The Waves [平装]

《海浪》中每个引子都是一篇精致的散文诗，以太阳和海浪的涨落与变迁对应生命的兴衰沉浮；跟在每段引子后面的是六个没有姓氏的、高度形式化的人物在各自相应人生阶段——从儿童时代、学生时代、青春时代、中年时代直到 老年时代的瞬间内心独白。引子与正文互相映射，为读者的感官辟开前所未有的、细致入微的通道，最大限度地接近生命、时间、意识以及感觉的实质。这是一部在现代文学的殿堂中占据重要地位的作品，时至今日，仍以其精美绝伦的文本结构和诗意盎然的笔调激荡着我们的灵魂。

Book Description
Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this novel follows their development from childhood to youth and middle age. Separately and together, they query the relationship of past to present, and the meaning of life itself.

From AudioFile
This narrative traces the lives and friendships of six childhood friends from their childhood to their old age. It tells of the friends' true feelings, which are often different from the ones they portray to each other. The narration is done in a light, airy poetic voice by Frances Jeater, who comforts the listener with her reading but fails to provide enough differentiation to the characters, making it difficult to know who is the focus of each point of the story. J.F.M.

About Author
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. From 1915 onward, she maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary criticism, essays and biography. She married Leonard Woolf and in 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press. She died in 1941.

Book Dimension :
length: (cm)19.8 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)12.6

Review
Similar in style to another modernist work, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the novel follows its six narrators from childhood through adulthood. While Joyce's novel could be considered a Bildungsroman, Woolf's novel is more concerned with the individual consciousness and the ways in which multiple consciousnesses can weave together. The Waves is different from a Bildungsroman in that the self may very well be considered to be its own society. The difficulty of assigning genre to this novel is complicated by the fact that The Waves obliterates traditional distinctions between prose and poetry, allowing the novel to flow between six not dissimilar interior monologues. The book similarly breaks down traditional boundaries between people, and Woolf herself wrote in her Diary that the six were not meant to be separate "characters" at all, but rather facets of consciousness illuminating a sense of continuity. Even the name "novel" may not accurately describe the complex form of The Waves. Woolf herself called it not a novel but a "playpoem." (wikipedia) --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Review
'Together these ten volumes make an attractive and reasonably priced (the volumes vary between L3.99 and L4.99) working edition of Virginia Woolf's best-known writing. One can only hope that their success will prompt World's Classics to add her other essays to the series in due course.'  Review of English Studies, Vol. XLV, No. 178, May '94 (Elisabeth Jay, Westminster College, Oxford ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.