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Review
Clear, bright, burnished, at once marvellously accurate and subtly connotative. The pure, delicate sensibility found in this language and the moods that it expresses are a true kind of poetry ― New York Times
As a reader, as a writer, I constantly return, for the lyricism of it, the melancholy, the humanity ―
IndependentIt is so different from any other novel I have read that description is pointless. Suffice to say that it creates an entirely new way of writing about what goes on in the human mind and how those minds interact with one another — Mark Haddon ―
New StatesmanAbout the Author
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. After her father’s death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the center of ‘The Bloomsbury Group’. This informal collective of artists and writers exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture.
In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel
the Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob’s Room (1922). Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs. Dalloway (1925) to the Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
sai kiran –
Dear Glorious and legendary Virginia Woolf,I would like to take part in writing these ramblings on The Waves book with pleasure and assuming you to be a receiver, from an ardent admirer of your delightful works and wisdom.Your novel consumed me over the nights, early mornings and sometimes all the day with its poetic brilliance. I gasped and pondered, floated and awash over the days with its sheer splendid poetic and majestic prose.This is not a novel, It’s a book of long melodious song. A book of a long song that follows the pattern of waves, like ebb and flow, as rise and fall and rolls over. This book of a song is continuum flow of words with its fragmented sentences as if it had been scattered as clouds, as clouds get scattered in blue sky. The punctuations are like an aesthetic decoration to sentences.The six characters continually diverge, separate, converge and merge into single voice which gives shape and form to this unconventional novel.I wasn’t able to read it continuously, I gave a pause after reading each page due to its surprising metaphors with subsuming solidifying the words of those six voices. I gave pause to praise its beautiful sentences. Within a day, it became my elixir and holy grail. This novel moved in my mind as diffusion.No matter how many times I read, I go back to it. I go back to it for its poetic inspiration and solitude. I go back to it for the love of friendship and profundity of the human soul. I go back to it and read it till it grows and take roots in mine. I go back to till I wither.
Warak ki Kavi –
The product was authentic and delivered on time.
Ranjit Roy –
The cover reflects the integrity and subtlety of the content within…
Shatabdee Das –
A James Joyce wannabe. Plus seller overcharged me by Rs 100. Actual price clearly written on back page as Rs 399. They’re making a fortune per book.
Rashi BHardwaj –
I LOVE this book and this edition but I can’t believe the seller is selling this for more than its MRP. I should have returned it but I didn’t have the heart.
#CMB# –
Édition mediocre
Chef-d’œuvre dans une édition médiocre correctement préfacé par une romancière et preofesseure à succès mérites. Déçue par l’édition.
DD –
Woolf attempts to best Proust
A lovely, but not lively, extended essay on death and mortality. Woolf goes thrust for thrust with Proust. I think she pulls it off because of her relative concision. But then compared to Proust who is not concise?
Amazon Customer –
Me encanta
Me encanta Virginia Woolf y esta obra no se queda corta.
Beach Books Blog –
Meditative, with a wavelike rhythm
Seven friends are together since nursery. Bernard, Jinny, Louis, Neville, Rhoda, Susan and Percival. Nursery is located in a house with a garden right by the sea. Just like Virginia’s childhood summer house in St Ives. The sound of the waves is tattooed on the skin of their memories. “Chained beast stumps on the beach. It stamps and stamps.”Meditative, rhythmic. Paragraph after paragraph. Head gets a bit dizzy, but soon I fall in love with the wavelike rhythm. Poetic novel “The Waves” by Virginia Woolf, the most experimental of her works, is woven entirely of soliloquies spoken by the book’s six characters.Also important is Percival, the seventh character, though readers never hear him speak in his own voice. Everyone loves Percival. Unfortunately he falls from a horse and dies when young, just like Virginia’s brother Thoby, who contracted typhoid at the age of 26 while on holiday in Greece, and died shortly after. Percival remains as a mysterious hero, who is mentioned often but never says a word in this book. Mysterious and deeply loved.Nursery, school, youth, family, job, aging. They all meet again and again. You hear how their thoughts change, but they themselves don’t.Rhoda is afraid of everything. She finds her soothing escape during nights when dreaming the dreams. When awake, she has to touch something solid to not to dissolve into ungraspable reality. Rhoda thinks, she has no face.Jinny is like a dancing flame, attractive, teasing, living in reality and celebrating it. Party diva, a playful flow. “Come,” is her golden key.Susan has green eyes and she can take a deep breath only when in nature. Far away from school, far away from London, because in the city she suffocates and suffers. When grown-up, she has children, rough hands and a healthy attitude.Louis senses all the lives, his soul has ever lived. He hears women singing by the Nile, although that was thousands of years ago. That is why he leads his present life as a business. Appointments in his daily planner anchors him to here and now. To clear away the prehistoric density, he becomes a successful businessman. Although he still is an attic dweller with an old and dusty soul.Bernard is a story teller. He ignites when in people. Phrases fly like bubbles from his mouth, like rings of smoke. Everything is a story. Until his hair become gray and he becomes tired from all that and longs “for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.”Neville wonders, how scarce is our knowledge about each other. How infinite we are in ourselves, and how finite and one-sided we become in the eyes of others. He grasps the moment, when the infinite Neville, who approaches the table at a restaurant, becomes Neville the friend of these five other people.Virginia Woolf has X-ray eyes. She inflates readers with the kaleidoscope of life with such a beautiful intensity that you cry and laugh at the same time. The book is her magic funnel.Life is not a solid ground, and Virginia Woolf teaches us how to walk on water.
C. O’Shaughnessy –
Attractive edition of a modernist classic
‘The Waves’ is a masterpiece of modern fiction and this is a nice handy pocket-sized version with an attractive wrap-around cover designed by Aino-Maija Metsola. The Introduction by Jeanette Winterson is alone worth the price of the book (i.e. if you already own a copy of the novel). Brilliantly insightful about the creative process, especially the creative strategies and difficulties that Virginia Woolf used and encountered in writing ‘The Waves’.