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The Years
The most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime, The Years is a savage indictment of British society at the turn of the century, edited with an introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson in Penguin Modern Classics.
The Years is the story of three generations of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs - mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London's streets during the first decades of the twentieth century. Growing up in a typically Victorian household, the Pargiter children must learn to find their footing in an alternative world, where the rules of etiquette have shifted from the drawing-room to the air-raid shelter. A work of fluid and dazzling lucidity, The Years eschews a simple line of development in favour of a varied and constantly changing style, emphasises the radical discontinuity of personal experiences and historical events. Virginia Woolf's penultimate novel celebrates the resilience of the individual self and, in her dazzlingly fluid and distinctive voice, she confidently paints a broad canvas across time, generation and class.
The Years is the story of three generations of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs - mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London's streets during the first decades of the twentieth century. Growing up in a typically Victorian household, the Pargiter children must learn to find their footing in an alternative world, where the rules of etiquette have shifted from the drawing-room to the air-raid shelter. A work of fluid and dazzling lucidity, The Years eschews a simple line of development in favour of a varied and constantly changing style, emphasises the radical discontinuity of personal experiences and historical events. Virginia Woolf's penultimate novel celebrates the resilience of the individual self and, in her dazzlingly fluid and distinctive voice, she confidently paints a broad canvas across time, generation and class.
444 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1937
About the author
Virginia Woolf
1,423 books24.5k followers(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
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September 11, 2021
(Book 611 from 1001 books) - The Years, Virginia Woolf
The Years is a 1937 novel by Virginia Woolf, the last she published in her lifetime. The complexity of the writing style of "Virginia Woolf" puts the reader in a barrage that, even at the end of his stories, does not leave the readers.
The Years is story of boys, girls, father, mother, uncle, grandfather, cousins, daughters, servants and a family. It traces the history of the genteel Pargiter family from the 1880's to the "present day" of the mid-1930's.
At the beginning of each section, and sometimes as a transition within sections, Woolf describes the changing weather all over Britain, taking in both London and countryside as if in a bird's-eye view before focusing in on her characters.
Although these descriptions move across the whole of England in single paragraphs, Woolf only rarely and briefly broadens her view to the world outside Britain.
عنوان چاپ شده در ایران: سالها؛ نویسنده: ویرجینیا وولف؛ انتشاراتیها (نگاه، روزگار، و ...) ادبیات؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز بیست و ششم ماه دسامبر سال 2007میلادی
عنوان: سالها؛ نویسنده: ویرجینیا وولف؛ مترجم: فرهاد بدریزاده؛ تهران، نگاه، 1377؛ در 568ص؛ شابک 9646174604؛ چاپ سوم 1385؛ چاپ دیگر تهران روزگار؛ 1394؛ در 504ص؛ شابک 9789643746230؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده 20م
پیچیدگی سبک نگارش «ویرجینیا وولف»، خوانشگر را در برزخی قرار میدهد، که حتی در پایان داستانهایش نیز، از آن رهایی نمییابد؛ رمان «سالها»، داستانی از «پسرها»، دخترها، پدر، مادر، عمو، زن‌عمو، پسرعموها، دخترعموها، مستخدم، و یک خانواده است
کتاب به فصل‌ها تقسیم شده و در هر یک شرح زندگانی چند تن بازگو میشود؛ «ویرجینیا وولف» از دیدگاه خویش کوشیده تا بیهودگی زندگی انسان، خانواده، و فامیل را بنگارد؛ انگار کنید همان داستان «سالها»ست؛ کودکی نیز همواره دریغای «وولف» بوده، برای همین است که در کتاب‌هایش، کودکان و کودکی، جایگاهی ویژه دارند؛ بنگرید: «یکی از بدترین جنبه های بزرگ شدن این بود که نمی‌توانستند با هم درد دل کنند»؛ مرگ از نگاه «وولف» رخداد رویدادی بی‌همتا و بیهمانند است؛ درست همانند زندگی «دیلیا از خود پرسید: مرگ این است؟ لحظه هایی چنین می‌نمود که چیزی در شرف وقوع بود»؛ آدم‌های «وولف» مصنوعی نیستند؛ معنی دارند و گوشت، پوست و خون، خندیدن به همه چیز، به زندگی، کار درست و صادقانه آن‌هاست
نقل از متن: (سرهنگ روى صندلىِ ساخته از نى نشست، که صداى جیر جیر آن بلند شد، «میرا» سگ را روى زانوى او گذاشت؛ پشت یکى از گوشهاى سگ، لکه اى قرمز ـ احتمالا اگزما ـ وجود داشت؛ او عینک به چشم زد، و خم شد تا گوش سگ را نگاه کند؛ «میرا» قسمتى از گردن او را که در تماس با یقه بود بوسید؛ عینکِ سرهنگ از چشمش افتاد؛ «میرا» آن را قاپید، و به چشم سگ گذاشت؛ حس کرد که پیرمرد امروز سرحال نیست؛ در دنیاى مرموز باشگاه، و زندگى خانوادگى‌اش، که هرگز در مورد آن چیزى به او نمى‌گفت، اتفاقى افتاده بود؛ امروز او پیش از آنکه «میرا» موهایش را درست کند، پیدایش شده بود، که این باعث مزاحمت بود؛ ولى وظیفه اش این بود که پیرمرد را سرگرم کند، بنابراین از جا پرید ـ با جثه اى که بزرگتر مى‌نمود هنوز مى‌توانست بین میز و صندلى حرکت کند ـ پرده ی بخارى دیوارى را برداشت، و قبل از اینکه سرهنگ بتواند جلوى او را بگیرد، آن را روشن کرد، که صداى جرق جرق آتش، در فضاى آن خانه کرایه اى طنین انداخت؛ آنگاه روى دسته ی صندلى سرهنگ نشست؛ «میرا» در آیینه نظرى به خود انداخت، سنجاق سرش را جابجا کرد، و گفت: «اوه میرا، چه دختر ژولیده و شلخته اى هستى!»؛ او حلقه اى بلند از موهایش را رها کرد، که روى شانه هایش غلتید، موهاى طلایى اش هنوز زیبا بود، گرچه تقریبآ چهل ساله بود و، اگر حقیقت برملا مى‌شد، دخترى هشت ساله داشت که دوستانش در «بِدفورد» از او نگهدارى مى‌کردند، موهاى «میرا» به آرامى و به دلخواه خود رها شد، و موج برداشت و «باگى» با دیدن این صحنه خم شد، و موهاى او را بوسید، صداى یک ارگ دندانه اى، از انتهاى خیابان به گوش رسید، و بچه‌ها به آن سمت هجوم بردند، که با رفتن آنها، آرامشى ناگهانى به وجود آمد، سرهنگ شروع به نوازش گردنِ «میرا» کرد.)؛ پایان نقل
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 16/07/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 19/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
The Years is a 1937 novel by Virginia Woolf, the last she published in her lifetime. The complexity of the writing style of "Virginia Woolf" puts the reader in a barrage that, even at the end of his stories, does not leave the readers.
The Years is story of boys, girls, father, mother, uncle, grandfather, cousins, daughters, servants and a family. It traces the history of the genteel Pargiter family from the 1880's to the "present day" of the mid-1930's.
At the beginning of each section, and sometimes as a transition within sections, Woolf describes the changing weather all over Britain, taking in both London and countryside as if in a bird's-eye view before focusing in on her characters.
Although these descriptions move across the whole of England in single paragraphs, Woolf only rarely and briefly broadens her view to the world outside Britain.
عنوان چاپ شده در ایران: سالها؛ نویسنده: ویرجینیا وولف؛ انتشاراتیها (نگاه، روزگار، و ...) ادبیات؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز بیست و ششم ماه دسامبر سال 2007میلادی
عنوان: سالها؛ نویسنده: ویرجینیا وولف؛ مترجم: فرهاد بدریزاده؛ تهران، نگاه، 1377؛ در 568ص؛ شابک 9646174604؛ چاپ سوم 1385؛ چاپ دیگر تهران روزگار؛ 1394؛ در 504ص؛ شابک 9789643746230؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده 20م
پیچیدگی سبک نگارش «ویرجینیا وولف»، خوانشگر را در برزخی قرار میدهد، که حتی در پایان داستانهایش نیز، از آن رهایی نمییابد؛ رمان «سالها»، داستانی از «پسرها»، دخترها، پدر، مادر، عمو، زن‌عمو، پسرعموها، دخترعموها، مستخدم، و یک خانواده است
کتاب به فصل‌ها تقسیم شده و در هر یک شرح زندگانی چند تن بازگو میشود؛ «ویرجینیا وولف» از دیدگاه خویش کوشیده تا بیهودگی زندگی انسان، خانواده، و فامیل را بنگارد؛ انگار کنید همان داستان «سالها»ست؛ کودکی نیز همواره دریغای «وولف» بوده، برای همین است که در کتاب‌هایش، کودکان و کودکی، جایگاهی ویژه دارند؛ بنگرید: «یکی از بدترین جنبه های بزرگ شدن این بود که نمی‌توانستند با هم درد دل کنند»؛ مرگ از نگاه «وولف» رخداد رویدادی بی‌همتا و بیهمانند است؛ درست همانند زندگی «دیلیا از خود پرسید: مرگ این است؟ لحظه هایی چنین می‌نمود که چیزی در شرف وقوع بود»؛ آدم‌های «وولف» مصنوعی نیستند؛ معنی دارند و گوشت، پوست و خون، خندیدن به همه چیز، به زندگی، کار درست و صادقانه آن‌هاست
نقل از متن: (سرهنگ روى صندلىِ ساخته از نى نشست، که صداى جیر جیر آن بلند شد، «میرا» سگ را روى زانوى او گذاشت؛ پشت یکى از گوشهاى سگ، لکه اى قرمز ـ احتمالا اگزما ـ وجود داشت؛ او عینک به چشم زد، و خم شد تا گوش سگ را نگاه کند؛ «میرا» قسمتى از گردن او را که در تماس با یقه بود بوسید؛ عینکِ سرهنگ از چشمش افتاد؛ «میرا» آن را قاپید، و به چشم سگ گذاشت؛ حس کرد که پیرمرد امروز سرحال نیست؛ در دنیاى مرموز باشگاه، و زندگى خانوادگى‌اش، که هرگز در مورد آن چیزى به او نمى‌گفت، اتفاقى افتاده بود؛ امروز او پیش از آنکه «میرا» موهایش را درست کند، پیدایش شده بود، که این باعث مزاحمت بود؛ ولى وظیفه اش این بود که پیرمرد را سرگرم کند، بنابراین از جا پرید ـ با جثه اى که بزرگتر مى‌نمود هنوز مى‌توانست بین میز و صندلى حرکت کند ـ پرده ی بخارى دیوارى را برداشت، و قبل از اینکه سرهنگ بتواند جلوى او را بگیرد، آن را روشن کرد، که صداى جرق جرق آتش، در فضاى آن خانه کرایه اى طنین انداخت؛ آنگاه روى دسته ی صندلى سرهنگ نشست؛ «میرا» در آیینه نظرى به خود انداخت، سنجاق سرش را جابجا کرد، و گفت: «اوه میرا، چه دختر ژولیده و شلخته اى هستى!»؛ او حلقه اى بلند از موهایش را رها کرد، که روى شانه هایش غلتید، موهاى طلایى اش هنوز زیبا بود، گرچه تقریبآ چهل ساله بود و، اگر حقیقت برملا مى‌شد، دخترى هشت ساله داشت که دوستانش در «بِدفورد» از او نگهدارى مى‌کردند، موهاى «میرا» به آرامى و به دلخواه خود رها شد، و موج برداشت و «باگى» با دیدن این صحنه خم شد، و موهاى او را بوسید، صداى یک ارگ دندانه اى، از انتهاى خیابان به گوش رسید، و بچه‌ها به آن سمت هجوم بردند، که با رفتن آنها، آرامشى ناگهانى به وجود آمد، سرهنگ شروع به نوازش گردنِ «میرا» کرد.)؛ پایان نقل
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 16/07/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 19/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
May 3, 2023
Notes on 2nd reading
I’m glad I returned to this. It’s wonderful second tier Woolf. Its greatest strength is its highly enigmatic means of advancing the narrative. I don’t place it up there with Mrs. Dalloway or To The Lighthouse or The Waves or Orlando or Jacob’s Room. But it’s still highly readable—adroitly leaping from consciousness to consciousness. At times Woolf pulls away to indulge a descriptive tchotchke by way of transition. It’s the only thing, I think, that dates the book. Literary fiction today mostly minimizes such flights. Read A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf to see how she gutted this one out. The severity of her labors seems to me most manifest in the lack of spritely humor which makes a number of the other books such gems.
Notes from 1st reading
I will not call the early going a slog, but the novel did fail to engage me until page 140 or so. After that, all was well. The novel took off as a proper Virginia Woolf novel should. By the end of the long party scene which closes the book I was familiarly dazzled. I have to admit that I find the content almost unsummarizable. There's no plot to speak of. It's the technique that astonishes. Woolf's concern is not the quotidian, and often not the particular, but the structural. There are any number of exchanges between characters, sometimes arguments, in which the reader has no idea of the issues involved. Woolf deliberately takes the emphasis off the particular here and this somehow pulls the characterizations into the foreground more strongly. I'm not sure how she does it. It's impressive. She uses the technique throughout. As for the timeline, it seems almost capricious. Here are the years which form the chapter heads: 1880, 1891, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, 1918 and Present Day. As with a bildungsroman, Woolf's interest is in the developmental arc over time. But unlike the bildungsroman there is no movement toward a set goal, life being thinly plotted. Neither is there a single central character but rather an ensemble effect. Much takes place offstage: births and deaths and weddings and childbirth. Woolf's concern is with the interstitial moments, when the effect of time has its cumulative impact.
