The Waves

I got paperback instead of hardcover. I paid for hardcover.

What a tragic, true, glorious yet troubling depiction of brief human existence in an infinite world. Hard to take at times and not to be read in a fragile mood! Perhaps unduly long, though the detail builds and builds, so needs time to mature. A masterpiece, of course.

In my humble opinion, The Waves is the greatest, most exquisite poetry-as-novel ever written. Virginia Woolf's goal was to express the reality beneath reality in every human being, and she achieves nothing less than that in The Waves. Every word, every phrase, every sentence is perfect. One ought to hear this novel read aloud, and then read it aloud, over and over to discover all its diverse, rich treasures. This is the book I would choose if I were marooned on an island or mountaintop. All of life, the underlife and the other life are in it. Virginia Woolf was of course at least a hundred years ahead of her time; & she is timeless.

Honestly I'm not sure why people do that when there are other platforms for reviewing books. Anyway, this is not a good edition. It's riddled with typos (Most notably always replacing the word "book" with "e-book" , but that's far from the only thing), grammatical errors, and changes the structure of certain sections, like failing to italicize things that were italicized in the original. This is a 90 year old book. Just read a free pdf and don't make my mistake.

Intense, poignant writing!