“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