The Waves (Oxford World's Classics) Pocket Book – 27 February 2015

Literary club nomination ... couldn’t finish !!!Maybe I’m not highbrow enough?!

Well read but of course anything by Ms Woolf is good with me.

This is my review of “The Waves”. I read an edition of the novel from the Oxford University Press. This edition contained an introduction that provided a description of the extensive scholarship around the novel. It described the novel as Woolf’s most experimental and the most in the genre of modernism. As a modernist novel, the novel expects the participation of the reader in its creation. The novel provides images and allusions. The novel evokes a response in the reader that is the product of these allusions within the background of the reader. The introduction in this edition provided a background to some of these allusions and images. There were some that were highly personal to Woolf. The fin on the horizon and the puddle that could not be crossed come from highly meaningful events in her life. Others such as that of the Piccadilly underground station would rely on the experience of her expected readers during her life. As the introduction explains, Piccadilly contained a mural of a map of the British Empire with Piccadilly as the centre – London as the centre of the world. London as the capital of a colonial empire. This is the scholarship. It describes the novel as an expected reader in the time of its first publication would see it. The scholarship could see the novel as an historical artifact that brings light to that era almost a century ago.However, I do not live in the world of 1931. I do not have insight into the highly personal images of Wolfe’s life. I’ve been to London. The geographic allusions in the novel about London do have meaning for me. Many of them would be the same as that of a 1931 reader but many are distinctly not. Piccadilly station no longer has retail displays of the wonders of a world-wide empire. It is no longer the center of the world. The colonial themes that the scholarship reveals were evoked for people of that era are academic for me. It was the highly personal themes that the novel evoked for me. It is the “I-I-I” of the novel. What makes up a person’s identity. How is it malleable with the events and the people around him/her? That is what I found in the novel. The novel has six active characters with each describing the inner and outer aspects of their lives and their relationships. There is an ambiguity. Are there six characters or only one with different aspects of his/her personality coming to the fore. The novel ends with the death of Bernard – the collector of phrases. Would Bernard be he final collective entity of these six characters.I’ve read other novels by Woolf. I found Mrs. Dalloway to be a powerful novel. During my reading of “To the Lighthouse”, I kept thinking of it as a masterpiece. “The Waves” does not strike me as of the same quality as these two novels. The voices of the characters in the novel blend together. The reader must eb careful to understand just which one is speaking at any one time. That for me is an issue. The characters do not have their own voices. They describe themselves as being very different – Bernard from Louis – Jinny from Susan – and yet they all sound the same. It is the same voice coming from many different people. It feels to me more like a single narrator describing the six characters than the six of them each speaking in their own voices. The characters in Faulkner’s “The Sound and The Fury” each have their voice. That is the power of the novel in bringing the reader into their lives. I find this lacking in “The Waves”.

ヴァージニア・ウルフの「波」。筆者が、ウルフの「波」（角川文庫）を読んだのは、小学校４年生の頃と、記憶する。　男女６人（男性３人、女性３人）の、会話で成り立っている、この作品ですが、ウルフの小説の中でも、進歩的な作品です。　和訳についてですが、「波」（角川文庫）は、絶版の模様です。中古品には、プレミア価格（千円だ！）が、付いている。　他にも、「みすず書房」の訳とか、存在するので、適切な図書館で、借りて読めば良い、と、思います。　Oxford の、この版ですが、新版(NEW EDITION) です。Hogarth Press の版よりも、良いでしょう。価格も、そんなに高くない。大学の学食で、「ランチ」を、３回、食事した、と思えば、その位の予算で、買えます。

an amazing book well worth the read