the waves

My third attempt (or is that my fourth !!) at reading 'the waves' is coming up against a wall. The six characters: Bernard, Loius, Jinny, Neville, Rhoda and Susan are as confusing as ever. In the first 40 pages, Virginia embodies these characters with a lot of symbolism and I can only conjecture as to what she would want me to understand. That might really be the case with the rest of the book. Plainly speaking, I am not a humanities major and this book sure requires you to be one! Inspite of this, I have really liked her writing, especially her short fiction; the death of the moth just drove me wild with pleasure. That is why am unwilling to put the waves down and label it as unreadable. On second thought, it might be just that I am not mature enough to understand. If we asked a 3th grade kid, who likes enid blyton, to read agatha christie or some such thing, what alternative would the kid have other than to throw up his hands in despair! Maybe I should just get back to the waves in a few more years. sigh...