I’m glad I returned to this. It’s wonderful second tier Woolf. Its greatest strength is its highly enigmatic means of advancing the narrative. I don’t place it up there with Mrs. Dalloway or To The Lighthouse or The Waves or Orlando or Jacob’s Room. But it’s still highly readable—adroitly leaping from consciousness to consciousness. At times Woolf pulls away to indulge a descriptive tchotchke by way of transition. It’s the only thing, I think, that dates the book. Literary fiction today mostly minimizes such flights. Read A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf to see how she gutted this one out. The severity of her labors seems to me most manifest in the lack of spritely humor which makes a number of the other books such gems.
Notes from 1st reading
I will not call the early going a slog, but the novel did fail to engage me until page 140 or so. After that, all was well. The novel took off as a proper Virginia Woolf novel should. By the end of the long party scene which closes the book I was familiarly dazzled. I have to admit that I find the content almost unsummarizable. There's no plot to speak of. It's the technique that astonishes. Woolf's concern is not the quotidian, and often not the particular, but the structural. There are any number of exchanges between characters, sometimes arguments, in which the reader has no idea of the issues involved. Woolf deliberately takes the emphasis off the particular here and this somehow pulls the characterizations into the foreground more strongly. I'm not sure how she does it. It's impressive. She uses the technique throughout. As for the timeline, it seems almost capricious. Here are the years which form the chapter heads: 1880, 1891, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, 1918 and Present Day. As with a bildungsroman, Woolf's interest is in the developmental arc over time. But unlike the bildungsroman there is no movement toward a set goal, life being thinly plotted. Neither is there a single central character but rather an ensemble effect. Much takes place offstage: births and deaths and weddings and childbirth. Woolf's concern is with the interstitial moments, when the effect of time has its cumulative impact.
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December 2, 2020May 2nd 2015
Since The Years is composed of a series of vignettes about the Pargiter family over a period of fifty years, it is tempting to review it as if it were an old photograph album, one of those with layers of tissue to protect the images. As we slide the delicate paper aside, each image gradually assembles itself:
1880. A family group. The bewhiskered patriarch is squarely camped on the only chair, one elbow propped against a little table on which sits an elaborate china teapot. His grown and semi-grown children are massed about him. He looks as if he has just finished speaking. The others look like they haven’t yet begun. The mother is missing from the picture.
Next page: 1891. This time the image is of a London trolleybus*, the kind that ran on tram tracks and were pulled by horses. There’s a woman sitting on the upper deck. She looks uncomfortable travelling shoulder to shoulder with strangers but she needs to get to her workplace. She also looks like she doesn’t speak about her work to many people, least of all to her father when she diligently returns home every afternoon at five o'clock to serve his tea.
1907: In the centre of the photograph a woman pours tea for her daughter. The daughter stares at her mother pouring tea as if she is imagining the scene as a painting. Another daughter sits in a window-seat holding a book and a pen in her hands, staring into the distance. She looks like she may be thinking about writing.
1908: An old man is lying in a bathchair, covered in a blanket. On a table beside him is a tea pot and some newspaper cuttings, one, a photograph of a woman with a brick in her hand, another, an obituary for the King.
1911: A group of women taking tea on a terrace. One of them is brown from the sun. She’s been travelling on her own in Spain and Italy. There is an owl in the background.
1913: An elderly woman pours tea for herself in a little room on the top floor of a lodging house in Wandsworth using the old china tea pot she saved from the house at St John’s Wood where she worked all her life as a housekeeper.
1914: Some people sitting in a café and, yes, you’ve guessed it, they are drinking tea…actually I can’t do this anymore. This review is turning into a farce and Virginia Woolf’s book doesn’t deserve that treatment.
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May 8th 2015
The Years has been the hardest of Woolf’s novels for me to get through and it has also been a challenge to write about, such a challenge in fact that I’ve been forced to do something I rarely do before writing a review: read up on the writer's life to help me understand her work. I bought A Writer's Diary a few days ago, and started it in the middle—1932—the year Woolf began her ninth novel, The Years.
Here’s an entry from the autumn of 1932: I have entirely remodelled my Essay. It’s to be called The Pargiters (The Years)—and to take in everything, sex, education, life etc.; and come, with the most powerful agile leaps, like a chamois, across precipices from 1880 to here and now…Everything is running of its own accord into the stream, as with 'Orlando'. What has happened of course is that after abstaining from the novel of fact all these years—since 'Night and Day' in 1919—I find myself infinitely delighting in facts for a change, and in possession of quantities beyond counting: though I feel now and then the tug to vision, but resist it. This is the true line, I am sure, after 'The Waves'—this is what leads naturally on to the next stage—the Essay-novel.
The Essay she is talking about at the beginning of that quote is Professions for Women** published in 1931, which was the inspiration for both The Years and Three Guineas, the Essay-novel she spoke of at the end. As we can see, she had great plans for The Years and wrote nearly two hundred thousand words very quickly. In 1933, she wrote in her diary:
I visualise this book now as a series of uneven time sequences—a series of great balloons, linked by straight passages of narrative. I can take liberties with the representational form which I didn’t dare when I wrote 'Night and Day'.
She began editing that enormous mass of words soon afterwards but the process took years during which she lurched between loving and hating every scene she had written. It appears that she reduced the body of the novel quite a bit during the rewrites, although it is still one of her longest. She removed many of the themes that would have been of interest to us today, the sex, education, life themes which she had spoken of with such enthusiasm at the beginning. The result is a series of beautifully written vignettes, but without a strong underlying theme to knit them together (that’s why my initial attempt to review this book failed—I couldn't find a common thread and was left with nothing but...an elaborate teapot).
To the Lighthouse was the first of Woolf's novels I read and I remember feeling that there was more beauty than realism in the text. In The Years, she set out to write a book full of realism, full of ‘facts’, but she seemed to become uncomfortable with so much 'fact' and the book had to fall back on ‘vision’, on poetic flights, on beautiful images. The ‘facts’ mostly seem to have been in the material Woolf cut from this book and we are left to wonder why. The diary gives accounts of her fragile state of health during this time which may have caused her nerves to fail at the thought of the sniping of her many critics. All books now seem to me to be surrounded by a circle of invisible censors, she noted around this time. She had grown more and more fearful of reading negative criticism, leading as it did to days and weeks of depression, of inability to write.
The five long years which Woolf spent struggling with the manuscript of this book were sad ones, difficult ones, years during which she constantly doubted her own talent. But what is really sad for us today is that the doubts she experienced led to the removal of such a quantity of exciting material from The Years, a project that should have been the high point of her entire novel writing career.
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For Proust enthusiasts (may contain spoilers):
*
**In 'Professions for Women', Woolf argued for the killing of of the 'Angel in the House' figure, the self-sacrificing mother who perpetuates the idea that a woman's role is simply to be decorative and charming. In 'The Years', the mother figure dies at the beginning.
Since The Years is composed of a series of vignettes about the Pargiter family over a period of fifty years, it is tempting to review it as if it were an old photograph album, one of those with layers of tissue to protect the images. As we slide the delicate paper aside, each image gradually assembles itself:
1880. A family group. The bewhiskered patriarch is squarely camped on the only chair, one elbow propped against a little table on which sits an elaborate china teapot. His grown and semi-grown children are massed about him. He looks as if he has just finished speaking. The others look like they haven’t yet begun. The mother is missing from the picture.
Next page: 1891. This time the image is of a London trolleybus*, the kind that ran on tram tracks and were pulled by horses. There’s a woman sitting on the upper deck. She looks uncomfortable travelling shoulder to shoulder with strangers but she needs to get to her workplace. She also looks like she doesn’t speak about her work to many people, least of all to her father when she diligently returns home every afternoon at five o'clock to serve his tea.
1907: In the centre of the photograph a woman pours tea for her daughter. The daughter stares at her mother pouring tea as if she is imagining the scene as a painting. Another daughter sits in a window-seat holding a book and a pen in her hands, staring into the distance. She looks like she may be thinking about writing.
1908: An old man is lying in a bathchair, covered in a blanket. On a table beside him is a tea pot and some newspaper cuttings, one, a photograph of a woman with a brick in her hand, another, an obituary for the King.
1911: A group of women taking tea on a terrace. One of them is brown from the sun. She’s been travelling on her own in Spain and Italy. There is an owl in the background.
1913: An elderly woman pours tea for herself in a little room on the top floor of a lodging house in Wandsworth using the old china tea pot she saved from the house at St John’s Wood where she worked all her life as a housekeeper.
1914: Some people sitting in a café and, yes, you’ve guessed it, they are drinking tea…actually I can’t do this anymore. This review is turning into a farce and Virginia Woolf’s book doesn’t deserve that treatment.
………………………………………………………
May 8th 2015
The Years has been the hardest of Woolf’s novels for me to get through and it has also been a challenge to write about, such a challenge in fact that I’ve been forced to do something I rarely do before writing a review: read up on the writer's life to help me understand her work. I bought A Writer's Diary a few days ago, and started it in the middle—1932—the year Woolf began her ninth novel, The Years.
Here’s an entry from the autumn of 1932: I have entirely remodelled my Essay. It’s to be called The Pargiters (The Years)—and to take in everything, sex, education, life etc.; and come, with the most powerful agile leaps, like a chamois, across precipices from 1880 to here and now…Everything is running of its own accord into the stream, as with 'Orlando'. What has happened of course is that after abstaining from the novel of fact all these years—since 'Night and Day' in 1919—I find myself infinitely delighting in facts for a change, and in possession of quantities beyond counting: though I feel now and then the tug to vision, but resist it. This is the true line, I am sure, after 'The Waves'—this is what leads naturally on to the next stage—the Essay-novel.
The Essay she is talking about at the beginning of that quote is Professions for Women** published in 1931, which was the inspiration for both The Years and Three Guineas, the Essay-novel she spoke of at the end. As we can see, she had great plans for The Years and wrote nearly two hundred thousand words very quickly. In 1933, she wrote in her diary:
I visualise this book now as a series of uneven time sequences—a series of great balloons, linked by straight passages of narrative. I can take liberties with the representational form which I didn’t dare when I wrote 'Night and Day'.
She began editing that enormous mass of words soon afterwards but the process took years during which she lurched between loving and hating every scene she had written. It appears that she reduced the body of the novel quite a bit during the rewrites, although it is still one of her longest. She removed many of the themes that would have been of interest to us today, the sex, education, life themes which she had spoken of with such enthusiasm at the beginning. The result is a series of beautifully written vignettes, but without a strong underlying theme to knit them together (that’s why my initial attempt to review this book failed—I couldn't find a common thread and was left with nothing but...an elaborate teapot).
To the Lighthouse was the first of Woolf's novels I read and I remember feeling that there was more beauty than realism in the text. In The Years, she set out to write a book full of realism, full of ‘facts’, but she seemed to become uncomfortable with so much 'fact' and the book had to fall back on ‘vision’, on poetic flights, on beautiful images. The ‘facts’ mostly seem to have been in the material Woolf cut from this book and we are left to wonder why. The diary gives accounts of her fragile state of health during this time which may have caused her nerves to fail at the thought of the sniping of her many critics. All books now seem to me to be surrounded by a circle of invisible censors, she noted around this time. She had grown more and more fearful of reading negative criticism, leading as it did to days and weeks of depression, of inability to write.
The five long years which Woolf spent struggling with the manuscript of this book were sad ones, difficult ones, years during which she constantly doubted her own talent. But what is really sad for us today is that the doubts she experienced led to the removal of such a quantity of exciting material from The Years, a project that should have been the high point of her entire novel writing career.
…………………………………………………………………….
For Proust enthusiasts (may contain spoilers):
*
**In 'Professions for Women', Woolf argued for the killing of of the 'Angel in the House' figure, the self-sacrificing mother who perpetuates the idea that a woman's role is simply to be decorative and charming. In 'The Years', the mother figure dies at the beginning.
May 21, 2018
“The Years” is a mature novel but also a hybrid work straddling a family saga and a collection of robbed moments that would have vanished into the river of time hadn’t it been for Woolf’s brilliant descriptive skills.
Capable of capturing the elusiveness of an atmosphere, of words left unsaid, of a particular landscape in any season, of the details that dress a room or the people that come in and go out of it scarcely leaving any trace, Woolf manages to give human quality to the passage of time, the real protagonist of this story.
It’s true that she uses the Pargiter, a bourgeois family in extinction at the beginning of the twentieth century, to flesh out something as ungraspable as the passage of time. We get to know the Pargiters in their childhood days and observe, in fragmentary manner, the evolution of their personalities as they grow up and become active actors in their lives. Oddly enough, the cumulative changes they suffer only strengthen their innate characters, boosting their childhood traits.
As usual in Woolf’s novels, London appears as a backdrop to the Pargiters’ doings, materializing the transformation of the city and its society over the years. The end of the Victorian era, WWI, the British colonies, women’s causes or politics are addressed tangentially; it’s the alternating cycle of rebirth and decline of the main protagonists and their descendants that centers the focus of the storyline.
Despite the lyrical harmony of Woolf’s subtle prose, this has been a tough novel to get through. There is a certain detachment between the characters as years go by, and the style of the narrative evolves from an initial delightful family portrait to an oblique semi-essay on the generational gap that is most evident in the last section of the novel titled “present time”, which takes place in a party reminiscent of Proust’s long-winded chronicles of the social soirees he loved and despised at once.
What I will mostly remember of this novel is the atmospheric openings of each section and Woolf’s pristine, heart-lifting passages that provide eternal quality to the ephemeral existence of the passersby who walk in the pathways of unstoppable time.
