pools beneath.
For ever alone, alone, alone - hear silence fall
and sweep its rings to the farthest edges.
Gorged and replete, solid with middle-aged content,
I, whom loneliness destroys, let silence fall, drop by drop.

.............................................................

There is the recurring theme of the shark fin, revolving far out in the waves,
the fin of inspiration:
...leaning over this parapet I see far out a waste of water. A fin turns,
the fin that rises in the wastes of silence, and then..sinks back into the depths,
spreading around it a little ripple of satisfaction, content...

There are the sheep, advancing remorselessly through the narrative in that wooden way of theirs, step by step on stiff, pointed legs

There is the grindstone, the rush of the great grindstone within an inch of my head.

There are moths, which sailing through the room had shadowed the immense solidity of chairs and tables with floating wings
And Jinny’s yellow scarf is moth coloured in the light

There is love and hate.

There is the colour purple.

There is a red carnation in a vase

There are stoats nailed to stable doors.

There are white petal ships floating in brown oceans.

And Bernard's voice, no longer making phrases:
Nothing, nothing, nothing broke with its fin that leaden waste of waters

But always the waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.

Lizzy

Rating: really liked it

The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice. Suddenly tumblers revealed themselves upheld by streaks of light.

As I turn the pages of The Waves, Virginia Woolf talks to me, to my heart, my spirit and my soul, like I could not have imagined. Such splendor and beauty come to me through her words, and I feel like singing with her. She sings life, a life that begins and goes on and on. So I keep reading and hope to get lost, to blend with the pages whose sounds are just like the very waves that come and go inexorably.

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.

If only I could write, if only I were a poet. If only I knew who I was, but I feel the six of them as if they shared my soul. Yes, there are six, and I am only one. But each talks to a part of me. A part that I recognize or a part that I try to hide. As a woman, I am Jinny, Susan, and Rhoda and at the same time, I am not. But I am also Bernard, Neville, and Louis in their daily struggles, despite sometimes feeling so foreign to them. But I am all of them, and they are me. ‘I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.’ We play on along, and we live, we are human in our frailty and our imperfections. We live in our different scenarios, but all in the same planet. And I weep and smile with them for what they fought and are loved for, for their fears and for their insecurities, and their lovers.

The activity is endless. And tomorrow it begins again; tomorrow we make Saturday. Some take train for France; others ship for India. Some will never come into this room again. One may die tonight. Another will beget a child. From us every sort of building, policy, venture, picture, poem, child, factory, will spring. Life comes; life goes; we make life. So you say.

I that had for long forgotten to look inside myself, now crave to know why I lost so many friends or was lost by them. I am jealous of their friendship, as I sometimes feel so solitary and desperate for that human connection that seems some days so far away. I am a chameleon, for I am all six at the same time. Even Percival, for I have died even having survived. ‘How curious one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend.’ And I still feel the sorrow of those friends that I do not see anymore, and so seem dead to me. He is all the friends I lost, their long gone memories, and all the friends I gave up. He is the isolation that I built for myself. Was it pride or simply forgetfulness? I grieve and want to yell for help. Is there still time? Could we meet for dinner and perhaps share all our happiness, our misgivings, and our sufferings?

I have had one moment of enormous peace. This perhaps is happiness. Now I am drawn back by pricking sensations; by curiosity, greed (I am hungry) and the irresistible desire to be myself. I think of people to whom I could say things: Louis, Neville, Susan, Jinny and Rhoda. With them I am many-sided. They retrieve me from darkness. We shall meet tonight, thank Heaven. Thank Heaven, I need not be alone.

Despite all that I imagine I have in common with all six of them, I feel a special connection with Bernard. Why is that so? Should it not have been with Susan, a female with her family life and her children? I that am also a mother. But no, it is Bernard that talks most to me. Maybe that is because he is the storyteller of the group of friends, what keeps them together. Or perhaps he is one but is at the same time all six of them.

Light almost pierced the thin swift waves as they raced fan-shaped over the beach. The girl who had shaken her head and made all the jewels, the topaz, the aquamarine, the water-coloured jewels with sparks of fire in them, dance, now bared her brows and with wide-opened eyes drove a straight pathway over the waves.

I watch as the waves break close to my feet and I cannot devise how it feels to be confronted with such force and immensity, to hear its deafening bellows as it crashes and almost kills me. ‘The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.’ And I feel I am always eavesdropping on Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda, and I listen to them and journey with them from day to day. I now can say that I met the grave and quiet Neville and understood his love for another part of himself – ‘The leaves now are thick in country lanes, sheep cough in the damp fields; but here in your room we are dry. We talk privately.’ I encountered the ambitious and insecure outsider Louis – ‘I repeat, “I am an average Englishman; I am an average clerk”, yet I look at the little men at the next table to be sure that I do what they do.’ I shared experiences with Susan, her idyllic visions of family and rustic life – ‘At this hour, this still early hour, I am the field, I am the barn, I am the trees; mine are the flocks of birds, and the young hare who leaps, at the last moment when I step almost on him.’ Yes, I have felt for Rhoda’s fear of life, her terror of always being lost and unheard – ‘Identity failed me. We are nothing. I said, and fell.’ I encountered the passionate Jinny and her volatility and her need to feel loved – ‘Now with a little jerk, like a limpet broken from a rock, I am broken off: I fall with him; I am carried off. We yield to this slow flood. We go in and out of this hesitating music.’ And I know Bernard, the eternal storyteller who failed in his first love but unites the friends not only with words – ‘Who am I thinking of? Byron of course. I am, in some ways, like Byron. Perhaps a sip of Byron will help put me in the vein. Let me read a page.’

