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31:4 Book Reviews canee of these relationships, surely the word relationship means more than a record of the contacts between the three men. The book is about the "relationships" between the three men in the most restrictive sense of the word. Little effort is made to discover the significance of these contacts on any of the writers' works, and as biography, the focus on the letters offers a truncated and discontinuous view of the contact the men did have. The paucity of evidence that Lindberg-Seyerstad notes in the book's introduction is a problem she never overcomes. The book covers the territory it maps out, but the significance of that territory is very slim indeed. Rüssel Wiebe Portland State University TWO ON WOOLF Eric Wamer. The Waves. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Paper $5.95 Patricia Maika. Virginia Woolf s 'Between the Acts' and Jane Harrison 's Con/spiracy. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987. $34.95 It is somewhat startling to see Virginia Woolf's most idiosyncratic novel, The Waves, singled out in the Cambridge series, "Landmarks of World Literature." To the Lighthouse or Between the Acts might appear more suitable choices to represent, as I take it landmarks should do, those imaginative achievements that orient us in a particular historical landscape. But The Waves is characterized , both internally and in the history of its critical reception, by a wondrous bafflement at its very existence. Its fluidity (the unavoidable term for describing its essential nature) is so unrelenting that Frank Kermode is reported to have felt sick on reading it. The powerful assimilative rhythms of its poetic style, which contribute to this vertiginous impression, testify to Woolf's cunning and tenacity in attempting "to saturate ever atom ... to give the moment whole; whatever it includes." Eric Wamer, to his great credit, never minimizes the novel's eccentricity. His study of The Waves is admirably designed to account both for the novel's originality and its typicality as a landmark of modemist expression. In a somewhat unexpected analogy, Wamer claims that The Waves, like Finnegans Wake, is a work which "deliberately strives for the palm of innovation." Woolf's experimental audacity is thus seen as confluent with the "bold new energies" of Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Henry James and Proust. Wamer is also regardful that "it is precisely as a novelist that Woolf's awareness of the age was sharpened, for the revolutionary changes in form and feeling were brought into focus by prose fiction in a distinctive way." In elaborating this conviction, Wamer carefully examines the diaries and letters for evidence of the genesis and growth of this poetic marvel. In a finely 494 31:4 Book Reviews considered chapter, Wamer relates how the "mystical feelings" that haunted Woolf at the conclusion of To the Lighthouse finally coalesced in a singular image that defined the horizon of a new fiction: "a fin in the waste of waters ." He then links this visionary apparition to Woolf's growing philosophical interest in the "question" of reality, also adumbrated as a matter of direct narrative concem in To the Lighthouse. Many critics have observed and commented on the thematic continuity between Woolf's two most poetic novels. What gives Warner's treatment a somewhat cranky distinction is his contention that Orlando interrupts rather than facilitates Woolf's visionary progress from the elegiac lyricism of To the Lighthouse to the meditative poetry of The Waves. He does not find Woolf's playful homage to Vita Sackville-West particularly appealing. He is, of course, entitled to this opinion, but Warner's insistence that Woolf's fantasy is a mere "joke" commits him to an ill-considered position. No joke is only a joke in the sense that Wamer treats it; to claim as much is to miss not just the thrust, but the purpose of a joke, particularly such an elaborate one as Woolf concocted in Orlando. Woolf's historical jeu d'espirit was not just therapeutic—a "holiday" after the agonizing labor of laying the past to rest in To the Lighthouse. It was also preparatory and educative, as Woolf herself claims in a diary entry Wamer quotes...

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