Capable of capturing the elusiveness of an atmosphere, of words left unsaid, of a particular landscape in any season, of the details that dress a room or the people that come in and go out of it scarcely leaving any trace, Woolf manages to give human quality to the passage of time, the real protagonist of this story.
It’s true that she uses the Pargiter, a bourgeois family in extinction at the beginning of the twentieth century, to flesh out something as ungraspable as the passage of time. We get to know the Pargiters in their childhood days and observe, in fragmentary manner, the evolution of their personalities as they grow up and become active actors in their lives. Oddly enough, the cumulative changes they suffer only strengthen their innate characters, boosting their childhood traits.
As usual in Woolf’s novels, London appears as a backdrop to the Pargiters’ doings, materializing the transformation of the city and its society over the years. The end of the Victorian era, WWI, the British colonies, women’s causes or politics are addressed tangentially; it’s the alternating cycle of rebirth and decline of the main protagonists and their descendants that centers the focus of the storyline.
Despite the lyrical harmony of Woolf’s subtle prose, this has been a tough novel to get through. There is a certain detachment between the characters as years go by, and the style of the narrative evolves from an initial delightful family portrait to an oblique semi-essay on the generational gap that is most evident in the last section of the novel titled “present time”, which takes place in a party reminiscent of Proust’s long-winded chronicles of the social soirees he loved and despised at once.
What I will mostly remember of this novel is the atmospheric openings of each section and Woolf’s pristine, heart-lifting passages that provide eternal quality to the ephemeral existence of the passersby who walk in the pathways of unstoppable time.
April 23, 2022
No mi libro preferido de Virginia Woolf, y aún así lo he disfrutado, o más bien me he dejado llevar completamente por esa corriente de pensamientos que definen las historias de la autora.
El libro nos lleva a conocer la vida de una familia de clase media/alta inglesa desde finales del siglo XIX hasta los años 30 del XX.
Lo peculiar de esta "saga familiar" es que en cada capítulo veremos un fragmento de la vida de unos o varios personajes, una anécdota, un momento concreto, que nos hará comprender su vida, pensamiento e incluso la sociedad que le rodeaba.
En los años que narra esta novela tiene lugar un cambio generacional bastante importante, además de la lucha sufragista o una guerra mundial, pero la autora lo cuenta todo a través de detalles muy sutiles e ingeniosos, lo que francamente me encantó y me demostró de nuevo la genialidad de Woolf.
También es una historia a veces confusa o extraña, y no siempre conecté con sus personajes (aunque hay algunos maravillosos como Eleanor), al terminar el libro me quedó una sensación extraña.
A veces pienso que me perdí algo de lo que quería contar Virginia Woolf en esta novela... pero por otro lado creo que lo importante no es tanto entender como sentir y empatizar con todos estos personajes que son piezas de la propia autora. Y eso siempre lo consigo con ella.
El libro nos lleva a conocer la vida de una familia de clase media/alta inglesa desde finales del siglo XIX hasta los años 30 del XX.
Lo peculiar de esta "saga familiar" es que en cada capítulo veremos un fragmento de la vida de unos o varios personajes, una anécdota, un momento concreto, que nos hará comprender su vida, pensamiento e incluso la sociedad que le rodeaba.
En los años que narra esta novela tiene lugar un cambio generacional bastante importante, además de la lucha sufragista o una guerra mundial, pero la autora lo cuenta todo a través de detalles muy sutiles e ingeniosos, lo que francamente me encantó y me demostró de nuevo la genialidad de Woolf.
También es una historia a veces confusa o extraña, y no siempre conecté con sus personajes (aunque hay algunos maravillosos como Eleanor), al terminar el libro me quedó una sensación extraña.
A veces pienso que me perdí algo de lo que quería contar Virginia Woolf en esta novela... pero por otro lado creo que lo importante no es tanto entender como sentir y empatizar con todos estos personajes que son piezas de la propia autora. Y eso siempre lo consigo con ella.
June 17, 2020
”Slowly wheeling, like the rays of a searchlight, the days, the weeks, the years passed one after another across the sky.”
This novel is tricky; on the surface there is a series of mundane events - dinners, tea, walks in the park - and seemingly no plot. But there is more to meet the eye than that yielded by a superficial glance or reading.
The 3-generation saga of the Pargiter family commences in 1880 and finishes in the “present”. The then “present “ we are told in the Notes must be “between 1931 and 1933”. There is no story as such, but we encounter various members of the family at intervals doing what they generally seem to do: eat, drink, talk, walk in the park, etc. They repeat old habits; Sara (who always seems scattered anyway) repeatedly looks the wrong way when someone points out something or someone. “‘Where?’ said Sara. But she looked in the wrong direction.” The reader, as an unseen guest at their dinner parties or other events, listens in to snippets of various conversations by these people, and from that deduces that this one has died or that one is now married and has x number of children. There is no detailed telling of their individual stories.
To me this novel resembles an Impressionist painting; there are dappled glimpses of the individuals, but no strong outline is given. The reader does not really get to know any of the characters. Someone in the novel suggests that as we don’t truly know ourselves, how can we know others. There is a beautiful description of two of these people walking in the park in dappled sunlight: ”She too was netted with floating lights from between the leaves. A primal innocence seemed to brood over the scene. The birds made a fitful sweet chirping in the branches; the roar of London encircled the open space in a ring of distant but complete sound. The pink and white chestnut blossoms rode up and down as the branches moved in the breeze. The sun dappling the leaves gave everything a curious look of insubstantiality as if it were broken into separate points of light. He too, himself, seemed dispersed. His mind for a moment was a blank.”, and I thought: “yes, that’s it, that is how I see all of these people”.
The years go by and not much seems to happen or change, and yet members of the older generation die, the younger people mature and have their own families as well as their personal dramas which are only obliquely alluded to. But whilst it seems that not much is happening or changing (they are still eating, drinking, walking, talking), the world is changing dramatically and many major events take place. We see how these events and changes affect these individuals in some way, whether they play an active part in it or whether they are simply reading it in a newspaper or discussing it at a dinner party or over breakfast kippers. “Paper-boys were crying, Parnell… Parnell. He’s dead, she said to herself, still conscious of the two worlds; one flowing in wide sweeps overhead, the other tip-tapping circumscribed upon the pavement.”* We observe some of their thoughts and reactions. One of these characters, Eleanor, gives us some glimpses of how she perceives the passing years and what some of her thoughts about old age are. Someone mentions the first time she saw an aeroplane, another has a new car. There are references to the Suffragettes, the Ulster crisis, WWI, women finally getting the vote, etc. At home there are also changes. Towards the end of the book there is a large party, but guests are no longer formally announced at the door, there are no servants, some people sit on the floor with plates of food instead of being served at table. “All sorts of people were there, she noted. That had always been her aim; to mix people; to do away with the absurd conventions of English life. And she had done it tonight, she thought. There were nobles and commoners; people dressed and people not dressed; people drinking out of mugs, and people waiting with their soup getting cold for a spoon to be brought to them.” Sometimes they ponder the past, and on one occasion someone wonders if one day one would be able to see the person to whom one is speaking when making a telephone call (yes, indeed!). So everything but nothing changes as the years go by...
Do not be put off by the seemingly disjointed first half of the novel, as it all comes together in the second half. If I were to rate the novel based on the first half, I should give it 3 stars. Based on the second half I should give it 5 stars. So, let’s settle for four.
* Parnell was an Irish politician.
#####
“I wish I hadn’t quarrelled so much with my mother, she thought, overcome with a sudden sense of the passage of time and its tragedy. Then the music changed.”
“Things can’t go on for ever, she thought. Things pass, things change, she thought, looking up at the ceiling. And where are we going? Where? Where?…”
“Why? she asked herself, looking at the lovely face, empty of meaning, or character, like a page on which nothing has been written but youth.”
“Everything shook slightly. There was a perpetual faint vibration. She seemed to be passing from one world to another; this was the moment of transition.”
“A blank intervened; her thoughts became spaced; they became muddled. Past and present became jumbled together.”
“Another door had been opened. Old age must have endless avenues, stretching away and away down its darkness, she supposed, and now one door opened and then another.”
“‘How nice it is,’ she said, ‘not to be young! How nice not to mind what people think! Now one can live as one likes,’ she added, ‘… now that one’s seventy.’”
March 7, 2022
The last of her novels to appear in Virginia Woolf’s lifetime, The Years was her least favourite but also one of her most commercially successful, even spawning an American Armed Forces edition. It’s a difficult book to summarize, stretching as it does from the 1880s through to the 1930s. On the surface it’s a family saga revolving around the sprawling, upper-middle-class, Pargiter family but it quickly becomes clear that they act as a fixed point from which to examine aspects of English history and politics, and the complex interactions between individuals, culture, and society. It’s a piece that went through various incarnations, edited and reworked over and over again, before Woolf decided on its final form. Woolf deliberately departs from the social realist conventions of popular dramas of family life like Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, her narrative’s elliptical, fragmented, concerned with inner worlds, thoughts and impressions.
I found Woolf’s chosen structure a little bewildering at first. Apart from extended opening and closing sections, The Year’s broken down into segments representing one day within a specified year, sometimes years follow each other in quick succession, sometimes there are large gaps between them. Characters appear, reappear, or disappear entirely, although some figures like Eleanor (Nell) the oldest Pargiter daughter have a substantial role throughout. There’s a sense of discontinuity but also of webs of connection, each section opens with lyrical descriptions of the weather, nature, and panoramic views of teeming, London streets, before closing in on a character’s experiences, and in the background, sometimes barely registering, an historical event – the death of Parnell, the end of WW1. There are recurring images that focus on an interplay of colour and sound, highlighting shifts from light to darkness, paralleling the feelings of Woolf’s characters as they grope their way through the everyday and grapple with the passing of time.
It's an incredibly wistful, melancholy book but littered with savage observations that unexpectedly shatter the mood, an unsettling preoccupation with “ugliness” and contamination: Rose the youngest daughter escapes to a local toy shop but is confronted by a leering man masturbating in the street; a woman peddling violets bears signs of some terrible disease. Characters stumble through life in search of an underlying pattern, or some ultimate meaning, alternating between sudden bursts of clarity that hint at the possibility of different ways of living, and contempt or disgust for their surroundings and the people they encounter. There are numerous grating elements, anti-Semitic attitudes attributed to key players but not dissimilar from views expressed by Woolf elsewhere, awkward references to the Empire that forms a backdrop to the Pargiters’ sheltered version of reality. But Woolf's adept at communicating profound uncertainty, the gap between an individual’s notion of self and how they’re perceived, the constant tension between their present and memories of their past. Sometimes this is accompanied by a sensation of intense grief as everything solid seems to be slowly melting away, sometimes by relief at the prospect of change and renewal. I’m surprised this isn't more popular, I thought it was fascinating, atmospheric and absorbing, a slice-of-life portrait of Woolf’s generation, their attitudes and assumptions, an ambitious but deeply flawed attempt to map out the very nature of an individual’s existence. I read this in the Penguin edition and found the notes invaluable.
I found Woolf’s chosen structure a little bewildering at first. Apart from extended opening and closing sections, The Year’s broken down into segments representing one day within a specified year, sometimes years follow each other in quick succession, sometimes there are large gaps between them. Characters appear, reappear, or disappear entirely, although some figures like Eleanor (Nell) the oldest Pargiter daughter have a substantial role throughout. There’s a sense of discontinuity but also of webs of connection, each section opens with lyrical descriptions of the weather, nature, and panoramic views of teeming, London streets, before closing in on a character’s experiences, and in the background, sometimes barely registering, an historical event – the death of Parnell, the end of WW1. There are recurring images that focus on an interplay of colour and sound, highlighting shifts from light to darkness, paralleling the feelings of Woolf’s characters as they grope their way through the everyday and grapple with the passing of time.
It's an incredibly wistful, melancholy book but littered with savage observations that unexpectedly shatter the mood, an unsettling preoccupation with “ugliness” and contamination: Rose the youngest daughter escapes to a local toy shop but is confronted by a leering man masturbating in the street; a woman peddling violets bears signs of some terrible disease. Characters stumble through life in search of an underlying pattern, or some ultimate meaning, alternating between sudden bursts of clarity that hint at the possibility of different ways of living, and contempt or disgust for their surroundings and the people they encounter. There are numerous grating elements, anti-Semitic attitudes attributed to key players but not dissimilar from views expressed by Woolf elsewhere, awkward references to the Empire that forms a backdrop to the Pargiters’ sheltered version of reality. But Woolf's adept at communicating profound uncertainty, the gap between an individual’s notion of self and how they’re perceived, the constant tension between their present and memories of their past. Sometimes this is accompanied by a sensation of intense grief as everything solid seems to be slowly melting away, sometimes by relief at the prospect of change and renewal. I’m surprised this isn't more popular, I thought it was fascinating, atmospheric and absorbing, a slice-of-life portrait of Woolf’s generation, their attitudes and assumptions, an ambitious but deeply flawed attempt to map out the very nature of an individual’s existence. I read this in the Penguin edition and found the notes invaluable.
June 5, 2023
3.5
I’m not sure how to review this work, or even how to get a handle on it. I reread some of my friends’ reviews from years ago, and I see they also struggled and/or were frustrated by it.
I think I prefer the style in the beginning, chapters dedicated to a particular year, better than the last section, “Present Day,” where all the living characters are brought together at a party. Neither style is difficult. They’re just different. I appreciated quite a bit of the last section, so I’m not sure what I’m “complaining” about, except that, maybe, the whole didn’t gel for me.
A couple of these reviewers said they struggled to finish the book. I never felt that, but then I read it on a very slow schedule with an online group, and it never felt arduous or even tedious. Only a few in the group expressed some bewilderment at specific junctures. Most of them seem to have connected with this work more than I did, though I want to emphasize I enjoyed its prose and themes. It’s Woolf after all.
