Much better to listen to than to read

What made the experience of listening to The Waves the most enjoyable?

I had struggled with this book before. However, listening to it while walking the dog allows its beauty and strangeness to grasp you. Wonderful.

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“So strange is the contact of one with another.”

What made the experience of listening to The Waves the most enjoyable?

Being carried on from one monologue to another.

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

How different it is from a Virginia Woolf novel that I like much better - "To the Lighthouse".

Which character – as performed by Julia Franklin – was your favourite?

Bernard.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No.

Any additional comments?

I expect to re-read “The Waves” (1931), in part because its (Modernist) difficulty is likely to release new meanings, rather than confirm assumptions or provide reassurance, but also because as its six characters get older and, in their interspersed monologues, contemplate death so they seem to matter more and move beyond their very irritating youthful characters.

Even after one reading, though, I would say that while “The Waves” is acute on time, it relegates the social and historical insights that occur from time to time, and, to my surprise, at least, emerge much more unerringly in “Mrs Dalloway” (1925) and “To the Lighthouse” (1927). Possibly, this is because Virginia Woolf sticks, mostly, to the perspectives (and the narrowness of political outlook) of Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis; but, equally, it could be because of Woolf’s allegiance to the values of nature announced in the title and pursued doggedly, as well as through the unnamed third-person narrator who follows the rhythm of one day even as the six named characters go through to middle-age. This allegiance to nature or natural reality is quite deliberate on Woolf’s part and distinguishes “The Waves” from “To the Lighthouse”, which, in some respects, it resembles. Whereas in “To the Lighthouse”, for all its Modernist interest in consciousness, there is a concern with how people inter-relate in society, in “The Waves” “the contact of with one another” is “strange” for the characters. Almost in spite of her metaphysical interests, though, there are so many wonderful passages in “The Waves” when society – and particularly London society -- presses upon the more worldly of the six characters that there is an even greater novel shadowing the novel that Virginia Woolf has written.

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A very acquired taste

Would you ever listen to anything by Virginia Woolf again?

No

Any additional comments?

I thought I ought to listen to something slightly more upbrow, but found this deadly dull and uninspiring. Despite it being set more than 50 years ago, I can't believe that children and teenagers ever spoke to, and about each other like this in prose that sounded more like they were 60 year olds, and rather pompous ones at that, I managed about half of the book, before abandoning it having found that I was listening to it and not taking any of it in, so much so that I regret spending money on it. Not sure who would find this book appealing.

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