The Years describes three generations of a London family, the Pargiters, as they navigate the mid-1800’s to 1930. The focus here is on commonplace, even trivial, events, while all about them the details of 80-odd years of English history unfold. Wars, death, marriages, loss, empire, social changes are all around the edges, but mostly what we see are intimate moments of personal relationships, disappointments, desire, and imperfect humanity.

The dailiness and particularity of Woolf’s prose always appeals to me, but especially in autumn and winter, when I seem to require extra kinship for my melancholy heart. Her tales are all close observance, very little action. This one in particular feels as though, on a walk through your neighborhood at night, you are peering in the windows of a few different houses, watching the inhabitants in the midst of the small dramas of their lives, and then you return a few years later, and then also again. In other words, it’s the kind of story which I suspect primarily appeals to the adult who was once a child constantly in trouble for staring at strangers on buses and listening to the private conversations of couples seated next to their family at restaurants. I’m still that child, endlessly fascinated by humans and their complex inner worlds, wondering what they will do or say next and why.

Abandoned. Too many characters, not enough plot.

I think it's so cool that the first half of the book manages to cover like 50 years worth of time and the other half describes one single evening, hopping between the perspectives of the various characters which the reader has gotten to know in the first half. One thing I found slightly irritating, although I think it was definitely done on purpose, was the fact that throughout the entire book, there was never direct communication of the characters' inner thoughts to each other. But not just their inner thoughts, even their surface-level silly thoughts were never communicated, and the sentences which they said to one another were always half finished, disrupted or non-sensical. So while one was within the perspective of one character, one knew, from being acquainted with another character's perspective earlier, what the other character may be thinking, but the characters themselves never reached any level of understanding. The book actually felt really lonely, despite it being full of social interactions, because they were all absolutely absurdly irrelevant to what all of the characters were truly thinking and feeling. Whether there is some message about society Virginia Woolf wanted to convey by doing this, I don't know, but sometimes it made me want to throw this book on the ground and just shake the character's by the shoulders to wake up and get a grip.

Gah, a slog all the way through... it never picked up for me for long. I liked the idea of it a lit more than the practice. I never cared for the characters, I guess.

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.

May 2nd 2015

Since [b:The Years|18852|The Years|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486619020l/18852._SY75_.jpg|2970368] 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

[b:The Years|18852|The Years|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486619020l/18852._SY75_.jpg|2970368] 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 [b:A Writer's Diary|14948|A Writer's Diary|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388907338l/14948._SY75_.jpg|568491] a few days ago, and started it in the middle—1932—the year Woolf began her ninth novel, [b:The Years|18852|The Years|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486619020l/18852._SY75_.jpg|2970368].

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 [b:The Years|18852|The Years|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486619020l/18852._SY75_.jpg|2970368] and [b:Three Guineas|18854|Three Guineas|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442463839l/18854._SY75_.jpg|3165312], the Essay-novel she spoke of at the end. As we can see, she had great plans for [b:The Years|18852|The Years|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486619020l/18852._SY75_.jpg|2970368] 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).

Spoiler

[b:To the Lighthouse|59716|To the Lighthouse|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1346239665l/59716._SY75_.jpg|1323448] was the first of Woolf's novels I read and I remember feeling that there was more beauty than realism in the text. In [b:The Years|18852|The Years|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486619020l/18852._SY75_.jpg|2970368], 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 [b:The Years|18852|The Years|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486619020l/18852._SY75_.jpg|2970368], a project that should have been the high point of her entire novel writing career.

…………………………………………………………………….

For Proust enthusiasts (may contain spoilers):

Spoiler

[b:The Years|18852|The Years|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486619020l/18852._SY75_.jpg|2970368] covers a similar period to Proust’s [b:À la recherche du temps perdu|2185617|À la recherche du temps perdu, Tome III|Marcel Proust|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328384003l/2185617._SY75_.jpg|71835166]. His work explored a fity year period, from the 1870s—the early Swann/Odette sections—up until the 1920s.
In both works, the action, if it can be called action, revolves around privileged people often seen in drawing room settings. There is a character in [b:The Years|18852|The Years|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486619020l/18852._SY75_.jpg|2970368], Lady Lasswade, who bears a remarkable resemblance to the Comtesse de Guermantes—we even see her in her opera box at one point. Another character is described making a phonecall for the first time, later seeing an aeroplane rising above rooftops, also a first. There is an uneasy relationship with a faithful family servant who is retired off when the family have no need of her. Taboo subjects such as anti-semitism and homosexuality are skirted around rather than addressed directly.
The biggest resemblance however is the ending. Proust closes his Recherche with an evening party at which many of the principle characters are seen and where their destinies are finally revealed—with many surprises, and the effects of age and time passing are examined. [b:The Years|18852|The Years|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486619020l/18852._SY75_.jpg|2970368] also ends with an evening party at which all the principle characters gather. We find out what they have all become—there are also some surprises—and Woolf writes some fine paragraphs on ageing.

I also noted a comparison between how these two writers gathered their material. Proust was well known for picking up inspiration for his Recherche at his friends' soirées. Woolf did the same thing. Around the time she realised that she shouldn’t add any more scenes to [b:The Years|18852|The Years|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486619020l/18852._SY75_.jpg|2970368] but should be preparing it for printing, she wrote in her diary:
If I go to Edith Sitwell’s cocktail this evening I shall only pick up some exacerbating picture: I shall froth myself into sparkles; and there’ll be the whole smoothing and freshening to begin again.
She spent so much time smoothing and freshening the manuscript that she grew entirely sick of it. Near the end she wrote: I wonder if anyone has ever suffered so much from a book as I have from The Years.
Actually, I think Proust probably suffered more.

*
**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.