It likely deserves a reread and I have just the friend to join in with when that time arrives.
I’m not sure how to review this work, or even how to get a handle on it. I reread some of my friends’ reviews from years ago, and I see they also struggled and/or were frustrated by it.
I think I prefer the style in the beginning, chapters dedicated to a particular year, better than the last section, “Present Day,” where all the living characters are brought together at a party. Neither style is difficult. They’re just different. I appreciated quite a bit of the last section, so I’m not sure what I’m “complaining” about, except that, maybe, the whole didn’t gel for me.
A couple of these reviewers said they struggled to finish the book. I never felt that, but then I read it on a very slow schedule with an online group, and it never felt arduous or even tedious. Only a few in the group expressed some bewilderment at specific junctures. Most of them seem to have connected with this work more than I did, though I want to emphasize I enjoyed its prose and themes. It’s Woolf after all.
It likely deserves a reread and I have just the friend to join in with when that time arrives.
January 29, 2023
“Time is a monster that cannot be reasoned with.” ~Joe Wenteworth
Released in 1937, less than four years before Virginia Woolf would fill her coat pockets with stones and stride into the River Ouse, The Years was the last of Woolf’s novels to be published in her lifetime.
I knew that tidbit going in and I kinda’ wish I hadn’t. I am certain that the knowledge tainted my perception. It gave me a hard case of melancholy and, once it sets in, melancholy is a difficult feeling to shake.
“How terrible old age was, she thought; shearing off all one's faculties, one by one, but leaving something alive in the center.”
[SPOILERS REMOVED]
In places, The Years reads more like a diary than a novel. Detailed and personal, it has a somewhat Brontë feel to it (Emily, not Charlotte). I found it to be rather dispiriting and somber, but just how much of that is me and how much of that is Woolf I cannot begin to say.
“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.” ~Andrei Tarkovsky
Released in 1937, less than four years before Virginia Woolf would fill her coat pockets with stones and stride into the River Ouse, The Years was the last of Woolf’s novels to be published in her lifetime.
I knew that tidbit going in and I kinda’ wish I hadn’t. I am certain that the knowledge tainted my perception. It gave me a hard case of melancholy and, once it sets in, melancholy is a difficult feeling to shake.
“How terrible old age was, she thought; shearing off all one's faculties, one by one, but leaving something alive in the center.”
[SPOILERS REMOVED]
In places, The Years reads more like a diary than a novel. Detailed and personal, it has a somewhat Brontë feel to it (Emily, not Charlotte). I found it to be rather dispiriting and somber, but just how much of that is me and how much of that is Woolf I cannot begin to say.
“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.” ~Andrei Tarkovsky
February 18, 2012
Other reviews tell me that this isn't as good as Mrs Dalloway or To The Lighthouse - having read all three books now, I will concede the Mrs Dalloway point, but I think I liked The Years better than To the Lighthouse. The two stories are similar, in that they deal with an extended family and the perspective switches from person to person and the closest you get to an action scene is everyone sitting around and talking, but the scope of The Years is much wider (it deals with several generations of a family and spans decades, rather than a couple years) and seemed, at least to me, to be slightly easier to follow than To the Lighthouse. I would definitely have better luck explaining the plot of this book to someone who had never read it.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about, and not what you came here to see. The reason I write Woolf book reviews isn't to write a critique of the books (because who am I to analyze Woolf?) but to quote the everloving bejeezus out of whatever I just read, because no one is more equipped to demonstrate the greatness of Virginia Woolf than Woolf herself.
Reading this book made me realize yet another reason I love Woolf's writing - the scope of her writing is immense. She draws back and describes entire cities from a deity-like distance, seen here when she shows us England in the snow:
"Snow was falling; snow had fallen all day. The sky spread like a grey goose's wing from which feathers were falling all over England. The sky was nothing but a flurry of falling flakes. Lanes were levelled; hollows filled; the snow clogged the streams, obscured windows, and lay wedged against doors. There was a faint murmur in the air, a slight crepitation, as if the air itself were turning to snow; otherwise all was silent, save when a sheep coughed, snow flopped from a branch, or slipped in an avalanche down some roof in London. Now and again a shaft of light spread slowly across the sky as a car drove through the muffled roads. But as the night wore on, snow covered the wheel ruts; softened to nothingness the marks of the traffic, and coated monuments, palaces and statues with a thick vestment of snow."
and then she zooms in a little bit, like this perfect description of the crowd at an opera:
"The orchestra was still tuning up; the players were laughing, talking and turning round in their seats as they fiddled busily with their instruments. She stood looking down at the stalls. The floor of the house was in a state of great agitation. People were passing to their seats; they were sitting down and getting up again; they were taking off their cloaks and signalling to friends. They were like birds settling on a field. In the boxes white figures were appearing here and there; white arms rested on the ledges of boxes; white shirt-fronts shone beside them. The whole house glowed - red, gold, cream-colored, and smelt of clothes and flowers, and echoed with the squeaks and trills of the instruments and with the buzz and hum of voices. ...Lights winked on ladies' arms as they turned; ripples of light flashed, stopped, and then flashed the opposite way as they turned their heads."
and then she goes closer, looking at objects on an almost microscopic level, until we share her fascination with ordinary objects and people:
"But what vast gaps there were, what blank spaces, she thought, leaning back in her chair, in her knowledge! How little she knew about anything. Take this cup, for instance; she held it out in front of her. What was it made of? Atoms? And what were atoms, and how did they stick together? The smooth hard surface of the china with its red flowers seemed to her for a second a marvelous mystery."
That's why I love Virginia Woolf: she can look at a snowstorm in a city, and a single china cup, and study both of them with the same level of interest and detail, and make both subjects seem new and fascinating. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go stare at my dishes and think about my life for a while.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about, and not what you came here to see. The reason I write Woolf book reviews isn't to write a critique of the books (because who am I to analyze Woolf?) but to quote the everloving bejeezus out of whatever I just read, because no one is more equipped to demonstrate the greatness of Virginia Woolf than Woolf herself.
Reading this book made me realize yet another reason I love Woolf's writing - the scope of her writing is immense. She draws back and describes entire cities from a deity-like distance, seen here when she shows us England in the snow:
"Snow was falling; snow had fallen all day. The sky spread like a grey goose's wing from which feathers were falling all over England. The sky was nothing but a flurry of falling flakes. Lanes were levelled; hollows filled; the snow clogged the streams, obscured windows, and lay wedged against doors. There was a faint murmur in the air, a slight crepitation, as if the air itself were turning to snow; otherwise all was silent, save when a sheep coughed, snow flopped from a branch, or slipped in an avalanche down some roof in London. Now and again a shaft of light spread slowly across the sky as a car drove through the muffled roads. But as the night wore on, snow covered the wheel ruts; softened to nothingness the marks of the traffic, and coated monuments, palaces and statues with a thick vestment of snow."
and then she zooms in a little bit, like this perfect description of the crowd at an opera:
"The orchestra was still tuning up; the players were laughing, talking and turning round in their seats as they fiddled busily with their instruments. She stood looking down at the stalls. The floor of the house was in a state of great agitation. People were passing to their seats; they were sitting down and getting up again; they were taking off their cloaks and signalling to friends. They were like birds settling on a field. In the boxes white figures were appearing here and there; white arms rested on the ledges of boxes; white shirt-fronts shone beside them. The whole house glowed - red, gold, cream-colored, and smelt of clothes and flowers, and echoed with the squeaks and trills of the instruments and with the buzz and hum of voices. ...Lights winked on ladies' arms as they turned; ripples of light flashed, stopped, and then flashed the opposite way as they turned their heads."
and then she goes closer, looking at objects on an almost microscopic level, until we share her fascination with ordinary objects and people:
"But what vast gaps there were, what blank spaces, she thought, leaning back in her chair, in her knowledge! How little she knew about anything. Take this cup, for instance; she held it out in front of her. What was it made of? Atoms? And what were atoms, and how did they stick together? The smooth hard surface of the china with its red flowers seemed to her for a second a marvelous mystery."
That's why I love Virginia Woolf: she can look at a snowstorm in a city, and a single china cup, and study both of them with the same level of interest and detail, and make both subjects seem new and fascinating. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go stare at my dishes and think about my life for a while.
December 24, 2020
There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves. We’re only just beginning, she thought, to understand, here and there.
September 10, 2021
Para ser fiel al espíritu de Los años, no debería referirme directamente al libro o a su autora. De hecho, no me debería referir a nada en concreto. Sería más apropiado comenzar por hablar, con flema británica, del tiempo, del calor asfixiante de este verano, del cielo despejado, atravesado por apenas un par de nubes perezosas, predecesoras de otras más oscuras que ya se apiñan en un horizonte todavía lejano, presagiando los celajes de un invierno que aún tardará en llegar. A vista de pájaro, podría describir el azul intenso del mar, plano como el fondo de un plato, las olas lamiendo mansas la arena de las playas atestadas de familias que apuran sus pocos días de descanso estival, los campos agostados, los caminos polvorientos.
Descendería después sin prisa y recorrería las calles casi vacías; los pocos transeúntes anhelando el refugio de una sombra, el cansino trasiego del tráfico, las tiendas cerradas por vacaciones. Al ponerse el sol vería a la gente, como llamadas por un reclamo inaudible, abandonar sus casas y ocupar terrazas y restaurantes. Entonces seguiría aproximándome y entraría en mi propia casa, describiría los muebles y la decoración, deteniéndome en algunos objetos queridos. Ahí estaría yo, ocupado en alguna actividad cotidiana; leyendo Los años de Virginia Woolf, por ejemplo. Aparecerían amigos y familiares y mantendríamos conversaciones intrascendentes, quizá sobre libros. Pero nunca ocurriría nada en mi relato; el verano pasaría, yo leería otro libro y después otro más, los años y las conversaciones se sucederían…
Esta historia, de mi mano, no puede ser más aburrida; mi verano no tiene el romanticismo de la lluvia en Londres o en Oxford, el ajetreo de mi ciudad carece de atractivo (¿cómo comparar un vulgar atasco en la autopista con el desfile de cabriolés, victorias y landós dirigiéndose hacia la Ópera) y yo no me parezco en nada a los personajes burgueses, siempre tan elegantes y correctos, que protagonizan las novelas de Virginia Woolf. Y, sobre todo, yo no sé escribir como ella.
Después de ascender sinuosamente desde el sótano, la tetera era depositada en la mesa, y vírgenes y solteronas, cuyas manos habían restañado las heridas de Bermondsey y Hoxton, medían cuidadosamente una, dos, tres cucharaditas de té. Cuando el sol se ponía, un millón de lucecitas de gas, como los ojos pintados en las plumas de un pavo real, se abrían en sus jaulas de cristal, pero a pesar de ello en las aceras quedaban amplias zonas oscuras. La mezcla de la luz de las farolas y la del sol poniente se reflejaba por igual en el Round Pond y en la Serpentine. Quienes habían salido a cenar fuera de casa contemplaban durante un instante el encantador espectáculo cuando su cabriolé pasaba al trote por el puente. Por fin, se alzaba la luna que, como una reluciente moneda, aunque oscurecida de vez en cuando por nubes deshilachadas, brillaba con serenidad, con severidad, quizá con total indiferencia. Girando lentamente, como los rayos de un faro, los días, las semanas, los años cruzaban el cielo uno tras otro.
A eso me refería: ni punto de comparación. De todas formas, la elegancia no es suficiente: unos párrafos están bien, pero casi quinientas páginas de cambios meteorológicos, educadas conversaciones tomando el té y bucólicos paseos por Londres es demasiado para cualquiera si no hay algo más.
Hay mucho más: un magnífico retrato de cómo pasa el tiempo, lo que se pierde, lo que cambia y lo que permanece. Los verdaderos protagonistas de Los años son precisamente esos; los años: desde 1880 hasta el momento en que se escribió el libro, cincuenta años en la vida de los Pargiter desfilan por sus páginas.
Al inicio del libro los hijos del coronel Pargiter y sus primos son jóvenes; están llenos de energía, de optimismo y de ideales. Les falta experiencia, pero enfrentan el mundo con su “bello rostro, vacío de pensamiento y de carácter, como una página sin nada escrito, salvo la juventud.”
Y Virginia Woolf va a llenar esas páginas en blanco, con su delicada prosa, de todas esas escenas casi intrascendentes, construyendo sus personajes por acumulación de pequeños detalles.
Pasan los años sin que suceda en la narración nada remarcable. La autora sólo nos ofrece instantáneas tomadas al azar, fotografías desparejas de un álbum familiar incompleto en las que se intuyen las huellas que el paso de los años deja en los rostros retratados. Los chicos crecen, se casan, tienen hijos. Los hijos se van, vuelven. Como en cualquier familia normal, a unos les va mejor y a otros peor. Pasan del optimismo del cambio de siglo a la desolación de la guerra, aunque en Los años todo eso no se menciona o solo se hace de pasada; todo lo que tenemos son las conversaciones y las reflexiones de los Pargiter.
Quizá había dicho tonterías. No había hecho más que decir lo primero que se le venía a la cabeza.
—Imagino que todas las conversaciones quedarían reducidas a tonterías, si se hicieran constar por escrito —comentó removiendo el café con una cucharilla.
Maggie detuvo la máquina de coser un momento y sonrió.
—Y si no, también —dijo.
—Pero es el único medio que tenemos para conocernos los unos a los otros —protestó Rose.
En esas conversaciones no solo se intuyen las huellas del tiempo; tras ellas se ocultan, apenas insinuadas, esas cosas de las que nunca se habla: sucesos terribles, secretos vergonzantes, abusos, homosexualidad, alcoholismo… y otras que no por ser menos escabrosas son menos dolorosas: el hastío, la decepción, la angustia vital que la brillante coreografía social que todos ejecutan apenas logra aliviar.
