The Waves - Virginia Woolf

"There was a star riding through clouds

one night, and I said to the star,

'Consume Me'."

This is Woolf's most popular experimental novel. Soliloquies are spoken by the six characters: Bernard, Susan, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda and Neville. But Percival, the seventh character, whom all admire does not speak in his own voice. There are also third-person interludes detailing a coastal scene, from sunrise to sunset.

"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 moment of humiliation and triumph that comes 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 movements; 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."

Such beauty! Woolf paints a painting that resonates sound. It looks like you are standing in a meadow and a calm breeze might make you float. If tried hard, one might even swim in it. The six 'voices' Woolf created are distinct and explore, of self, community and individuality. Together they compose something that lets you hear the silence and see in the dark. Such beauty!

There is difficulty at hand when assigning a genre to this masterpiece as it is hard to distinguish between the prose and the poetry in it. It is a blur.

"How much better is silence;

the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bind that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself."

The first fifty pages can be a bit baffling as an unknown conundrum. The whole book is in the form of internal monologues with few initial elucidations about who thinking what. It is easy to relate with it. And the magnificence on display, intolerable to carry. This book will be read again and again to find a part of the past, present and the future. The equation of tenses will change but the words shall remain intact in their truth and beauty.

Bernard is left to conclude, only through sensibility, creative inner life, all which achieves love and forge abiding worth and find the fellowship that are the principal sources of light and warmth in the life.

"And in me too the wave rides, 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."

Such beauty!