...torn bits of stuff, stuff with raw edges...
Virginia Woolf's The Waves is a strange, lyrical, difficult, beautiful, and complicated book. Is it a novel? Woolf called it a "play-poem," and it seems to me that it is perhaps a mixture of all three forms: a novel that is built like a play, written in the form of a long prose poem. Or perhaps it's something else entirely. It is a book about consciousness, and like its subject, its true nature is slippery.
The Waves is made up of the entwined inner monologues of six characters, broken occasionally by short, italicized sections describing in careful detail a scene on the coast of England at various points from sunrise to sunset. These descriptive sections mark the passage of time in the lives of the six characters, but Woolf shows very little interest in the events of their lives. Some of them marry, some have children, some become lovers or poets or businessmen--where other authors would construct major scenes or whole plots out of any one of these events, Woolf gives them only glancing mention. Instead, Woolf focuses on the struggle of each of her characters to know themselves, to know others, to understand themselves in relationship to others, to understand the changing world and their own changing place in it. It is a book about the pain of identity: the first half (my favorite half, when the characters are young) is about the pain of forming an identity; the second is about the pain of one's inevitable isolation within that identity.
This was the most challenging book that I've read in quite a while, and although I wanted to love it in the way I loved To the Lighthouse last summer, I couldn't quite. I was blown away by Woolf's ambition and by her determination to write about those elusive elements of thought and experience that resist being set down in words. Her sentences are unfailingly gorgeous, she brings an equal, startling precision to her observation of both the natural world and the human psyche, and there are deep insights and moving moments in The Waves. But those insights and moments of emotional connection are often surrounded on all sides by abstraction, and I frequently found my attention drifting as Woolf's lovely sentences flowed past my eyes. Some days I had no trouble staying focused and connected to the narrative, but on others I continually found myself at the bottom of the page with no awareness of how I had gotten there. So although there is much to admire (more even than I have enumerated here! I have barely scratched the surface!), I remained stuck in admiration and never made the leap to love.
But this is not a book that reveals itself fully on a first reading. I know that I should return to it someday, and that I will experience it differently when I do.