Y el tiempo nunca se detiene. La rebeldía deja paso al conformismo primero, a la monotonía después y, finalmente, a una lenta decadencia. Los ideales te abandonan antes que las fuerzas. Algunos se dejan llevar por la corriente y otros se entregan con vehemencia a distintas causas, participan en comités, hacen como que quieren cambiar el mundo, pero ambas actitudes no son sino maneras de dejar pasar los años.
Para tratarse de una colección de primorosas estampas burguesas, Los años es un libro cargado de melancolía. No es una obra dramática, ni siquiera la calificaría de triste, pero la melancolía impregna sus páginas. El desengaño, el hartazgo de tanta ceremonia, de tanta hipocresía desembocan finalmente en el descubrimiento de que tras las elegantes fachadas señoriales se esconden las ruinas del alma: en cuanto traspasamos el umbral, sólo se puede encontrar mezquindad, codicia, envidia y mediocridad. Lo peor del paso del tiempo no es que terminemos por descubrir cómo son los demás, sino que tarde o temprano tendremos que aceptar cómo somos nosotros mismos.
June 11, 2013
That is true, Rose thought as she took her pudding. That is myself. Again she had the odd feeling being two people at the same time.
It has been months since I read The Years. There have been many books in my life. Light bulbs switched on and off over my head. They glow and brightness hot to the touch. I don't know how long they'll last but they often come back when I had been trying too hard to get inside other windows. Hey, you forgot about it and left all of the lights on. This next part might sound like a backhanded compliment. In my little book loving heart that could it does not feel like a backhanded compliment. I started to forget about The Pargiters when I was still reading about them. There were men and their faces look like dream faces. If you try to look at them up close you don't see anything. I didn't care about the end or what happened to them. You could sweep everyone out onto lit up streets in the safety of lit up faces for all I could care. I was already in the other room with the lights left on. When I was reading The Years I had a mental conversation going with myself about how I would explain my apathy about how it all turned out and be believed that they and the book had meant something to me. I could have stopped reading it and never found out what happened. What really happens, anyway? People die and the next day and what's left is the other stuff that I'm going to think about anyway.
"You want your supper, do you?" said Maggie. She went into the kitchen and came back with a saucer of milk. "There, poor puss," she said, putting the saucer down on the floor. She stood watching the cat lap up its milk, mouthful by mouthful; then it stretched itself out again with extraordinary grace.
What followed this has come back to bite me, to sting me, to warm me and confuse me. When I wasn't trying to hold it I almost had why I had not felt such acute envy. It was this next part:
Sara, standing at a little distance, watched her. Then she imitated her.
"There, poor puss, there, poor puss," she repeated. "As you rock the cradle, Maggie," she added.
Maggie raised her arms as if to ward off some implacable destiny; then let them fall. Sara smiled as she watched her; then tears brimmed, fell and ran slowly down her cheeks. But as she put up her hand to wipe them there was a sound of knocking; somebody was hammering on the door of the next house. The hammering stopped. Then it began again- hammer, hammer, hammer.
They listened.
It's that Sara imitates her. This much I know. When reading some other books these days that made me feel the loss of I don't know what I wondered if it was that security that I knew they had people who loved them (a soul mate? Another part of me to have faith in? H.D. had an idea I wanted to run away with as my own to have the dog of your own in HERmione. I wanted that dog but make it a mental Mariel dog and it would be as if you could feel your own soul). But I'm not jealous of Maggie it is something about how Sara measures where Maggie fits and it is her measuring that makes it so. Someone loves you. I don't want to say it is altogether that because it isn't. It would also ruin it. I like to think about this scene in The Years. I'll be some place I shouldn't be seen having entire other worlds going on in my head (surely I look off). I wish I could make the gesture, to feed the kitten and be in the warm kitchen and some place safe.
Maggie must have been some kind of great hope for the Pargiters. When she's a baby there is a deal made about purchasing her a necklace. Eleanor must pick it out. The Colonel will pay for it. See to it that it is done. This special important Pargiter baby must have the necklace. If they were in a garden their plants would turn to her as if she was the sun. Maybe they all reenacted the future kitchen scene through things before there was a hungry kitten to be fed in place of the warm family of her own in the future. The safety of her assured warm place in their hearts turned me to her cousins and sister who must make their own, when they can, when they are lucky.
Before there was a who we want to be in young Pargiter flesh there was an angry young woman who secretly wishes that her mother would just die already. I could hear her angry heart beating in her chest. Stop beating, stop bleeding, just die. Before anyone could learn all of the details, before conditions were right I could hear Rose with her lights left on memory. Intense, willed alone. With a knife in her hand she cuts a gash, thin and white still, into her wrist. What made her do such a thing? When she meets another of her own kind. When she finally feels she can talk to another she doesn't choose one of her own kind. She tries to wish on Maggie. My eyes could follow her into the never-ending conversation. The kind where you repeated yourself and said something stupid. When you are not you that you know because you didn't find another of your own kind after all. You found someone who doesn't have to build. My eyes could follow them into all of the rooms they ever go into and see that she doesn't see Eleanor and she doesn't see Sara. I feel lonely when the men talk a lot and know what people are thinking. When they know what each other are thinking. When Eleanor wonders what made Rose do such a thing as to cut herself I had the feeling that she didn't know what else to do. She will remember that forever and I know that. Sometimes I find Rose again in my mind too. She would be felt hot on the other side of concrete of me. Intense memories of not knowing what else to do with not belonging. When you don't feel like yourself. When you don't feel real. Eleanor sits somewhere off to the side, in a half light. Sara must be looking out the window. I know she will be happy some day but I want her to look out the window because I don't feel like me when it is assurance and the great hope. I want to look at their faces and see faces when they get up close because they haven't walked off too far in The Years. I like to think about that kind of stuff. I don't want to be Delia and wanting her mother to die already and let the living people live. I just want to feel that knowing that Sara had that people could. That's probably going to be my The Years for my days. The longing feeling about people I don't really know because they aren't real but they seemed real because they had feelings I've had about wishing stuff was real.
This isn't the review I wanted to write back then. I was happy when I went on goodreads and found reviews from Elizabeth, Sam and William. They all like The Years and mentally I hugged and high five all around. Others dismissed the book as something unspecial because it isn't The Waves or To the Lighthouse. To that I say that the specialness was not only breathing in daring tattoo permanence. I wish the disappointed or scornful The Years faces could see what I see that Woolf used paints on the inside, behind the eyes. Right where you go to cry or something. Something like that. Something intense like a memory you turned into that something intense. To me that is special to capture that. To capture it because you didn't hold it. You let the light come on afterwards by knowing what you held onto about how you feel about your family.
Does everything then come over again a little differently? she thought. If so, is there a pattern; a theme, recurring, like music; half remembered, half forseen?... a gigantic pattern, momentarily perceptible? The thought gave her extreme pleasure: that there was a pattern. But who makes it? Who thinks it? Her mind slipped. She could not finish her thought.
November 10, 2022
Идеей этого произведения является, что викторианская эпоха и, вообще, прежние годы ушли безвозвратно, что технический прогресс и даже простые коммунальные усовершенствования сильно изменили жизнь. Примечательна прозорливость, вложенная в уста Пегги о том, что люди будут в будущем не только слышать, но и видеть при телефонных разговорах. Писательницу волнует тема времени, ее хода, старения, памяти, воспоминаний, развития, изменений, возникающих с течением научно-технического прогресса. Здесь объединены традиционная семейная сага от момента молодости главных героев и смерти их матери до момента их встречи в престарелом возрасте.
Элинор размышляет в семьдесят лет, что у нее не было жизни: жизнь - это то, что творят, чем распоряжаются. А у нее есть только настоящий момент, она живет здесь и сейчас, слушает фокстрот. Я не знаю, это ли жизнь?
О войне изложено скупо, но автор изложила свою позицию: "Вокруг столько красоты... Так чего же ради эти люди стреляют друг в друга? "
Главная идея произведения на мой взгляд: Жизнь быстротечна, и нужно ценить каждый ее миг...
Элинор размышляет в семьдесят лет, что у нее не было жизни: жизнь - это то, что творят, чем распоряжаются. А у нее есть только настоящий момент, она живет здесь и сейчас, слушает фокстрот. Я не знаю, это ли жизнь?
О войне изложено скупо, но автор изложила свою позицию: "Вокруг столько красоты... Так чего же ради эти люди стреляют друг в друга? "
Главная идея произведения на мой взгляд: Жизнь быстротечна, и нужно ценить каждый ее миг...
November 13, 2022
In one word,
The Years
is the chronicle of the passing life. It tells how life, smoothly guided by seasonal cycles, affected the Pargiters, a big London-based family living in a big mansion, starting 1880' till beginning of 1930'.
Extrapolating to two words, the Pargiters family is showing in miniature the trajectory taken by the human race, which is in its infancy sometime in an uncertain spring of 1880’, and presumably grows to its maturity by 1930’, where we find most of them, collected in a house for a summer party, against the window gathered in a group the old brothers (Edward, Morris, Martin) and sisters (Eleanor, Milly, Rose, Delia):the group in the window, the men in their black-and-white evening dress, the women in their crimsons, golds and silvers, wore a statuesque air for a moment, as if they were carved in stone. Their dresses fell in stiff sculptured folds. Then they moved, they changed their attitudes, they began to talk...
I was assuming at the beginning of the book that such a large family would stir the novel pages with some thrilling and exciting episodes, but contrary to my expectations, the Pargiters, as the caravan crossing the desert, do not offer any excitement in their ways of living their lives, or any sensational plot or intrigue. Moreover, I have experienced a deep impression that although the years pass one by one, till they get to their ‘present’, none of the characters change, slightly or dramatically, despite the fact that change itself forces them to change their lifestyle, from richness to poverty, and vice-versa..
There must be another life ,she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people . She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now , she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves. We’re only just beginning to understand, here and there . She hollowed her hands in her lap, just as Rose had hollowed her round her ears. She held her hands hollowed; she felt that she wanted to enclose the present moment; to make it stay; to fill it fuller and fuller, with the past, the present and the future, until it shone, whole, bright, deep with understanding.
I felt this novel so peaceful and so safe, as if nothing could trigger any extreme irritation in me. Although I didn’t get to know in depth each of the member of the Pargiters, I have found more than enough to feed my satisfaction, through all those little snapshot pictures of people, while they are taking part into very mundane, routine daily life habits and events…
...suddenly she saw the sky between two striped tree trunks extraordinarily blue. She came out on the top. The wind ceased, the country spread wide all round her. Her body seemed to shrink, her eyes to widen. She threw herself on the ground, and looked over the billowing land that went rising and falling, away and away, until somewhere far off it reached the sea. Uncultivated, uninhabited, existing by itself, for itself, without towns or houses it looked from this height. Dark wedges of shadow, bright breadths of light lay side by side. Then, as she watched, light moved and dark moved; light and shadow went travelling over the hills and over the valleys. A deep murmur sang in her ears – the land itself, singing to itself, a chorus, alone. She lay there listening. She was happy, completely. Time had ceased.
Virginia Woolf is a delicate writer to deal with surely, yet The Years is now a favourite with me :)
https://youtu.be/kXkiGgY-kG8
(Fikret Kızılok feat. Sibel Sezal – *song Bu Kalp Seni Unutur mu)
Extrapolating to two words, the Pargiters family is showing in miniature the trajectory taken by the human race, which is in its infancy sometime in an uncertain spring of 1880’, and presumably grows to its maturity by 1930’, where we find most of them, collected in a house for a summer party, against the window gathered in a group the old brothers (Edward, Morris, Martin) and sisters (Eleanor, Milly, Rose, Delia):the group in the window, the men in their black-and-white evening dress, the women in their crimsons, golds and silvers, wore a statuesque air for a moment, as if they were carved in stone. Their dresses fell in stiff sculptured folds. Then they moved, they changed their attitudes, they began to talk...
I was assuming at the beginning of the book that such a large family would stir the novel pages with some thrilling and exciting episodes, but contrary to my expectations, the Pargiters, as the caravan crossing the desert, do not offer any excitement in their ways of living their lives, or any sensational plot or intrigue. Moreover, I have experienced a deep impression that although the years pass one by one, till they get to their ‘present’, none of the characters change, slightly or dramatically, despite the fact that change itself forces them to change their lifestyle, from richness to poverty, and vice-versa..
There must be another life ,she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people . She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now , she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves. We’re only just beginning to understand, here and there . She hollowed her hands in her lap, just as Rose had hollowed her round her ears. She held her hands hollowed; she felt that she wanted to enclose the present moment; to make it stay; to fill it fuller and fuller, with the past, the present and the future, until it shone, whole, bright, deep with understanding.
I felt this novel so peaceful and so safe, as if nothing could trigger any extreme irritation in me. Although I didn’t get to know in depth each of the member of the Pargiters, I have found more than enough to feed my satisfaction, through all those little snapshot pictures of people, while they are taking part into very mundane, routine daily life habits and events…
...suddenly she saw the sky between two striped tree trunks extraordinarily blue. She came out on the top. The wind ceased, the country spread wide all round her. Her body seemed to shrink, her eyes to widen. She threw herself on the ground, and looked over the billowing land that went rising and falling, away and away, until somewhere far off it reached the sea. Uncultivated, uninhabited, existing by itself, for itself, without towns or houses it looked from this height. Dark wedges of shadow, bright breadths of light lay side by side. Then, as she watched, light moved and dark moved; light and shadow went travelling over the hills and over the valleys. A deep murmur sang in her ears – the land itself, singing to itself, a chorus, alone. She lay there listening. She was happy, completely. Time had ceased.
