2023-06-25 13:16:41
The waves of monologues follow one another in rolling, I sometimes forget which of the six speaks but it’s beautiful: the sharp, sharp, carnal images, both light and serious, full of humor, give me joy. Certain sentences stand out, emerge like reefs. I underline: “A single and same shiver of light suddenly crossed all the plants, as if a sudden fin had split the crystal green of a lake.”
Read also: The Roaring Twenties, a blessed period for freed novelists
Would reading be like swimming? The fish would be the reader. Or else, it’s the text that is fish: it escapes, we can’t catch it. The lives of the characters unfold, intertwine, like so many “streams of consciousness”. They were children at the beginning of the story, now they are old. In reality, they are several ages at the same time, just like us. In my confusion, I no longer know if it is my own memories that are printed on the paper, or theirs.
silver fin
This novel may have originated from an image that Woolf noted in 1926 in his Journal“I netted this fin that I saw in the desert waters, beyond the marshes, through my window.” A silver flash, a call.
Two other images then go back to my memory. The small boat that Virginia as a child sailed in the pond in Kensington Garden, London, a Cornish lugger, a miniature fishing boat that she saw suddenly sink, for no reason, in the middle of the body of water.
How not to also think of the death of the writer in the waves, her pockets filled with stones, on March 28, 1941.
By dint of being read, carried everywhere, slipped into my pockets, the volume of Waves, taking up the beautiful translation of Marguerite Yourcenar, has become curved like a small board. Each book is a skiff.
Previous “Characters” chronicles:
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#waves #Virginia #Temps