I am in love with their names and their destinies, I am always with them and outside of it all, but present in spirit.

‘Words and words and words, how they gallop—how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me—some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity. Yet it is incredible that I should not be a great poet.’

I read each word, Virginia Woolf’s words, and her lyricism makes me feel very luxurious inside. She uses words that are metaphors for our everyday life, such as waves and storms. Words that are each and every one a treasure to our intellect and our souls. She is a poet and reminds me of Fernando Pessoa and The Book of Disquiet. She has led me through an ephemeral life, or better, six lives, and I feel replete and indulged. And I feel alive despite dying in the end.

And now I ask, “Who am I?” I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know.

Piyangie

Rating: really liked it
What Virginia Woolf does to me by her books no author living or dead has been able to do. She with her poetry and creativity takes me to some outer world enchanting and free. My mind wanders and is lost in its beauty and is simply unable to find its way back to the present realities for some time. The Waves took me through that journey into the lives of six characters, their relationship with each other, and their outlook on life and death.

Through internal soliloquies and thoughts, six different characters tell us of their stories that begin in their childhood and stretch through their youth, adulthood, and old age. Their stories illuminate us of their struggle to understand their true identity which is cloaked by their surroundings - people and objects, and their intimacy with each other. Time, experience, and maturity make them realize that while they shape each other in certain ways, they are six different identities that are partly known and partly unknown to each other. On to this struggle is brought "death" - the enemy, with the premature demise of their young friend, Percival which forces the six to consider deeply the meaning of life against the newfound formidable foe.

The Waves is the most experimenting novel of Virginia Woolf. The use of internal soliloquies is a creative addition to her stream of consciousness. The inner soliloquies and thoughts of the characters through which they say their story is interrupted by nine interludes. These nine interludes with the use of metaphors and symbols from nature show the passage of time.

The beauty of Virginia Woolf's books lies in her creativity and her language. The Waves I believe is the climax of her achievement. The whole composition is one poem. There is a lyrical beauty in every sentence. And it is also a painting with its colours. The tone is melancholy which suited the theme of the story. There is much symbology but the Sun and Waves are prominent. Sun was the beginning of hope - the life - the vitality. The Waves is the change - the continuation of life.

No one can write like Virginia Woolf. She overwhelms me with each book of hers in a way no other author can. She is a genius unparalleled.

Katie

Rating: really liked it
Tough one to review this because at times it feels like Virginia Woolf sees and knows things beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals! There are times when she seems to perceive quantum worlds through the sensibility of an animal, even an insect. There are also times when she maybe gets a bit carried away with her fanciful metaphors and other times when I wasn't able to quite follow her. But the best passages - and there are loads of them - make most other writing in comparison seem like amateurish scribbling.

The founding concept of the book is of six close friends and their shared experience all the way from childhood to old age. And who speak of their pivotal experiences in a private poetical language that you have to learn, almost like a foreign language, as the book progresses. The lyrical prose has a secretive quality as if moonlit. As if we're being ushered into a world hidden by day. All six characters form their identity in relation to each other. Though the novel is short on comedy Woolf is continually mocking the way biographies and histories are traditionally written. Her characters can't be caught by facts. Facts, in fact, are irrelevant unless accompanied by forceful feeling. The Waves is all about feeling; how we are formed by what we feel and how integral loved ones are in forming us by making us feel. And what better metaphor is there for feelings than waves?

I suspect it's a novel you'll either love to bits or simply won't connect with - as happens to all of us with music. The Waves is perhaps the closest prose gets to imitating music. The tightly controlled rhythmic beat of the prose, brilliantly reminiscent of waves, often compels you without realising it to read the words on the page aloud. And speaking the words aloud you appreciate the marvels of the book's design - in particular Woolf's poetic command of rhythm and the moonlit witchcraft of her prose.