Virginia Woolf is a delicate writer to deal with surely, yet The Years is now a favourite with me :)
https://youtu.be/kXkiGgY-kG8
(Fikret Kızılok feat. Sibel Sezal – *song Bu Kalp Seni Unutur mu)
September 3, 2021
Woolf writes of the Pargiter family—a large family of brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents and grandchildren. We follow the family through three generations, beginning in 1880. The telling leaps forward sometimes by decades, other times, year by year, all the way into the 1930s. We see the life of an upper-middle-class family before, during and after the war. We see societal changes over time and through the characters. The setting is primarily London although life abroad, for example in Africa and India, is spoken of too. We see the young become old, how they see themselves and how in turn their offspring view them. We observe the passage of time and history through the lives of a family.
Although there is not a heavy dose of stream of consciousness in this novel by Woolf, it lurks in the background. Woolf writes with talent and she knew how to draw out the inner core, the essence of a person through her characters. Personally, I am willing to give the book four stars for the prose alone. The prose and the thoughts it gives rise to had more an effect on me than the family story.
At the start I was at times confused how the characters were related to each other. This difficulty clears up as one reads. The usage of pronouns is however not always crystal clear. In one episode roses are spoken of as dying—I became confused. The writing made me think the character Rose had died……but then she turned up again! Stupid me? Or perhaps, the writing was in fact not sufficiently clear. I very much like Woolf’s writing. It’s atmospheric, it’s lyrical, but not always one hundred percent clear!
Finty (Tara Cressida Frances) Williams narrates the audiobook. She is a contemporary English actress. This is mirrored in her reading. She acts; she gives us a performance. She dramatizes but not excessively, which I appreciate. Most of the characters are easy to recognize through the intonations she gives them. Her intonations fit the characters well. My favorite is Sara Pargiter’s! It’s spot on. Finty’s tone enhances the beauty of Woolf’s descriptive, atmospheric lines. For this reason alone, her audio narration deserves four stars.
The story I would give three stars, the prose four.
I will close with one quote:
“There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.”
*******************
*The Years 4 stars
*Mrs. Dalloway 4 stars
*Jacob's Room 4 stars
*The Voyage Out 3 stars
*The Mark on the Wall 3 stars
*Night and Day 3 stars
*To the Lighthouse 3 stars
*Between the Acts 3 stars
*Kew Gardens 3 stars
*The Waves 1 star
*A Room of One's Own 1 star
*Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf 3 stars by Maureen Adams
*Orlando TBR
Although there is not a heavy dose of stream of consciousness in this novel by Woolf, it lurks in the background. Woolf writes with talent and she knew how to draw out the inner core, the essence of a person through her characters. Personally, I am willing to give the book four stars for the prose alone. The prose and the thoughts it gives rise to had more an effect on me than the family story.
At the start I was at times confused how the characters were related to each other. This difficulty clears up as one reads. The usage of pronouns is however not always crystal clear. In one episode roses are spoken of as dying—I became confused. The writing made me think the character Rose had died……but then she turned up again! Stupid me? Or perhaps, the writing was in fact not sufficiently clear. I very much like Woolf’s writing. It’s atmospheric, it’s lyrical, but not always one hundred percent clear!
Finty (Tara Cressida Frances) Williams narrates the audiobook. She is a contemporary English actress. This is mirrored in her reading. She acts; she gives us a performance. She dramatizes but not excessively, which I appreciate. Most of the characters are easy to recognize through the intonations she gives them. Her intonations fit the characters well. My favorite is Sara Pargiter’s! It’s spot on. Finty’s tone enhances the beauty of Woolf’s descriptive, atmospheric lines. For this reason alone, her audio narration deserves four stars.
The story I would give three stars, the prose four.
I will close with one quote:
“There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.”
*******************
*The Years 4 stars
*Mrs. Dalloway 4 stars
*Jacob's Room 4 stars
*The Voyage Out 3 stars
*The Mark on the Wall 3 stars
*Night and Day 3 stars
*To the Lighthouse 3 stars
*Between the Acts 3 stars
*Kew Gardens 3 stars
*The Waves 1 star
*A Room of One's Own 1 star
*Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf 3 stars by Maureen Adams
*Orlando TBR
May 31, 2020
4.25|5
I’m in love 😳
I’m in love 😳
July 5, 2015
But you may ask why The Years and not Mrs. Dalloway first? I don't know. I think it was a fortunate to find it in my local library and by reading a few pages of it, I realized that I must read it first. Did you know that I tried to read Mrs. Dalloway for more than 3 times, and even once I read almost half of the book, but I failed to finish it? I was losing my hope. I thought Woolf is not my type.
Reading A room of one's own opened my eyes to many things. That Virginia Woolf mainly concentrates on what kinds of things around us. Let me think. It is a book on women, writing and novels but you see she's describing a cat without a tail in the yard of Oxford University. Amazing huh? And then she compares herself with that cat. I don't think she was a revolutionary feminist. She didn't write a book like The golden notebook of Doris Lessing. She is not The woman destroyed of Simone de Beauvoir, despite her life. I think she was beyond all these things. Although I am not a professional Woolf reader, after reading the years I felt I discovered something new in my life: a new author, a new kind of writing above all kinds of hatred, a new kind of womanhood in fact.
She's smart. She has her own style. She's strong. She's different.
The Years is like I can say The Waves that I have read it years ago, I could finish it but I don't think I wholly understood it, because of a bad translation or perhaps it's untranslatable or maybe I wasn't yet a mature reader. It is the story of a family. There are 4 sisters and 3 brothers living in a big house with their sick mother and father. This is how it starts. The title of each chapter is a certain year. It goes for decades for almost fifty years until each one of the characters gets old.
What we expect from a Woolf novel should not be a mixture of events which supposedly must constitute a special year (chapter). Like chapter 1914 which is describing only one day, they are snapshots of a period od time. I realized that I should read it like a poem, a long poem of winds, clouds, leaves, pigeons, sounds and noise, seasons , streets and London. Each chapter starts with a description of a special season and then characters are floating in these natural frames.
It was January. Snow was falling; snow had fallen all day. The sky spread like a grey goose’s wing from which feathers were falling all over England. The sky was nothing but a flurry of falling flakes. Lanes were levelled; hollows filled; the snow clogged the streams; obscured windows, and lay wedged against doors.
This is beautiful to see that how characters remain themselves by passing years. How for instance Sara poetically reacts to other people's behavior in her 40's like her 20's. Or how Woolf manages that her characters remembers those memories from years ago that we have read about them in previous chapters and it was for me a reminiscence of reading Proust. I think one main special characteristics of Woolf's is that you have to participate in the novel. Although she puts some clues in different places but you have to guess some things yourself. And that makes it a mysterious reading.
The main characters are mainly women. One thing that I really liked about them was that Woolf sometimes sees them from the eyes of other people, an old man sitting in front of them in a bus for instance:
The man on whose toe she had trodden sized her up; a well-known type; with a bag; philanthropic; well nourished; a spinster; a virgin; like all the women of her class, cold; her passions had never been touched; yet not unattractive. She was laughing. . . .
That above sentence looked so natural to me. I mean as she herself says in A room of one's own, a successful female author writes beyond her gender. And Woolf proves that she is like that.
Reading A room of one's own opened my eyes to many things. That Virginia Woolf mainly concentrates on what kinds of things around us. Let me think. It is a book on women, writing and novels but you see she's describing a cat without a tail in the yard of Oxford University. Amazing huh? And then she compares herself with that cat. I don't think she was a revolutionary feminist. She didn't write a book like The golden notebook of Doris Lessing. She is not The woman destroyed of Simone de Beauvoir, despite her life. I think she was beyond all these things. Although I am not a professional Woolf reader, after reading the years I felt I discovered something new in my life: a new author, a new kind of writing above all kinds of hatred, a new kind of womanhood in fact.
She's smart. She has her own style. She's strong. She's different.
The Years is like I can say The Waves that I have read it years ago, I could finish it but I don't think I wholly understood it, because of a bad translation or perhaps it's untranslatable or maybe I wasn't yet a mature reader. It is the story of a family. There are 4 sisters and 3 brothers living in a big house with their sick mother and father. This is how it starts. The title of each chapter is a certain year. It goes for decades for almost fifty years until each one of the characters gets old.
What we expect from a Woolf novel should not be a mixture of events which supposedly must constitute a special year (chapter). Like chapter 1914 which is describing only one day, they are snapshots of a period od time. I realized that I should read it like a poem, a long poem of winds, clouds, leaves, pigeons, sounds and noise, seasons , streets and London. Each chapter starts with a description of a special season and then characters are floating in these natural frames.
It was January. Snow was falling; snow had fallen all day. The sky spread like a grey goose’s wing from which feathers were falling all over England. The sky was nothing but a flurry of falling flakes. Lanes were levelled; hollows filled; the snow clogged the streams; obscured windows, and lay wedged against doors.
This is beautiful to see that how characters remain themselves by passing years. How for instance Sara poetically reacts to other people's behavior in her 40's like her 20's. Or how Woolf manages that her characters remembers those memories from years ago that we have read about them in previous chapters and it was for me a reminiscence of reading Proust. I think one main special characteristics of Woolf's is that you have to participate in the novel. Although she puts some clues in different places but you have to guess some things yourself. And that makes it a mysterious reading.
The main characters are mainly women. One thing that I really liked about them was that Woolf sometimes sees them from the eyes of other people, an old man sitting in front of them in a bus for instance:
The man on whose toe she had trodden sized her up; a well-known type; with a bag; philanthropic; well nourished; a spinster; a virgin; like all the women of her class, cold; her passions had never been touched; yet not unattractive. She was laughing. . . .
That above sentence looked so natural to me. I mean as she herself says in A room of one's own, a successful female author writes beyond her gender. And Woolf proves that she is like that.
October 20, 2017
Reviewed in conjunction with Margery Sharp's Lise Lillywhite
One of the things I do in Geneva is hang out at the local flea market trying to suppress my urge to preserve dead lives. Every week you'll see people disrespectfully pawing over the beloved libraries of the deceased, libraries which with possibly indecent haste, have been taken away by market vendors who, I can imagine, don't pay a cent for them. It is merely enough that they are willing to cart them off. There in the market they sit in boxes, 2CHF a book. Amongst them will often be intimate belongings such as photo albums, travel diaries or autograph books. Every time I see this, I want to save the memory even if nobody else does. Could I not keep just a skeleton of the library's existence?
As it is, my own library is, as much as anything else, a cemetery of book bones, nothing as whole as a skeleton no doubt, but each death provides my shelves with something more. There are many reasons for loving a book. Some of mine I love simply because they belonged to people who cared about them and I have inherited them if only by chance. Not least, the library remnants of the Hautevilles' library.
When the sale of the chateau and its contents was first mooted, the best of the books went to a posh auction house. The refuse of that process ended up at the local flea market. Each time I see one of these discarded deceased estates, lying higgledy-piggledy in boxes, I don't just look at the books one by one, deciding which small treasure to take home. I also read the story of the library itself. Ah, so and so was a jazz and cinema lover, as I see a record collection, the reference books lovingly collected on its side, now the junk man's province. This Swiss person made trips to Australia in the 1950s, here are the photo albums, the travel books of the period. Oh, and he was into....
So it goes on. Most of these deceased book lovers leave only a small tale. The Hautevilles, however, were a prominent family for many generations and their story is told via important legal battles, their castle and through the auction of the contents of that castle. They loved theatre and put on productions, so the auction included the costumery collected over the years. At the 'junk' end, ordinary books not worth anything, was a lovely collection of children's and adult's fiction from the pre and post WWII period. It contained many gems of the period including an author, almost forgotten these days, Margery Sharp. She is perhaps due for the requisite revival, not least because it would not be entirely unreasonable to call her the Jane Austen of her day. I hesitate to do that, but as it may get somebody to read her, and as almost nobody on GR - none of my friends - have read this, I will take the chance.
reset here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...
One of the things I do in Geneva is hang out at the local flea market trying to suppress my urge to preserve dead lives. Every week you'll see people disrespectfully pawing over the beloved libraries of the deceased, libraries which with possibly indecent haste, have been taken away by market vendors who, I can imagine, don't pay a cent for them. It is merely enough that they are willing to cart them off. There in the market they sit in boxes, 2CHF a book. Amongst them will often be intimate belongings such as photo albums, travel diaries or autograph books. Every time I see this, I want to save the memory even if nobody else does. Could I not keep just a skeleton of the library's existence?
As it is, my own library is, as much as anything else, a cemetery of book bones, nothing as whole as a skeleton no doubt, but each death provides my shelves with something more. There are many reasons for loving a book. Some of mine I love simply because they belonged to people who cared about them and I have inherited them if only by chance. Not least, the library remnants of the Hautevilles' library.
When the sale of the chateau and its contents was first mooted, the best of the books went to a posh auction house. The refuse of that process ended up at the local flea market. Each time I see one of these discarded deceased estates, lying higgledy-piggledy in boxes, I don't just look at the books one by one, deciding which small treasure to take home. I also read the story of the library itself. Ah, so and so was a jazz and cinema lover, as I see a record collection, the reference books lovingly collected on its side, now the junk man's province. This Swiss person made trips to Australia in the 1950s, here are the photo albums, the travel books of the period. Oh, and he was into....
So it goes on. Most of these deceased book lovers leave only a small tale. The Hautevilles, however, were a prominent family for many generations and their story is told via important legal battles, their castle and through the auction of the contents of that castle. They loved theatre and put on productions, so the auction included the costumery collected over the years. At the 'junk' end, ordinary books not worth anything, was a lovely collection of children's and adult's fiction from the pre and post WWII period. It contained many gems of the period including an author, almost forgotten these days, Margery Sharp. She is perhaps due for the requisite revival, not least because it would not be entirely unreasonable to call her the Jane Austen of her day. I hesitate to do that, but as it may get somebody to read her, and as almost nobody on GR - none of my friends - have read this, I will take the chance.
reset here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...
