There are writers whose arrival at full lucidity ends up overwhelming them, blinding them with flashes of clairvoyance. Although it is probably not that literature has a perverse effect on the soul of the author. It is rather the opposite, those who search the depths of the soul become writers or artists in order to unravel it all, at any cost.
Virginia Woolf is one of those authors who looked into the depths of the soul ... and if we add to this her condition of woman, in a world still stigmatized by what was dictated by religions and beliefs in which women were an inferior being, less gifted… It all must have been a loathsome sum. Until its saddest end.
But even at its end there was something poetic, immersed in the waters of the River Ouse like a nymph, allowing herself to be invaded by an underwater world to which we naturally do not belong ...
And yet, in life, Virginia showed her great vitality when her spirit was carried away by the winds. Writer and essayist, editor and activist for women's rights, dedicated to love and experimentation towards knowledge. Always consistent and a follower of that heterogeneous current of modernism, conspired to undo the traditional and move towards an almost experimental narrative.
3 Recommended Novels By Virginia Woolf
Waves
Contemplating the sea is what you have. Sometimes it grows and sometimes it decreases. At times it appears appeased and then becomes violent under the influence of storms. Change as the foundation and vital structure, the sea as a metaphor for life beyond us, for the unattainable immortality, for the eternal, for the smallness of existence and the repetitive heaviness of the sum of moments. A work that for me could serve as a mirror for The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.
Summary: Since 1931, the year of its publication, The Waves has been considered one of the capital works of the twentieth century, both for the original beauty of its prose and for the perfection of its revolutionary narrative technique, and over the years its influence on contemporary literature has been increasing.
The novel develops, to the beat of the beating of the waves on the beach, six interior monologues, sometimes discrepant, isolated, other times almost in concordant colloquy, in which, from his childhood to his last years, six multiple lives and disparate. The Waves is one of the great novels of the XNUMXth century.
Between acts
A novel written with the trembling pulse of the spirit that relapses into its melancholy awaiting the final act. The History of Europe as a play, sometimes overstated, predictable and at other times magical, when unpredictable characters that fascinate us pass through it.
Summary: Virginia Woolf's last novel, Between Acts is the work that the author wrote before committing suicide in 1941. It was published posthumously and was immediately considered a masterpiece, the quintessence of her novelistic career, one of the most brilliant and decisive contributions to the European literature of the XNUMXth century.
The story takes place during the summer of 1939 at Pointz Hall, the Oliver family's country home for more than a century. The main event of the novel is the representation of the theatrical work that is organized every year in the village, written and directed this time by the fiery Miss La Trobe, which reflects the history of England from the Middle Ages to the days before the outbreak of World War II.
Present and past, the most distant history and the history that is about to happen, the remote world and the world that is already beginning to disappear are intertwined in this prodigious novel, the last act of one of the most powerful, courageous and most powerful literary representations. enduring of all time.
Orlando
Avant-garde novel where they exist. Chronological jumps and substantial modifications of the life stage of the characters, like a stage-shift in which their own interpreters participate, trying to change their destinies based on curtains falling and goodbyes until the next act. The most vertiginous love and the fullest surrender towards a truth without time or fixed stage.
Summary: Singular biography of Orlando. It takes place between the Elizabethan era and the XNUMXth century, and also, halfway through, the sex of its protagonist changes. Only a narrative agility like Woolf's could weave such a literary game, and only an author like Borges was in a position to translate it into our language.
Orlando continues to be one of Virginia Woolf's best novels due to its modernity and the presence of all the basic themes of the English author's work: the condition of women, the passage of time and the literary recreation of reality.
Other Recommended Virginia Woolf Books
Jacob's room
In the antechamber of all disasters. The Europe that pointed to a world flourishing in modernity and all kinds of advances, was only located in the midst of dead calm for the arrival of all storms. An ideal setting for Virgina Woolf to lead us between splendors about to run out and latent sensations of instability.
Set in the innocent years leading up to World War I, Jacob's Room is an impressionistic portrayal of the life of young Jacob Flanders.
In scenes ranging from the beaches of Cornwall to the ruins of Greece to the cloisters of Oxford, Woolf not only reveals the character's multiple perceptions, but subtly and poignantly alludes to the historical horizon of an entire generation destined for tragedy.
The novel also marks the moment when the great writer, with a unique poetic prose that reflects her experiments with time and consciousness, abandons the traditional methods of English narrative to turn to her innovative modernist writing.