Seemita

Rating: really liked it
Hi. || Hi. || Is it you? || Yes, I am. || You look different. || Should I have been same? || Mmm... I don’t know. But you have my color. || In setting auburn, yes. || But it still looks content on your skin; that color – like a sheet of fine, wet porcelain covering a tired, antique statue. || And you look dazed, as if an army of nebulous thoughts have held you captive. || Is it so evident? || Yes. || I met a few people – Bernard, Susan, Louis… || …Jinny, Neville and Rhoda. I know. || Do you remember them? || They never left me. || Even after so many years? || Time has shuffled what was detached from me; what was within me, was always out of its reach. || So it all begun from where I stand. || And it walked with you till where I stand. || In the same form? || In what form you say? || I don’t know. But it feels like my mind and body dissolved its hinges and fused into that of those six people who combed through life with the precision of a surgeon… || …and the flamboyance of an artist. They let their vial overflow and got injected into your veins, sprucing your limp persona to rise like a volcanic sapling, splashing your vision with hues, bunched and scattered. You became them and you permitted it. || How could I not? Were you not present when we picked abandoned pebbles of insecurities on the way and held them hidden in our clothes of opaque vanity? Were you not a witness to the swinging that erupted from our trees of longing, long enough to allow crystallization with birches of affection in our hair? Would you deny the scene where we luxuriated at the thought of being serenaded by that young traveler, eventually kissing the rutted soil that he kicked with his indifferent boots on his voyage away from us? Were you not a secret enthusiast when we paused to bite into the luscious fruits of solitude only to experience a lonely taste hijacking our mouths in the most nauseous of sensations? Did you not skip a beat at the sight of us, lain ambushed behind the currant trees of ambition that were trimmed by parental legacy exposing our being to a twisted life bearing resemblance to an encumbered ball of alien proclivity? Did you not? || I did. With apprehension. And with h… || Then why did you not stop us? Stop ME? || Because amid everything, I saw you with hope. And revitalizing continuity. I am not surprised you let the streams of incredulity flow into the six, for they made the river that I am today. || But the streams were fledgling! Didn’t you see? In the vast ocean of my life, our pulses flickered like inconsolable dreams; now made and now thrashed. We were young, confused, hopeful, repulsive, always standing by the window of expectation, ready to be swept away even under the winds of anonymity and recklessness. We could not say the good from the bad. If only a wedge named Percival could have stood on our fertile surfaces, we could have perhaps…. || …not lived the life that you did. But who is to say what life we have to make? Isn’t life what we can capture in a diary and sing as a song? Isn’t it the crisp bed we lie on after a day of hard work? Why else should…. || …Life is not the view from the perch of simplicity that you elucidate in eloquence. The rules of the society are painted in huge, black letters on the wall that envelop our breathing. And they are not erasable. || But interpretable. || Perhaps. Did I do a good job interpreting it? Did I read the rules and still make mine? Inserting a letter here and recoloring a word there? Have I ever come close to understanding life? Ever? || Well, in the suns that rise and moons that melt, we found meaning of life. In the rains that drench and frost that shrivels, we found meaning of life. I have bathed in the sun-kissed day that danced in your bright eyes and you have shivered in the wintriness of my hunched shoulders. I have collected the shells you shed in the corners of your bed when no one was looking and you have swung the lilies from the roof I lay prostrate on to lull the world beneath. I have stood witness when you opened the doors to stray dogs and cats and learnt the art to welcome a stranger when it was time. You have shared my marks of jealousy like an unhealed wound that acts as the reminder of impending tests spurting from the corners of our aspirations. I walked along with you on the path of love and loss, family and friends, victory and failures, reality and drama and never lost sense of the road. The road, this road, that you have been asked to traverse, that I have traversed in its unevenness, coarseness, unpredictability and lengthiness, is a lullaby that tampers with our sensory beams and evokes reactions not written in our palms. You say I stand like an antique statue? Well, I have learnt over my dainty walks and strained tapping that empty eyes speak the loudest. And the stoic porcelain continues to draw figures on my body that no one, but my silent eyes, can decipher. When the sun hides behind the restless waves and the white foam strips its light into shadows, I can still make a drawing in the sand and not be worried of its fate. || Even in its transience, there is meaning? || Yes. In its transience, there is meaning. Because there are memories. I am afraid if I were to render form to memories, I would view it as a long vestibuled train which rearranges its compartments to derive a faster, nimbler run but never coughs enough steam to disengage any one of them. You see, memories are creations. And there is no better role to acquire than that of a creator. The very best. || But being a creator is also a bane; sometimes he has to let fall the axe on what is unacceptable. || But what pride would you have if you never created anything on your own? You love your warm coffee in the morning and the soft pillow at night. But try giving space to a fading rose in your vase; or a rumpled shawl on your shoulders. Perhaps, you can draw a familiar aroma or feel an acquainted warmth. And if you get neither, don’t fret; they get magically synthesized into memory pearls that keep dotting the steady and sinking steps you take on the shore of life, much like navigators to lead you where you truly belong. || Would they be illuminating forever? || Indeed. || That is a resuscitating relief. But… You look different. || Do I? || Yes. Wait! Is it you? || Yes, I am you.

Luís

Rating: really liked it
It is difficult to critique the Waves; it is a text that is felt but only in an absolute way—invading the flow of the mind, emotions, and the deep course of existence. I read it a long time ago. It is still in my memory; it inhabits and enriches me. I resonate with the essence of what is delivered and discovered a form of perfection in literature. The state is liberated but to better vibrate and diffuse, with a richness that many current novels, dull and cold by dint of wanting to be stripped of constraints, have never been able to match. It is a dream, but the time of this dream is the whole essence of life that passes.