The Waves

Woolf had been writing here and there about and around the coming of this sort of literature years before, then fulfilled her own prophecy

>>8269251
It was also her favourite novel she wrote, no?

>>8269215

Please, tell me how you did it. I found it, though interesting, extremely boring.

>>8269332
I flipped around on my bed a few times with orange juice in my mouth, then I spat the orange juice onto my fat stomach and cried "Fuck me harder!" really loud so my neighbors could hear and then I went into the kitchen where I began to weep while letting the tears spill into the sink where they fall into the pipes and eventually into the drinking water that someone will eventual dispose into their mouths then piss out in a stream out from their dicks and into the gutter.

>>8269215
>Rhoda is Virginia, right?
I don't know much about the Woolfie except her depression and suicide and simply going by that I would assume they have a lot in common. But she probably also carries elements of the other characters or she wouldn't be able to write them so well.

It's the only one of hers I've read so far but definitely one of my favourites. Heartwrenchingly beautiful and endlessly quotable.

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I've only read Orlando and Mrs Dalloway, how does this one compare to here other works.
I'm curious because I've seen this novel posted here several time and I must say, at the very least I adore this cover (pic related).

>>8269332
The prose alone should be enough to keep you going.

>>8269351

Bernard does go on about how the edge between the characters is blurred, so I am guessing they all have a part of Woolf in them. I also liked how she talks about identity and how we are more than just us because of the people we encounter through our lives: they shape us as we live on, and we can't talk about ourselves and leave out the ones who made us what we are.


I wrote down at least 30 quotes while reading it. Every line is a gem.

>>8269451
It's at least as good as Mrs Dalloway, if not better. It's a blend of poetry and prose, though, so approach it differently.

Very rewarding a read. It's worth your time due to sheer ability alone.

Beautiful book. It's one of those that sticks in your head well after finishing it.

>>8269215
Learn to use spoiler tags, jerk.

>>8269332
>I found it, though interesting, extremely boring.
>I found it, though hot, extremely cold

>>8270513
>what is icecube foreplay

>>8269494
Bernard a shit. Percival is best boy.

>>8269307
To The Lighthouse is what she called her best.

One of my absolute favourites, yes. Virginia Woolf is amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8czs8v6PuI

>>8270604
Percival doesn't count. He's sexy Jesus and not part of the mind connected gang.

I absolutely love the description of his death.

did anyone else unreasonably hate percival? i don't know, i just resented how they were all going about how fucking wonderful he was the whole time when i never really got to know him and he just seemed like a chad asshole

>>8271513
lol, you're a weak creature

>>8271502
>reflexively clicks on censored text
why the fuck do I do that

>>8270560
No seriously, what is it? I'm asking you.

‘You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character. I find marks against all those sentences which seem to express a sardonic yet passionate nature; a moth-like impetuosity dashing itself against hard glass. You thought, as you drew your pencil there, “I too throw off my cloak like that. I too snap my fingers in the face of destiny”. Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table – it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up clumsily, with your pocket-handkerchief. You then stuff your handkerchief back into your pocket –that is not Byron; that is you; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years’ time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep. Once you were Tolstoi’s young man; now you are Byron’s young man; perhaps you will be Meredith’s young man; then you will visit Paris in the Easter vacation and come back wearing a black tie some detestable Frenchman whom nobody has ever heard of. Then I shall drop you.

‘I am one person – myself. I do not impersonate Catullus, whom I adore.

I just started reading this down by the coast and I am really enjoying it so far.

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Got this book up next on my reading list. You guys are getting me excited to start on it.

>>8271749
I would let this woman kill me.

>>8271765
>reading the Waves by the waves

Fuck, that must be comfy.

Are we posting quotes now? This is one of my favourites, because I had just lost a loved one and felt just like Rhoda (spoiler ahead):

'Now I will walk down Oxford Street envisaging a world rent by lightning; I will look at oaks cracked asunder and red where the flowering branch has fallen. I will go to Oxford Street and buy stockings for a party. I will do the usual things under the lightning flash. On the bare ground I will pick violets and bind them together and offer them to Percival, something given him by me. Look now at what Percival has given me. Look at the street now that Percival is dead. The houses are lightly founded to be puffed over by a breath of air. Reckless and random the cars race and roar and hunt us to death like bloodhounds. I am alone in a hostile world. The human face is hideous. This is to my liking. I want publicity and violence and to be dashed like a stone on the rocks. I like factory chimneys and cranes and lorries. I like the passing of face and face and face, deformed, indifferent. I am sick of prettiness; I am sick of privacy. I ride rough waters and shall sink with no one to save me.

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>>8271730

One of my favourite ever passages is from The Waves. Fuck the whole end with Bernard's monologue is some of the best writing I've ever read. Until then the book hadn't really grabbed me (I don't think the attempt to transit experience with metaphor really worked), but in the last chapter it all clicked and came together. To The Lighthouse is better IMO, but wow.


I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot even grasp that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.


Shit. I need to read Woolf again now.

>to run in and out of the skulls of Sophocles and Euripides like a maggot

I'm going to the beach next month and wanted to read a Woolf book, should I start with Voyage, Lighthouse, or Waves?

>>8277099
>beach
>Waves
You know the answer. Unless there is a lighthouse.

>>8277353

there will be a lighthouse, along with waves and a voyage. you can see my trouble.

>>8278024
If it's any help, Lighthouse and Waves are different enough that you can read both in a row without pushing beyond author satiation

>>8271521
It's not really a spoiler. Most blurbs of the book include something about the characters "trying to come to terms with their friend's death" even though it takes place about halfway through the novel. If ever there was a book where the plot wasn't important, this is it.

>>8277099
read the voyage out, then to the lighthouse, then the waves

>>8273672
>I ride rough waters and shall sink with no one to save me.

Damn, didn't pick up on that the first time I read the novel.

>>8278131
Considering that Woolf drowned herself?

Can anyone who has read a lot of Woolf rank her works? I've only read Mrs Dalloway.

>>8279164
interested in this too

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>>8269251
>Poetry, Fiction and the Future / Woolf 1927

>>8279164
Of those I've read:
1. To The Lighthouse (favourite novel, perfection of stream of consciousness)
2. The Waves (incredibly beautiful but too experimental, Woolf's project doesn't quite come off)
3. Mrs Dalloway (excellent on its own, but really just a trial-run for the above two)
4. Orlando (fun and funny, nothing much substantial)
5. The Years (boring, run of the mill realist tedium)

I wholeheartedly recommend any of them except The Years. Mrs Dalloway is the best place to start IMO (and if you read it after TTL it will be relatively underwhelming).

>>8280903
Thanks. I'm also interested in Jacob's Room.

>>8280903
Currently reading Mrs. Dalloway and it's immediately becoming the best novel I've read this year, which is incredible considering there is almost no plot to speak of. I'm honestly blown away at Woolf's nuance; I'm an American black guy in my 20's riveted by a story about a British woman in her 50's throwing a dinner party- Woolf wields her narrative in such a way that it penetrates every layer of one's humanity and speaks to your most core aspects while talking about such mundane events. The description of lesbian romance, the feeling of existential solitude between people in relationships, death. If this isn't even her best work she may well be my favorite writer

women rarely have the balls to commit suicide. is wolfe a male-approved?

>>8281958
Cool! TTL is better imo because Mrs. Dalloway is a pretty annoying character when you think about it. Her incarnation in Mrs. Ramsey works much better I think.

But then again, that might just be bitterness because I am Peter Walsh irl...

>>8281958
glad you like it. most people agree ttl and waves are better so yeah. woolf is based