Product Description

Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this novel follows their development from childhood to middle age. Social events, individual achievements and disappointments form the outer structure of the book, but the focus is the inner life of the characters which is conveyed in rich poetic language.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #67378 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From the Inside Flap
Tracing the lives of a group of six friends, The Waves follows
their development from childhood to youth and middle age. While their
individual achievements and disappointments form its narrative, this novel
is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that conveys the inner
lives of its characters: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets,
their awareness of unity and isolation. Separately and together, they query
the relationship of past to present and the meaning of life itself, in a
haunting, atmospheric and sensuous exploration of the complexities of human
experience.

About the Author
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist, essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Her family and friends were writers and artists and they later became known as the Bloomsbury Group. Woolf suffered mental health problems throughout her life and, fearing another outbreak of mental illness, drowned herself in 1941.

Customer Reviews

A touching, haunting example of literary genius.
My favourite of Woolfs novels and also, I think, the most acessable to readers new to her work. It is the least complicated example of her style and the one where her stream of conciousness achieves its best synergy with characters and plot. Two central plotlines interweave, Mrs. Dalloway fighting submerged demons below a perfect veneer, while elsewhere in London Septimus Smith is overwhelmed by his. His character as a metaphor for the struggles in her mind works very well. Woolfs prose is on wonderful form here; with a clarity and beauty rarely matched it touches the heart, while opening a Bloomsbury cavern filled with class divide and false appearance. It is a very human, humane novel with a private, fragile quality that echoes it's themes - the mind, the life and marrying the two without harm.

Intense, addictive and very perceptive
A book totally without airs and graces; unusual for literature stemming from early last century. Presumptions that the book is ragingly feminist are thrown out the window as soon as you begin to read. It is, however, very much a woman's world, and the psyche of many a female charcter is delved into - though the thoughts and emotions of males are also successfully explored and expressed.

A thoroughly modernist book, superbly written. Woolf engages the reader by investigating the power of an integral modernist device: the inner voice. Also, by dint of following a day in the life of various people who are simply trying to survive in the throbbing heart of the capital, the book is fast-paced and leaves the reader with the sensation that he/she is in London too. The characters are subtly and cleverly linked to one another, and the chief protagonist is intensely likeable - despite AND because of her flaws.

This book is brief, exciting, exhilirating and leaves one's head in the clouds for days afterwards. It is excellently structured and uses modernist literary methods cleverly and quietly. Very refreshing.

Brilliant, difficult, Woolf's masterpiece
This novel must invent its own narrative form to speak, and does; Woolf perfects her own poetics through the voices of six characters as we follow them from infancy to death, all in the course of a day. But the novel is not merely a formal or stylistic exercise in describing the world: it is one of the twentieth century's most moving accounts of the mostly unspoken, largely unspeakable shock at there being a world at all.