THE WAVES - VIRGINIA WOOLF

It’s been a while since I’ve read a proper novel, and even longer since I’ve read a Great Novel, something squarely in the cannon. Actually, this one should be much central in the Modernist wing of said Cannon. It’s as good as The Sound and the Fury. It’s, to me, better than Ulysses. It fucks up The Wasteland and The Sun Also Rises. I have to assume that Woolf’s gender is the only reason she’s not the first name you think of when one considers literature in this period. The reason this book is so good and, frankly, so hard to review is that it gets as close as anything I’ve ever read to the experience of thinking and being with your thoughts. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE was also perfect in this regard. The way one’s interior monologue bounces back and forth between past and present as certain things remind you of other things and the way we mull things over and over in our heads is rendered closer to the real experience of being alive than anything else I’ve ever read. Like TO THE LIGHTHOUSE the “plot” is less important than the verisimilitude present in the prose itself. This book exceeds TTL by adding another layer of complexity. Instead of following a few characters throughout their lives, THE WAVES follows a group of friends as if the group was one organism. The members of the group take turns delivering monologues, sometimes, especially as they couple up, the boundaries between them blur. “We melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist.” one of them says at one point. Everyone speaks so gnomically and gorgeously I was reminded of DeLillo, who’s characters also have a strange perfect quality to their thoughts. This isn’t a complaint since Woolf is such a powerful writer and so beautiful on a sentence to sentence level that I don’t really care if it’s unrealistic that all of these folks would have such well-written interior dialogues. The theme of your friends composing your identity and shaping your life deeply resonates with me and reminds me of THE CONFERENCE OF BIRDS. And while the book is mostly timeless in its depiction of the sensation of being alive, it is also very placed in British history. The main thrust of the novel concerns the fact that all 6 of the narrators share a love of Percival, a character we hear a lot about but never from, who dies as part of the British campaign to subjugate India. The way this death changes the lives of the other 6 can’t help but be read as a commentary on the costs of Imperialism, a theme that lingers in the background. The British boarding school culture and its effect on the lives of the students and its connection to the British Empire is also explored but mostly in the  background. Again, I don’t have too much to say, the book is basically perfect and among the most beautiful I’ve ever read. I was constantly having to stop to copy down or reread sentences that were weepingly gorgeous and brilliant. Maybe I should be more aggressive with the novel reading. 1931 Waves.