I can't recall much, after all those years since I read it. ( )

Forgot to write little review when I read this a while back. Out of all the Woolf novels, I think this one might be the worst. It's not a bad novel, but this didn't read like Woolf. In her diary she said she didn't like this book either because she wrote this when she was sick. She says it's never a good thing when writers write when they are sick. It shows too. ( )

My first time reading this Woolf, and I can see why it would have been a shock when it first came out. on the other hand, it's just as experimental as her previous handful of novels, but the experiment is different. And it's quite enjoyable, though I confess it was a bit too long. The last quarter was comparatively tedious. ( )

Reviewed in conjunction with Margery Sharp's Lise Lillywhite

One of the things I do in Geneva is hang out at the local flea market trying to suppress my urge to preserve dead lives. Every week you'll see people disrespectfully pawing over the beloved libraries of the deceased, libraries which with possibly indecent haste, have been taken away by market vendors who, I can imagine, don't pay a cent for them. It is merely enough that they are willing to cart them off. There in the market they sit in boxes, 2CHF a book. Amongst them will often be intimate belongings such as photo albums, travel diaries or autograph books. Every time I see this, I want to save the memory even if nobody else does. Could I not keep just a skeleton of the library's existence?

As it is, my own library is, as much as anything else, a cemetery of book bones, nothing as whole as a skeleton no doubt, but each death provides my shelves with something more. There are many reasons for loving a book. Some of mine I love simply because they belonged to people who cared about them and I have inherited them if only by chance. Not least, the library remnants of the Hautevilles' library.

When the sale of the chateau and its contents was first mooted, the best of the books went to a posh auction house. The refuse of that process ended up at the local flea market. Each time I see one of these discarded deceased estates, lying higgledy-piggledy in boxes, I don't just look at the books one by one, deciding which small treasure to take home. I also read the story of the library itself. Ah, so and so was a jazz and cinema lover, as I see a record collection, the reference books lovingly collected on its side, now the junk man's province. This Swiss person made trips to Australia in the 1950s, here are the photo albums, the travel books of the period. Oh, and he was into....

So it goes on. Most of these deceased book lovers leave only a small tale. The Hautevilles, however, were a prominent family for many generations and their story is told via important legal battles, their castle and through the auction of the contents of that castle. They loved theatre and put on productions, so the auction included the costumery collected over the years. At the 'junk' end, ordinary books not worth anything, was a lovely collection of children's and adult's fiction from the pre and post WWII period. It contained many gems of the period including an author, almost forgotten these days, Margery Sharp. She is perhaps due for the requisite revival, not least because it would not be entirely unreasonable to call her the Jane Austen of her day. I hesitate to do that, but as it may get somebody to read her, and as almost nobody on GR - none of my friends - have read this, I will take the chance.

reset here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2017/10/20/3256/ ( )

The Years by Virginia Woolf is the story of the Pargiter family. The story starts in 1880 and the family is headed by Colonel Abel Pargiter. The colonel has seven children (Eleanor, Edward, Milly, Delia, Morris, Rose, Martin) and a sickly wife. In Woolf's style, some details are left out and considered not important such as the name of the Colonel's wife. Her death which is written in more detail than To the Lighthouse's Prue Ramsay's death, which was passed along to the reader in parenthetical information, but little is known or said about her. It is the reaction of other characters that are important in the death of the wife and mother as well as character reactions to the world around them. Reaction is more important than action.

Woolf's method of putting the reader in the head of the characters to listen to their thinking and to see their observations is perfected. The book is so much than about the plot and plot development, which covers over fifty years, but the characters and their personal interactions. The story extends to the extended Pargiter family and a few outsiders like Edward's friends at Oxford, one who marries his sister Milly. The housemaid, Crosby, gets her own chapter, 1918, but it is also the shortest chapter and is used to mark the end of the war. Inside the mix of acquaintances is Nicholas Pomjalovsky a Polish homosexual who Elenor meets through her sister Maggie and her French husband Rene.

Elenor seems to be the character that binds everything together. She is never far from the reader from start to finish. She runs the day to day of the family while the colonel is still alive, budgeting and shopping. Later she seems to be the thread that ties everyone together from siblings to nieces and nephews. She never marries and remains as an anchor point to the family. Outside the extended family little seems to happen. Historical events like the death of Charles Parnell, King Edward, and the end of World War I are used to mark a point in time rather than center around the event. With the exception of bricking throwing Rose, who lands herself in jail, not much is made of politics.

Perhaps the best reason to read Woolf is her use of words and descriptions. This is the opening paragraph for the chapter 1911 :

The sun was rising. Very slowly it came up over the horizon shaking out
light. But the sky was so vast, so cloudless, that to fill it with light took time.
Very gradually the clouds turned blue; leaves on forest trees sparkled; down
below a flower shone; eyes of beasts — tigers, monkeys, birds — sparkled.
Slowly the world emerged from darkness. The sea became like the skin of an
innumerable scaled fish, glittering gold. Here in the South of France the
furrowed vineyards caught the light; the little vines turned purple and yellow;
and the sun coming through the slats of the blinds striped the white walls.

Woolf writes not a novel or a story but literature. There is more to writing than plot alone and Woolf demonstrates this flawlessly. ( )