https://lithub.com/brian-dillon-on-what-virginia-woolfs-the-waves-means-to-him/
30 candidatos extraídos · 0 já revisados · 30 pendentes · 0.8% de cobertura de vocabulário
“Article continues after advertisement On November 28, 1928, Woolf wrote in her diary about The Waves .”
“The narrator of the interludes is the novel’s first coiner of comparisons: an addict of like and as if .”
“The Latest Emily Wilson Talks Complicated Men, Celebrating Strangeness, and Why There is Always Another Way to Say It The Waves Means to Him"> The Waves Means to Him">Brian Dillon on What Virginia Woolf’s The Waves Means to Him How—and Why—We Find Ourselves Trapped By Our Jobs What the Ghetto of Venice Reveals About Jewish History and Identity in Europe Literary Hub Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature Masthead About Sign Up For Our Newsletters How to Pitch Lit Hub Advertisers: Contact Us Privacy Policy Support Lit Hub - Become A Member If you buy books linked on our site, Lit Hub may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.”
“Available from New York Review Books.”
“____________________________ From Ambivalence: An Education by Brian Dillon.”
“Which means: You’ve been taken in by this obvious sham, this pretentious and failed experiment?”
“In her earliest draft, which Woolf completed on April 20, 1930, poetry and abstraction have not yet lit everything up, clarifying and confounding in the same moment.”
“Transformation is how VW’s writing proceeds: like and like and like .”
“Or is it the curious youthfulness of a novel in which even when old and near death its characters seem young?”
“The Waves is above all a book of images.”
“Everything, in fact, was something else.” Woolf ’s love of metaphor—her suspicion and mockery of it too.”
“Is this a depth of literary experience to which he must give in, or an aesthetic spell verging on kitsch?”
“Ambivalence: An Education Brian Dillon metaphor New York Review Books on reading Reading The Waves Virginia Woolf Brian Dillon Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969.”
““Yes, for when he talks, when he makes his foolish comparisons, a lightness comes over one; one is freed; I have escaped, one feels.” But metaphor’s flight is also a trap, and Rhoda for one wants to get out of it: “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like”—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?” He does not know it yet, but the extravagant metaphorical strain in Woolf, the feeling that all objects or bodies or views might translate at any second into any other, this quality is general across her work, essays as well as fiction, and will one day exercise and occupy him to an almost vexing degree: many hours of wonder and learning, years of envy and aspiration.”
“It is one of the reasons (rhythm is another) she could not herself, so she wrote to Vita Sackville-West, tell prose from poetry.”
“An orientalist image of women with red pitchers on their heads, camels by the Nile.”
“After a certain point, he will probably be reading The Waves for the rest of his life.”
“Instead, RB’s habit is a kind of bravado or affront, a refusal of the way things are, the way they ought to be.”
“Later, the book will seem a test of sorts, both in his own mind and the minds of various (male) writers and critics.”
“Unreadable, makes no sense .”
“It is the first novel he has ever read that makes him consider seriously the form of a human life.”
“We start with this voice, its plain past tense which he will always misremember as an insistent present: “The sun had not yet risen.”
“Scenes pictured in childhood through the greenery: a grand house where gardeners sweep the lawn with huge brooms.”
“He cannot swim, but feels himself fully immersed in this book.”
“And what of a certain sociological aspect?”
“Literary Hub » Brian Dillon on What Virginia Woolf’s The Waves Means to Him Literary Hub Craft and Criticism Literary Criticism Craft and Advice In Conversation On Translation Fiction and Poetry Short Story From the Novel Poem News and Culture History Science Politics Biography Memoir Food Technology Bookstores and Libraries Film and TV Travel Music Art and Photography The Hub Style Design Sports Become A Member Lit Hub Radio The Lit Hub Podcast Awakeners Fiction/Non/Fiction The Critic and Her Publics Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast Memoir Nation Beyond the Page First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing Thresholds The Cosmic Library Culture Schlock Reading Lists Reading Challenge Book Marks Best Reviewed Books CrimeReads True Crime The Daily Thrill Log In Craft and Criticism Fiction and Poetry News and Culture Lit Hub Radio Reading Lists Reading Challenge Book Marks CrimeReads Log In The Waves Means to Him"> Brian Dillon on What Virginia Woolf’s The Waves Means to Him “It is the first novel he has ever read that makes him consider seriously the form of a human life.” Via New York Review Books Brian Dillon September 8, 2026 In time he will say that The Waves by Virginia Woolf has been the most important novel in his life; but at twenty he does not use the word of this or any book, and would think it pompous, embarrassing, imprecise, conventional.”
“At the same time, no ambition to read all of Woolf, no urge towards expertise or exhaustion, and always a hampering fear that the wrong text will ruin her whole oeuvre or that of any other writer he loves.”