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Format: Paperback
ISBN-10: 0156949601
ISBN-13: 9780156949606
Jun 1978
Publisher: Harcourt
297 pages
A Harvest/Hbj Book
Language: English |
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* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
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Synopsis
THE WAVES, Woolf's highly experimental, almost-prose-poem of a novel, asks the reader, "What endures?" The answer calls out from the novel like an echo in a seashell: nothing. Everything changes, decays, morphs. Woolf sketches six lives--three women and three men--all focused on a leader, Percival, a classical hero. Each character narrates a set of soliloquies through which Woolf explores the ways in which each human life is like a wave that impacts another, but is always truly alone. THE WAVES is a stunning, though abstract, look at humanity--the novel about which Woolf said, "I am writing to a rhythm and not a plot."
| Details | | Series: | A Harvest/Hbj Book |
| Size | | Length: | 297 pages | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 9.6 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "The sun had not yet risen."
Industry Reviews
"Mrs. Woolf's new form is absolutely valid. It represents the successful attempt of a genius to reform for its own high pursposes a medium which had been distorted to suit lesser talents: and, as it happens, it is not so much a discovery of a new model as a reversion to an old and sanctified one....Virginia Woolf has revived the Platonic dialogue. True that her persons do not argue, but merely make counterassertions. Still the form is the same. And in this form Virginia Woolf comes to a curious and secret flowers. The sight of it is far beyond the deserts of most of us."
Books - Rebecca West (11/01/1931)
"As prose it has very often a high distinction--it is clear, bright, burnished, at once marvelously accurate and subtly connotative. The pure, delicate sensibility found in this language and the moods that it expresses are a true kind of poetry. And since literature comes before the novel, and THE WAVES reaches the level of literature, whether it is a good or bad novel, or any novel at all, is not really important....Certainly it has seductive form...; certainly it contains much distinguished and beautiful writing; certainly it reveals exquisite sensibility. These qualities make it good enough to deserve the most careful scrutinizing, when high standards of comparison must be brought into play. And measured by those standards, though it survives as something rare and unique enough, it emerges as minor writing."
New York Times Book Review - Louis Kronenberger (10/25/1931)
"In THE WAVES, Virginia Woolf came closest to fulfilling her aesthetic ideal. This ideal is a fiction in which the stuff of realistic fiction--money, class, social placement, the details of family connection--is notable for its absence, and attention is paid only to that which reveals the inner life."
PEN America - Mary Gordon
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