Alex’s Reviews > The Waves > Status Update

This has been a mixed bag for me since Percival passed. I find myself bored or frustrated or blown away by poignant prose. There are moments where I think this is some of the best stuff I've ever read and moments where I wonder if it's even worth continuing. The Waves is certainly not the type of book you can only read once and completely wrap your head around. I'm getting anxious to start Crossing to Safety.

I wonder if it might have been a mistake not to develop Percival as a character. It was clearly a deliberate choice on Woolf's part and maybe I haven't read far enough yet to understand that choice, but at the moment of his perishing, I felt nothing. I'm observing the emotions of surviving characters now without feeling any connection to them. It feels like a missed opportunity.

Mmf. Dat prose.

This is often beautiful, but I'm not yet convinced that the "play-poem" form (soliloquy after soliloquy) is doing anything for the content. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf accomplished similar shifts in perspective without having to put "Mrs. Ramsey said" at the end of every paragraph, which to me seems like a superior mode to be operating in. Obviously I still have plenty of time to change my mind on this matter.

A previous reading failed about five years ago. Knowing that this was written as a "play-poem" has made the style much easier to enter this time around. I'm also a much better reader than I was at that time.