March 1, 2022
Words can’t describe how much this book made an impact on me, but I will try to articulate it as much as I can.
At first glance, The Years may seem like a classical family saga, but in fact, is anything but. This novel comes close to what an anti-family novel would be: it’s a social critic of not only the Pargiters but the suffocating grip of patriarchy on people of the time. It’s in the tradition of hiding emotional dissatisfaction and masking it with composure, the light shines on the cracks, blurs, and smears of the Pargiters’ hypocrisy, it’s in the generational trauma and misconceptions that are passed down into the next generation, even the likable characters suffer from xenophobia and anti-Semitism inherited from their ancestors(Sara, for example)
A technique characteristical for The Years is the reoccurrence of patterns and repetitive actions, a sudden awareness of oneself as two beings at the same time, an observer and a participant in life (where am I? where am I going? Are the questions the female characters ask themselves throughout the novel).
The central character, Eleanor is in constant search of sense behind the patterns, until she comes to the realization that there is no sense behind them, it will always be out of reach, one should accept that fact in order to live fully in the current time.
The character and social study in The Years is one of the sharpest and cleanest ones I have seen Virginia do, besides in the more famous The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway, this is her most qualitative work. She expresses a wide array of emotions in the character, brilliantly paints a picture of people who are afraid of being themselves, of outside judgment that separates them, the covert and unsurpassed trauma of war, the difference between private I and public I, the repression of emotions, the omnipotence of a father figure, imposed heterosexuality, the generational gap, class, and national differences, stagnation, silence.
The tone, the humanistic under-layer of compassion, and the thoughts of these characters all hit close to home, I cried multiple times while reading this book, I don’t remember the last time something hit me this hard ever since I read Franny and Zooey in 2020, Virginia continues to surprise me with her intellect and skill; I remember reading her statement after reading Proust’s In Search of lost time, and I repeat it as a statement true to me after reading her work The Years: What else is there to write about?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Officially my third favorite Woolf novel after The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway.
“There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.”
At first glance, The Years may seem like a classical family saga, but in fact, is anything but. This novel comes close to what an anti-family novel would be: it’s a social critic of not only the Pargiters but the suffocating grip of patriarchy on people of the time. It’s in the tradition of hiding emotional dissatisfaction and masking it with composure, the light shines on the cracks, blurs, and smears of the Pargiters’ hypocrisy, it’s in the generational trauma and misconceptions that are passed down into the next generation, even the likable characters suffer from xenophobia and anti-Semitism inherited from their ancestors(Sara, for example)
”It was an abominable system, he thought; family life; Abercorn Terrace. No wonder the house would not let. It had one bathroom, and a basement; and there all those different people had lived, boxed up together, telling lies.”
A technique characteristical for The Years is the reoccurrence of patterns and repetitive actions, a sudden awareness of oneself as two beings at the same time, an observer and a participant in life (where am I? where am I going? Are the questions the female characters ask themselves throughout the novel).
The central character, Eleanor is in constant search of sense behind the patterns, until she comes to the realization that there is no sense behind them, it will always be out of reach, one should accept that fact in order to live fully in the current time.
“Her feeling of happiness returned to her, her unreasonable exaltation. It seemed to her that they were all young, with the future before them. Nothing was fixed; nothing was known; life was open and free before them.
“Isn’t that odd?” she exclaimed. “Isn’t that queer? Isn’t that why life’s a perpetual—what shall I call it?—miracle? … I mean,” she tried to explain, for he looked puzzled, “old age they say is like this; but it isn’t. It’s different; quite different. So when I was a child; so when I was a girl; it’s been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle.”
The character and social study in The Years is one of the sharpest and cleanest ones I have seen Virginia do, besides in the more famous The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway, this is her most qualitative work. She expresses a wide array of emotions in the character, brilliantly paints a picture of people who are afraid of being themselves, of outside judgment that separates them, the covert and unsurpassed trauma of war, the difference between private I and public I, the repression of emotions, the omnipotence of a father figure, imposed heterosexuality, the generational gap, class, and national differences, stagnation, silence.
“He can’t say what he wants to say; he’s afraid. They’re all afraid; afraid of being laughed at; afraid of giving themselves away. He’s afraid too, he thought, looking at the young man with a fine forehead and a weak chin who was gesticulating, too emphatically. We’re all afraid of each other, he thought; afraid of what? Of criticism; of laughter; of people who think differently…. He’s afraid of me because I’m a farmer (and he saw again his round face; high cheekbones and small brown eyes). And I’m afraid of him because he’s clever. He looked at the big forehead, from which the hair was already receding. That’s what separates us; fear, he thought.”
The tone, the humanistic under-layer of compassion, and the thoughts of these characters all hit close to home, I cried multiple times while reading this book, I don’t remember the last time something hit me this hard ever since I read Franny and Zooey in 2020, Virginia continues to surprise me with her intellect and skill; I remember reading her statement after reading Proust’s In Search of lost time, and I repeat it as a statement true to me after reading her work The Years: What else is there to write about?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Officially my third favorite Woolf novel after The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway.
February 28, 2017
The story is composed of fragments, moments taken from an entire life. There are things we remember better than other. Some things we forget completely until someone mentions it and than we seem to remember little fragments of the story. It is not always the most important things we remember; it can be just like a shadow that covers a piece of the wall without making difference. What Woolf does is, she constructs a complete novel of assembled fragments of the lives of the family Pargiter. So a complete story reveals itself.
June 7, 2018
Fleeting Moments
When I started the opening section, set in 1880, I had trouble keeping track of the seven or eight children of Colonel Abel Pargiter, in whose London house the book opens. The immensely helpful introduction by Eleanor McNees, who edited and annotated the Harcourt edition, reproduces a sketch of the Pargiter family tree from one of Woolf's notebooks, but it was obvious that some of the names and dates had been changed. In vain did I look for a version online. But I gradually came to see that this did not matter. A few of the children would become major figures, others would reappear only once or twice, and still others would disappear from the story almost completely, to be replaced by various cousins, nephews, and nieces. McNees makes the point that while most novels are focused, centripetal, this one is centrifugal. Think of ripples moving outwards in the pond of time, getting broken up into little wavelets as they move away from the centre, each reflecting a piece of the sky or the world around them.
As she does in The Waves, though with greater naturalism, Woolf begins each section with a description of the weather over England; she closes the book in that way too, as in the excerpt above. So even though there is a chronological movement through the decades, it is balanced against the rhythm of the seasons, cyclical and eternal. The chapters, all of different lengths, are headed 1880, 1891, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, 1918, and "Present Day" (presumably around 1930). The autumn wind that blows across England in the opening to the 1891 section strikes the houses of two of the characters, one in Northumberland, the other in Devon, who have apparently got married in the eleven-year gap, neither to people whom one might have expected. Another author might have made a whole novel out of either of these—but Woolf, after her brief puff of breeze, moves on. For her, such milestone events always take place offstage. Look again at the dates above. The Years is the only novel I know set in the early twentieth century where the reader approaches the First World War without any sense of dread. Woolf observes it, certainly; there is a scene with some people drinking wine in a basement with bombs falling overhead. But when a character joins the army, the main reaction is to question the rightness of war, rather the doomed foreshadowing of death that has become a WW1 novelist's cliché. At least one member of the family does die, of course, but this is something we learn about much later, as with all the other deaths, which are simply treated as another part of life.
Between them, the Pargiters cover most of the occupations typical of the upper middle classes in that period. Among the men, we have an Oxford don, a chancery lawyer, a financier, and a soldier turned farmer in the colonies. One of the women in the younger generation becomes a doctor, but her aunts have no such professions open to them. Instead, one of them builds housing for the poor, another works for women's suffrage, and another—a deliciously offbeat character whom Woolf may have based on herself—becomes a writer. There are marriages too, both high and low, but Woolf has no time for the "marriage plots" of the 19th-century novel. Many of her characters remain single, and there are hints of homosexual or asexual attractions also. And even the traditional openings are seldom followed through; one of the men in that closing party, for instance, meets a pretty girl and gets her permission to have him call on her the next day—but we never discover what happens; we do not even know her name. And although inevitably most of the characters are of a certain class, one of the most moving sections in the entire book, that of 1913, features the old servant Crosby, leaving the house on Abercorn Terrace for the last time after it has been sold.
The Years may not have a plot, but it absolutely has a setting: London. Just as she had done in Mrs. Dalloway (and using many of the same devices), Woolf paints the metropolis in glimpses through windows, trips by omnibus or on foot, visits to houses grubby or grand, creating a sensory picture in sight, scent, and above all sound. And unlike that earlier novel, which is set in a single day, this covers a fifty-year span. The sounds of lamplighters' footsteps and horses hooves that came through the window in 1880 are replaced by a less pleasant cacophony in the present day:
But Eleanor was standing with her back to them. She was watching a taxi that was gliding slowly round the square. It stopped in front of a house two doors down.These are the last few lines (with one small omission) of Virginia Woolf's last major novel, The Years, which I find to be at the same time Woolf's most approachable work and also her most original. Were this a normal novel, I would not dream of quoting the closing lines without spoiler alerts. But no spoilers are possible here, because Woolf avoids the normal narrative chain of cause and effect. The couple entering their house in the early morning are people we have not seen before, and probably would not see again even if the book were twice as long. The beauty of the passage is in the moment, one small example of life going on in an entire book about life going on, fleeting moment after fleeting moment. Eleanor Pargiter, a woman now in her seventies, is a major character; her sister Delia, whose party in a London town house is just ending, is a more minor one; but the point is less to show what has happened to these particular women whom we first met when the book began fifty years earlier, but simply to show that they are still alive, as witnesses to the changing world around them.
"Aren't they lovely?" said Delia, holding out the flowers.
Eleanor started.
"The roses? Yes..." she said. But she was watching the cab. A young man had got out; he paid the driver. Then a girl in a tweed travelling suit followed him. He fitted his latch-key to the door. "There," Eleanor murmured, as he opened the door and they stood for a moment on the threshold. "There!" she repeated, as the door shut with a little thud behind them. [...]
The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace.
When I started the opening section, set in 1880, I had trouble keeping track of the seven or eight children of Colonel Abel Pargiter, in whose London house the book opens. The immensely helpful introduction by Eleanor McNees, who edited and annotated the Harcourt edition, reproduces a sketch of the Pargiter family tree from one of Woolf's notebooks, but it was obvious that some of the names and dates had been changed. In vain did I look for a version online. But I gradually came to see that this did not matter. A few of the children would become major figures, others would reappear only once or twice, and still others would disappear from the story almost completely, to be replaced by various cousins, nephews, and nieces. McNees makes the point that while most novels are focused, centripetal, this one is centrifugal. Think of ripples moving outwards in the pond of time, getting broken up into little wavelets as they move away from the centre, each reflecting a piece of the sky or the world around them.
As she does in The Waves, though with greater naturalism, Woolf begins each section with a description of the weather over England; she closes the book in that way too, as in the excerpt above. So even though there is a chronological movement through the decades, it is balanced against the rhythm of the seasons, cyclical and eternal. The chapters, all of different lengths, are headed 1880, 1891, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, 1918, and "Present Day" (presumably around 1930). The autumn wind that blows across England in the opening to the 1891 section strikes the houses of two of the characters, one in Northumberland, the other in Devon, who have apparently got married in the eleven-year gap, neither to people whom one might have expected. Another author might have made a whole novel out of either of these—but Woolf, after her brief puff of breeze, moves on. For her, such milestone events always take place offstage. Look again at the dates above. The Years is the only novel I know set in the early twentieth century where the reader approaches the First World War without any sense of dread. Woolf observes it, certainly; there is a scene with some people drinking wine in a basement with bombs falling overhead. But when a character joins the army, the main reaction is to question the rightness of war, rather the doomed foreshadowing of death that has become a WW1 novelist's cliché. At least one member of the family does die, of course, but this is something we learn about much later, as with all the other deaths, which are simply treated as another part of life.
Between them, the Pargiters cover most of the occupations typical of the upper middle classes in that period. Among the men, we have an Oxford don, a chancery lawyer, a financier, and a soldier turned farmer in the colonies. One of the women in the younger generation becomes a doctor, but her aunts have no such professions open to them. Instead, one of them builds housing for the poor, another works for women's suffrage, and another—a deliciously offbeat character whom Woolf may have based on herself—becomes a writer. There are marriages too, both high and low, but Woolf has no time for the "marriage plots" of the 19th-century novel. Many of her characters remain single, and there are hints of homosexual or asexual attractions also. And even the traditional openings are seldom followed through; one of the men in that closing party, for instance, meets a pretty girl and gets her permission to have him call on her the next day—but we never discover what happens; we do not even know her name. And although inevitably most of the characters are of a certain class, one of the most moving sections in the entire book, that of 1913, features the old servant Crosby, leaving the house on Abercorn Terrace for the last time after it has been sold.
