Review: The Waves

The Waves by Virginia Woolf
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So I picked this up in a bookstore a year or two ago and decided to finally open it up on recommendation from a friend. It'd been a while since I last read something by Virginia Woolf, so I'd almost forgotten how hard it was to understand her novels until midway through the first section when my mind started wandering like crazy... wait, were they always this hard? I took a peek back at my copy of To The Lighthouse and compared a few passages at random, and yeah, I think The Waves is a lot harder to grasp... which is probably saying something even for Virginia Woolf.

Evidently this book can be hardly be called a novel persay- it's a lot more experimental compared to her other works. The story is told entirely through a series of interchanging soliloquies between the 6 main characters: Bernard, Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, and Rhoda, which means there is absolutely no dialogue in this book. There isn't even much of a plot; you can only find a few concrete moments at best (half of which revolve around the 7th figure, Percival, although he doesn't show up for some pages), and the rest of the time you're just meandering in a stream-of-consciousness like way through the scattered reflections and observations of the main characters as they progress through the course of life (which technically is what her other novels are like also, but it feels even more abstract than usual here).

That said, I feel you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in real life who thinks the ways these "characters" do, as they are way more articulate and poetic about the greater substance of life than some person's stray thoughts would ordinarily lend themselves to being. For how difficult it is to understand, the prose in this novel is actually quite beautiful and well thought out, though, which is probably more important for Woolf's purpose than actual realism. As is typical for Woolf's writing, the subject matter of this novel is largely based around observations and reflections on life itself - the passage of time, the connection between one's self and others, the effectiveness of language, the prospect of facing death, among other things, and it's in those few moments where the writing elucidates this most clearly that the novel really shines. What I liked the most was the way in which the characters's voices blended together, almost in harmony, in the few scenes where they were all present, in stark contrast with the glumness of their individual passages. (Incidentally this also made it difficult to distinguish them apart at the beginning, when their identities are first being formed. Probably would be good to take notes.)

This is not really a book I'd recommend trying to read in bed right before falling asleep, as per personal experience you don't really remember much afterwards. Even when fully focused I found myself having to repeat certain sections again because I forgot who had just been speaking or got lost in someone else's thoughts (typical, haha). I probably will have to go back and revisit this book again at a later point because there was a lot that I couldn't retain from a first reading- just looking at the quotes section for this book, I'm seeing a lot of stuff that I only half-remember coming across. I did have my doubts going into it at first, but with enough time, it's a pretty worthwhile read.