From AudioFile
This narrative traces the lives and friendships of six childhood friends from their childhood to their old age. It tells of the friends' true feelings, which are often different from the ones they portray to each other. The narration is done in a light, airy poetic voice by Frances Jeater, who comforts the listener with her reading but fails to provide enough differentiation to the characters, making it difficult to know who is the focus of each point of the story. J.F.M. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


Book Description
One of Woolf’s most experimental novels, The Waves presents six characters in monologue - from morning until night, from childhood into old age - against a background of the sea. The result is a glorious chorus of voices that exists not to remark on the passing of events but to celebrate the connection between its various individual parts.



Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Polish


Download Description
A work of haunting power and beauty, Virginia Woolf¿s magnificent 1931 novel, The Waves, is perhaps the most challenging and experimental work of her career. Told through the voices of six characters as they move from childhood to old age, The Waves is not only a fascinating experiment in narrative monologue but also a profound and emotionally resonant story about time¿s passing and the desire for harmony in the midst of life¿s chaos.

ANNOTATION

A novel in which the characters' lives are presented in terms of their thoughts.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Virginia Woolf's most overtly experimental and perhaps most challenging work, The Waves traces the lives of six characters from childhood through old age, presenting them through their own interwoven voices. The voices, always placed in quotations and introduced with the name of the person speaking, fall somewhere between spoken soliloquy and an interior monologue. The tension between these two things, between the spoken and the unspoken, is, in part, what gives the novel so much of its emotional force. The narration of the novel, placeable on a spectrum somewhere between uncensored inner narration and conscious self-presentation, undergirds one of the novel's central thematic preoccupations. That is, the characters whose "voices" we hear throughout each seem caught trying to mediate between the vivid idiosyncrasies of his or her own inner experience and the world of other people. Woolf brilliantly introduces this dynamic in the opening few pages where six children, Neville, Louis, Bernard, Susan, Jinny, and Rhoda take turns delivering one-line impressions of what they see around them. What is striking is the way their descriptions do and do not coincide. While they all speak in identical constructions (subject-verb-object) and describe something about their present sensory experience ("I see a crimson tassel"), they take notice of different phenomena and describe those phenomena in unique, impressionistic ways. Indeed, it is unclear in the opening few pages, as it often is in the rest of the novel, whether they are observing the same scene at all. Are they together or are they each alone? There is no third person narrator to tell us; we instead rely on the characters' own depictions of the world they inhabit and the people with whom they inhabit it. The ambiguity is deliberate, since Woolf's suggestion is that even when these people are together, on a deeper level, each one is still very much alone.

SYNOPSIS

A work of haunting power and beauty, Virginia Woolf's magnificent 1931 novel, The Waves, is perhaps the most challenging and experimental work of her career.

FROM THE CRITICS

Louis Kronenberger