The Years may not have a plot, but it absolutely has a setting: London. Just as she had done in Mrs. Dalloway (and using many of the same devices), Woolf paints the metropolis in glimpses through windows, trips by omnibus or on foot, visits to houses grubby or grand, creating a sensory picture in sight, scent, and above all sound. And unlike that earlier novel, which is set in a single day, this covers a fifty-year span. The sounds of lamplighters' footsteps and horses hooves that came through the window in 1880 are replaced by a less pleasant cacophony in the present day:
Against the dull background of traffic noises, of wheels turning and brakes squeaking, there rose near at hand the cry of a woman suddenly alarmed for her child; the monotonous cry of a man selling vegetables; and far away a barrel-organ was playing.And I have just noticed that the 1930s passage with which I opened is prefigured by a similar scene in 1880, just one of Woolf's impressionistic orchestration of fleeting moments that gave me greater delight than any other novel of hers:
The houses opposite all had the same front gardens; the same steps; the same pillars; the same bow windows. But now dusk was falling and they looked spectral and insubstantial in the dim light. Lamps were being lit; a light glowed in the drawing-room opposite; then the curtains were drawn, and the room was blotted out. Delia stood looking down at the street. A woman of the lower classes was wheeling a perambulator; an old man tottered along with his hands behind his back. Then the street was empty; there was a pause. Here came a hansom jingling down the road. Delia was momentarily interested. Was it going to stop at their door or not? She gazed more intently. But then, to her regret, the cabman jerked his reins, the horse stumbled on; the cab stopped two doors lower down.
December 5, 2009
my favorite
بعد از سه سال دوباره خوندمش. جالب این جاست که تو این سه سال هر وقت به یاد این کتاب می افتادم حس خوبی پیدا می کردم، اما داستانش به یادم نمی یومد! از این کتاب فقط یه حس برام باقی مونده بود. حالا هم که برای دومین بار خوندمش باز هم برام همون حس خوب رو زنده کرد و باز هم نمی تونم تعریفش کنم!
دلیلش اینه که:
ویرجینیا وولف عزیز ِ من تو این کتاب چیزی رو تصویر کرده که بهش می گیم "زندگی"، حسش می کنیم و نمی تونیم تعریفش کنیم.
بعد از سه سال دوباره خوندمش. جالب این جاست که تو این سه سال هر وقت به یاد این کتاب می افتادم حس خوبی پیدا می کردم، اما داستانش به یادم نمی یومد! از این کتاب فقط یه حس برام باقی مونده بود. حالا هم که برای دومین بار خوندمش باز هم برام همون حس خوب رو زنده کرد و باز هم نمی تونم تعریفش کنم!
دلیلش اینه که:
ویرجینیا وولف عزیز ِ من تو این کتاب چیزی رو تصویر کرده که بهش می گیم "زندگی"، حسش می کنیم و نمی تونیم تعریفش کنیم.
June 18, 2017
This is my fourth reading because it is a novel that speaks to me ; my very essence I grew up in a four storey Victorian terraced house with faded William Morris wallpaper and service bells in the hallway. The past was always present and maybe we all lived in the past even then
How do you describe the passing of the years ? Your years ? Your family' s years or your country s years ?
Family members die , political parties too and wars are waged and what remains ? what is reliable ? ; if anything. What does it all mean? What was really important ?
Seasons are reliable as all Nature Is , Virginia Woolf shows us that the everyday is all we had -love her
How do you describe the passing of the years ? Your years ? Your family' s years or your country s years ?
Family members die , political parties too and wars are waged and what remains ? what is reliable ? ; if anything. What does it all mean? What was really important ?
Seasons are reliable as all Nature Is , Virginia Woolf shows us that the everyday is all we had -love her
March 28, 2009
من شاید این کتابهایی که یک نسل یا یک خانواده را سالها پیگیری می کنند دوست دارم. برایم مثال زندگی واقعی است و خوب درکش می کنم حتی اگر براحتی نشود خواندش مثل این یکی.. ولی برای من دوست داشتنی بود، نسخه درجه 2 یا 3 از صد سال تنهایی..
September 22, 2020
The Years is a sprawling generational tale that follows the just as sprawling members of the Pargiters family. These middle-class and urban-dwelling individuals are first viewed in the spring of 1880 and Woolf invites the reader to follow them, and the altering, war-ravaged, and ever more industrial Britain, until the summer of 1930.
I have now read a number of Woolf's works and have adored and appreciated them all. None, however, have compared to my introduction and personal favourite, Mrs. Dalloway. This was the most reminiscent in tone and general theme, as it was through seemingly banal observations or discussions that the reader garnered a true understanding for landscape and individual thought and feeling. Both are surface-level creations of familial life but, through this, seek to expose so much more.
This one family are used merely as figures to present the ungraspable concept of the passage of time. In 400 pages, decades and generations speed by. A small number of pages are allocated for each year and so a limited insight is therefore unavoidable. Woolf works consistently hard to evoke an entire scene, an entire year, entirely new characters, and the sense of shifting time, and I would say she undoubtedly achieves this.
I truly felt the characters alter as they aged and often this was most heavily implied by their stagnation. They became inescapably bound to their roots and so when the novel continued on its ceaseless progression to the present day, they became left behind, first in thought and then in body. The Britain that surrounded them was altering at an even more increased rate and the reactions for those experiencing this was just as dutifully recorded.
It did take me a little while to truly grasp what Woolf was exposing the reader to, but, once I had done so, I became immersed in these scenes from the past and this proved to be another mesmerising and wonderful Woolf.
I have now read a number of Woolf's works and have adored and appreciated them all. None, however, have compared to my introduction and personal favourite, Mrs. Dalloway. This was the most reminiscent in tone and general theme, as it was through seemingly banal observations or discussions that the reader garnered a true understanding for landscape and individual thought and feeling. Both are surface-level creations of familial life but, through this, seek to expose so much more.
This one family are used merely as figures to present the ungraspable concept of the passage of time. In 400 pages, decades and generations speed by. A small number of pages are allocated for each year and so a limited insight is therefore unavoidable. Woolf works consistently hard to evoke an entire scene, an entire year, entirely new characters, and the sense of shifting time, and I would say she undoubtedly achieves this.
I truly felt the characters alter as they aged and often this was most heavily implied by their stagnation. They became inescapably bound to their roots and so when the novel continued on its ceaseless progression to the present day, they became left behind, first in thought and then in body. The Britain that surrounded them was altering at an even more increased rate and the reactions for those experiencing this was just as dutifully recorded.
It did take me a little while to truly grasp what Woolf was exposing the reader to, but, once I had done so, I became immersed in these scenes from the past and this proved to be another mesmerising and wonderful Woolf.
November 13, 2017
The sunlight-dappled passages of 'The Years', deciduous and delirious with Woolf's painterly vision hold the key to understanding Woolf's view of the world as an atmosphere of beauty enveloped in a haze of human melancholy, regret and isolation; although 'The Years' ostensibly follows the Pargiter family, the true star is the city of London. Verdant and vibrant, from the tree-lined streets to bilious lamp-light which imbued London with a sickly luminescence, to the maze like streets which have entrapped the characters, few writers had described London with as much verve and originality as Virginia Woolf;
"The moon which was now clear of the clouds lay in a bare space as if the light had consumed the heaviness of the clouds and left a perfectly clear pavement, a dancing ground for revelry. For some time the dappled iridescence of the sky remained unbroken. There was a puff of cloud; and a little cloud crossed the moon"
London is enveloped in a haze of harlequin colours, of crepuscular dusk and golden rain, Woolf’s poetic descriptions are a testament to her painterly vision, to an eye which was accustomed to catching the small, unnoticed and unappreciated details of life, of gas-lights shaped like peacock feathers, of the fall of moon-light on tables, of night coalescing into day;
“It was a clear night and every tree in the square was visible; some were black, others were sprinkled with strange patches of green artificial light. Above the arc lamps rose shafts of darkness. Although it was close on midnight, it scarcely seemed to be night, but rather some ethereal disembodied day,”
Perhaps the weaker element of ‘The Years’ is the characters; although part of this is reflective of the fact that Woolf presents their inner lives via snapshots of different days in various years of their lives and so it can come across as slightly disjointed and so it is difficult to form an emotional connection with the family. However, that does not completely detract from the beauty of the story, from the magical atmosphere which Woolf weaves around London.
"The moon which was now clear of the clouds lay in a bare space as if the light had consumed the heaviness of the clouds and left a perfectly clear pavement, a dancing ground for revelry. For some time the dappled iridescence of the sky remained unbroken. There was a puff of cloud; and a little cloud crossed the moon"
London is enveloped in a haze of harlequin colours, of crepuscular dusk and golden rain, Woolf’s poetic descriptions are a testament to her painterly vision, to an eye which was accustomed to catching the small, unnoticed and unappreciated details of life, of gas-lights shaped like peacock feathers, of the fall of moon-light on tables, of night coalescing into day;
“It was a clear night and every tree in the square was visible; some were black, others were sprinkled with strange patches of green artificial light. Above the arc lamps rose shafts of darkness. Although it was close on midnight, it scarcely seemed to be night, but rather some ethereal disembodied day,”
Perhaps the weaker element of ‘The Years’ is the characters; although part of this is reflective of the fact that Woolf presents their inner lives via snapshots of different days in various years of their lives and so it can come across as slightly disjointed and so it is difficult to form an emotional connection with the family. However, that does not completely detract from the beauty of the story, from the magical atmosphere which Woolf weaves around London.
March 8, 2019
Това е най-добрият роман, който съм чел на Вирджиния Улф досега.
Елеанор Парджитър е най-добрата жена героиня, която съм срещал в литературата.
Не мога да кажа нищо повече, освен да посоча най-лесния за мен извод - романът е брилянтен.
През цялото време се сещах за един пасаж от Бърнт Нортън на Т.С. Елиът. Подозирам, че и В. Улф също е била вдъхновена от него:
Елеанор Парджитър е най-добрата жена героиня, която съм срещал в литературата.
Не мога да кажа нищо повече, освен да посоча най-лесния за мен извод - романът е брилянтен.
През цялото време се сещах за един пасаж от Бърнт Нортън на Т.С. Елиът. Подозирам, че и В. Улф също е била вдъхновена от него:
"Настоящето й миналото време
навярно заедно минават в бъдещето време,
а бъдещето се съдържа в миналото.
Ако цялото време винаги съществува,
цялото време е непоправимо.
Което е могло да бъде, е абстракция —
постоянна възможност
само в света на разсъжденията.
Което е могло да бъде и което е
сочат към един и същи край — все в настоящето.
Стъпки отекват в паметта
през прохода, по който не поехме,
към врата, която не отворихме
към градината с розите. "
April 12, 2017
Oh god, family sagas, right? Who invented them and why did they hate excitement? Like, are they a family of extragalactic creatures or something, or should I take a nap, because I’d kinda rather do literally anything else, watching paint dry not excluded, than read about some family’s oh-so-immersing trials and tribulations, over many years. I’ve got my own family to deal with, good luck topping that saga. Maybe I’m the problem, who knows. Trembling with anticipation at the thought of reading this type of literature is a life skill I have yet to acquire, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon, family sagas stayed at the bottom of the pit since my long past failed attempt at reading Buddenbrooks or The Forsyte Saga, I don’t remember which, but it sucked so bad that I still hold a grudge. Talk about being petty.
In any case, this is pretty much a family saga, but it’s Virginia Woolf, so it doesn’t count, she could write tentacle porn on a bathroom wall and I’d still think it’s the most marvellous thing I laid eyes on. I do have a mind of my own, I swear! But I'm at a point where reading Virginia Woolf feels like being in love and you’re like wow you have the most beautiful toe I’ve ever seen on a human being even though everyone else says it’s kinda gross and not as good as your other toes.
I don’t have anything else to add other than that this book is full of beauty, heart and melancholy, and people saying it’s not as good as her other stuff don’t know what they’re talking about and they’re probably just jealous aspiring writers anyway. Though right now I’m a little delusional and I wouldn’t completely trust me.
In any case, this is pretty much a family saga, but it’s Virginia Woolf, so it doesn’t count, she could write tentacle porn on a bathroom wall and I’d still think it’s the most marvellous thing I laid eyes on. I do have a mind of my own, I swear! But I'm at a point where reading Virginia Woolf feels like being in love and you’re like wow you have the most beautiful toe I’ve ever seen on a human being even though everyone else says it’s kinda gross and not as good as your other toes.
I don’t have anything else to add other than that this book is full of beauty, heart and melancholy, and people saying it’s not as good as her other stuff don’t know what they’re talking about and they’re probably just jealous aspiring writers anyway. Though right now I’m a little delusional and I wouldn’t completely trust me.
July 23, 2020
The story of a middle glass family between 1870-1930s. The Pargiter family and their Victorian upbringing which they are unable to escape and their lives including everything.
The Years tells a story of three generations of the Pargiter family. The story documents their intimacies, anxieties and triumphs. This is done against the background of London’s streets during the first decades of the twentieth century.
The story also is set during the Great War, the feminism struggle and the beginning of the end of the British Empire. The themes of change and continuity are evident as with many of her novels.
The hypocritical father Colonel Abel Pargiter with his dying wife and greedy mistress sets the scene. His patriarchal view of the world instilled into his children. The episodic journey through the years and his daughters and their offspring lives is told. In particular, it explores the constraints placed on women.
The social class system and repression is evident with Eleanor the daughter stuck looking after the elderly father. Rose the rebellious daughter and suffragette follows her own path. The sons follow into a life long rut which sees them unable to escape or for that matter want to escape the social system. An interesting book and a good read especially Woolf's characterisations and description of London's changes over the years.
The Years tells a story of three generations of the Pargiter family. The story documents their intimacies, anxieties and triumphs. This is done against the background of London’s streets during the first decades of the twentieth century.
The story also is set during the Great War, the feminism struggle and the beginning of the end of the British Empire. The themes of change and continuity are evident as with many of her novels.
The hypocritical father Colonel Abel Pargiter with his dying wife and greedy mistress sets the scene. His patriarchal view of the world instilled into his children. The episodic journey through the years and his daughters and their offspring lives is told. In particular, it explores the constraints placed on women.
The social class system and repression is evident with Eleanor the daughter stuck looking after the elderly father. Rose the rebellious daughter and suffragette follows her own path. The sons follow into a life long rut which sees them unable to escape or for that matter want to escape the social system. An interesting book and a good read especially Woolf's characterisations and description of London's changes over the years.
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