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.

“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?
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Officially my third favorite Woolf novel after The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway.