Dit is het eerste boek ooit dat ik gewoon niet uitlees, mss is het eind goed maar ik heb tot 50% gelezen en ben meermaals opnieuw begonnen om toch te proberen maar ik vond het gewoon echt saai en vond echt geen rode draad en neen sorry Woolf

Probably my personal fave in Virginia Woolf's canon. She spans entire lifetimes here, generating extreme pathos through beautiful language and arch comedic scenes. A great, detailed dissection of one man's family during the transfer from the Victorian to Edwardian periods.

It’s interesting that this later book of Woolf’s was her most popular during her lifetime (according to the Internet). I enjoyed it, but it didn’t have the poetry of Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse, which are my favorites. Still, the way that the stories intersected as the years passed was engaging.

The two Woolfs -- the large canvas tectonic Woolf of Orlando and the minute almost tactile in-the-moment Woolf of Mrs Dalloway are brought together here.

Not unlike The Waves, sessions of historical narrative are bookended -- entr'acte'd if you will -- by waves of natural description to indicate the passage of time, or at least clean the palate.

I found the action of the plot too brief, and the natural pageant way too massive.

Reminds me of another known Woolf entirely:

In The Voyage Out she has whole sections - chapters - in imitation of Dickens. She indicates as much. I found the family saga more Dickenslike, the Woolf of the three-volume-novel (Like The Voyage Out) which as a model plays to neither of her strengths.

My feeling - no accounting for taste. I will come back to this and decide maybe I've missed something.

But I'm quibbling. It's good and you should read it and prove me wrong.

Virginia Woolf's last novel published during her lifetime was also her most popular with contemporary readers, even though it doesn't shine as brightly as her more Modernist novels with readers today. The book tells the story of the Pargiters, an upper-middle-class London family, from 1880 to "the present day" (aka 1937). Each chapter takes on a year in the life of three sets of cousins, their parents, and their children and the narrative weaves in and out of different character's perspectives along with vivid descriptions of their London environment and (quite poetically) the weather.

The relatively straightforward narrative hearkens back to Woolf's early novels like The Voyage Out and Night and Day, but there is a lot more going on here than in her early works. Layers of family relationships, class and gender roles, historical events, and technological changes combine into a trajectory where both the reader and the characters become unmoored -- desperate to connect with each other, but unable to break through. That may sound a little grim, and in places it really is, but the depth of characterization and Woolf's wonderful ability to write about families and friends as they age, as well as her obvious modeling of some characters on her own friends and family, gives the novel a human center that keeps it from losing all its optimism.

This book was originally conceived as an experimental novel-essay where fictional chapters would alternate with non-fiction essays discussing societal structures that lead to the oppression of women (illustrated by the fictional narrative). She ended up abandoning this project and moving the fiction portion into the 1880 section of The Years and the essays into her next book, Three Guineas. An edition of her original novel-essay draft was published as The Pargiters and you better believe I'll be reading that next!

Of the three novels I've read by Virginia Woolf ("The Years," "Jacob's Room" and "The Waves") this is the one I liked best. Perhaps because it has a more traditional narrative structure than the other two or because the overall theme was more obvious, I didn't feel as though I was missing some great point as I did with the other two.

"The Years" is very much about the passage of time, shown through some vignettes looking into the experiences of the Pargiter family (and their near relations.) The novel stretches from the 1880's to the 1930's, as the family ages, looks back and tries to make sense of their lives.

The characters are really interesting and the relationships between them often complex (and often only hinted at) which makes this book a fun and entertaining read.

èpic com plasma el pas dels temps