By Phil Clapham

For The Beachcomber

Which books would you take to a desert island?

I first read Virginia Woolf as a college student and was so entranced by the quality of her writing and the unique perspective of her novel “To The Lighthouse” that I remember almost walking into a lamppost as I read it while returning home in London one day.

I proceeded to read everything she had written. More than perhaps any novelist, Woolf illuminates the inner life and thoughts of her characters. Her books vary from rather traditional in style to entirely novel; and in “The Waves,” she gives us what is essentially a prose poem that’s unlike anything written before or since.

“The Waves” takes six characters from childhood into old age, with each taking turns to narrate their sensations, thoughts and feelings, always speaking in the present tense as they move through their lives. I reread the novel every few years and predictably relate to a different part of it each time.

Woolf lays it all out, starting with the discovery of the world in childhood. She moves on to the hopes, dreams and poignant insecurities of youth, that blessed time in which everything is endless beginnings, unsullied by the shadow of mortality; then the disillusion of middle age; and finally the gradual acceptance of the sober realities of a life approaching its end. She does all this with language that, as I said, is uniquely rich; metaphors cascade upon one another, and sometimes the sheer poetry of the text takes your breath away.

“The Waves” is, as the novelist Jeanette Winterson once memorably said, “a 200-page insult to mediocrity.”

Pick up a copy of the book and read the first dozen pages. Either you’ll be enchanted with the lyricism of the language and vitality of thought, or you’ll ask yourself what the hell this is (in which case, the novel is definitely not for you!).

If you’re in the mood for writing that is less prose poetry but still remarkably beautiful, read the bridge section of “To The Lighthouse,” a wonderfully evocative part of the book entitled “Time Passes,” which describes an empty house before the characters return the following summer. Here’s a sample:

“So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had shed and left—a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes—those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.”

Virginia Woolf’s life story is well known. Sexually abused as a child, she suffered repeated bouts of what was probably bipolar disorder. She produced nine novels, some wonderful short stories (check out the collection entitled “A Haunted House), numerous essays… and for good measure a rather improbable biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog.

She was an early pioneer of the feminist movement, and her book-length essays “Three Guineas” and “A Room Of One’s Own” tackle issues of war, society and the need for women to be educated and independent. The essays are not without dry humor. In “Three Guineas,” she writes in response to a letter from a man asking how war can be prevented. This is, she says, “a remarkable letter—a letter perhaps unique in the history of human correspondence, since when before has an educated man asked a woman [for] her opinion.”

Her diaries are frequently insightful, and deal with everything from the minor trials of daily life, to (inevitably) writing, to religion. On the latter topic, Woolf delivers some deliciously caustic barbs: “I read the Book of Job last night,” she writes. “I don’t think God comes out well in it.” She also warns of the ease with which we become lazy and complaisant. “A scandal, a scandal, to let so much time slip, and I standing on the bridge watching it go.” But her overall conclusion about life was simple: “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”

Plagued by madness, Woolf took her own life in 1941. But she left behind a legacy that influenced many of the writers who followed, and which in many ways changed the course of modern fiction.

Which books would you take to a desert island, and why? Email me at desertislandbookworm@gmail.com.

Phil Clapham is a retired whale biologist who lives on Maury Island.