Frankly The Years isn't a very good novel, but it's an interesting one worth reading for several reasons.

First and foremost--especially since I'm in the process of reading the entirety of Woolf's narrative output in chronological order--this novel is useful in explaining why the five novels from Jacob's Room to The Waves are so remarkable and just terrifically successful literary experiments. Although The Years is neither good nor an experiment, I don't mean to say simply that Woolf is good when she experiments and bad when she writes a more traditional narrative. (see my reviews of Woolf's first two novels, which I thought were fine works of narrative, if not in the same league with the heartbreaking works of genius that followed them.)

Rather what the aimless and fragmentary pastiche of scenes from out of the lives of two generations of Pargiters forced me to realize, when trying to find a connecting theme in The Years, is that Woolf never ties her novels together through theme. Her theme is always the very broadest possible subject for a novel--simple human experience. What makes her great novels so great, I think, is that they find new forms that tell us new and unique things about human experience. Without a form framing experience into something meaningful, a novel like The Years can only feel like a very long and rather aimless series of moments lifted from lives without much rhyme or reason. Not that some of them aren't interesting, but 400+ pages is a pretty long time to stick with disconnected fragments. One begins to yearn for some kind of coherent totality to announce itself.

I also have to add that Woolf's prose style here often sounded cutsey and just plain bad. Usually I find her style exciting, original, and very beautiful. Somehow I doubt that she had changed her style that much between what I think is her greatest novel (The Waves) and this, her worst (imho). It's more likely that the framing of the style through the more traditional form makes her usual flourishes of rhetorical style feel out of place and forced. (This might be the force of Hemingway's legacy and the general consensus that simple and straightforward is the measure of the modern novel. While I don't necessarily agree with that proposition, most of the literary intelligentsia of the last hundred years does, so I'm likely to have had some of it rub off on me.)

The bottom line is that you have to read a stinker once in a while in order to appreciate what's great about great novels. And The Years is a better than average stinker because its failure gives us some insight into how Virginia Woolf was able to write four of the greatest novels of all time. (Yeah, I think Orlando is kind of a failed experiment, sorry.)

I loved the last third of this book but the beginning took me so long to read. I kept getting the characters confused but overall still a good one

Voor mij onmogelijk om een aantal sterren aan dit boek te geven. Toch wat moeilijk lezen waardoor ikzelf niet helemaal in een leesflow kwam. Prachtig geschreven, maar ook wat opluchting toen ik het uit had.

I mean, it was beautiful and I still hold strong on my belief that Woolf is a genius. But, I also hold strong on my belief that she really just isn't for me.

2.5 rounded down

felt like the easiest read ever after reading the waves lol - a book with plot! but yeah, felt very victorian esque almost. but women had jobs! people are silly. is life not filled w wonders?

I hate to say this to my girl Virginia Woolf, but the lifes of the siblings just bore me, except for Eleanor