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Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Oxford Paperbacks (1999), Edition: New, Paperback, 524 pages
Description
The principal theme of this ambitious book is Time, threading together three generations of an upper-class English family, the Pargiters. The characters come and go, meet, talk, think, dream, grow older, in a continuous ritual of life that eludes meaning.
User reviews
LibraryThing member William345
I will not call the early going a slog, but the novel did fail to engage me until page 140 or so. After that, all was well. The novel took off as a proper Virginia Woolf novel should. By the end of the long party scene which closes the book I was familiarly dazzled. I have to admit that I find the
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content almost unsummarizable. There's no plot to speak of. It's the technique that astonishes. Woolf's concern is not the quotidian, and often not the particular, but the structural. There are any number of exchanges between characters, sometimes arguments, in which the reader has no idea of the issues involved. Woolf deliberately takes the emphasis off the particular here and this somehow pulls the characterizations into the foreground more strongly. I'm not sure how she does it. It's impressive. She uses the technique throughout. As for the timeline, it seems almost capricious. Here are the years which form the chapter heads: 1880, 1891, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, 1918 and Present Day. As with a bildungsroman, Woolf's interest is in the developmental arc over time. The overwhelming feature of the novel is the sense of the result of experience. But unlike the bildungsroman there is no movement toward a set goal, life being thinly plotted. Neither is there a single central character but rather an ensemble effect. Much takes place offstage: births and deaths and weddings and childbirth. Woolf's concern is with the interstitial moments, when the effect of time, certainly Proustian time though without the flashbacks, has its collective impact. This novel is certainly a candidate for rereading, so enigmatic are its means of advancing the narrative. Highly recommended. Show Less
LibraryThing member TheBooknerd
Among Woolf's work that I've read, not my favorite. The language, however, is beautifully crafted.
LibraryThing member pieterpad
A glorious opening paragraph sets the tone for Woolf's descriptions in this long survey of London society 1887-1937, but the narrative flags in the middle years. The close, though, set in an all-night party in the miasma of the late 1930s, is absolutely brilliant, a return to the impressionist
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modernism of Jacob's Room with the added insight of a great novelist's insights. Show Less
LibraryThing member Chris_V
This was the first Virginia Woolf novel I ever read and I suspect it would rate a little higher with a re-read as I struggle to remember most of it. Her wonderful eye for London life is as vivid as ever.
LibraryThing member dczapka
The Waves is an astonishingly difficult book to describe, to explain, or to analyze. Its premise is exceptionally simple--six friends struggle, in their own ways, to cope with the unexpected death of Percival, fellow friend to them all--but the execution, which is really what this book is "about,"
From the opening pages, the novel feels completely different than anything you're likely to have ever seen. Rapid-fire dialogue from each of the six friends bounce around and play off each other, a few lines at a time, alluding to things that seem elusive to the new reader. Before long, the notion of dialogue reveals itself as the novel's conceit: rather than tell a story with exposition and plot, Woolf exclusively presents the interior monologues of the characters, who tell us about places and events in their own voices. It's a unique and interesting tactic, one that gives the book a dreamlike quality, more like a long poem than a novel proper.
But does it work? I'll confess that it's the kind of book that invites slow, patient reading, even when the division of chapters doesn't always allow it. If you're not paying too close attention, it can be easy for the voices to change and you to not catch it. Part of me thinks this is a subtle flaw: if it takes a few pages to suspect that a different character is speaking, then aren't the characters not drawn nearly as well as they should. Or am I not reading carefully enough? It's a tough call. Don't get me wrong: there are scads of beautiful language of The Waves, and it's possible to appreciate the book on strictly those terms. It's just that, as with most Woolf, it feels to me like there's more going on there--and frankly, I'm just not sure at this point what it is.
Despite having just finished it a few days ago, I still find it so hard to say anything more of substance about the book. It's just too unique to compare to anything else, and it's so radical and different that I'm not even sure on what terms to assess it. It's a challenge and an experience, for sure, and it's definitely not for everybody. Woolf fans will surely find it a revelation; most everyone else, I figure, will wonder if they've missed something. As for me, I'm still on the fence between those two, and I suspect it will take another, more careful reading before I can assess for certain which side I'm on.
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is what makes it transcend. I can't promise anything I saw here will shed any light on whether or not you should read it, but I'll try.From the opening pages, the novel feels completely different than anything you're likely to have ever seen. Rapid-fire dialogue from each of the six friends bounce around and play off each other, a few lines at a time, alluding to things that seem elusive to the new reader. Before long, the notion of dialogue reveals itself as the novel's conceit: rather than tell a story with exposition and plot, Woolf exclusively presents the interior monologues of the characters, who tell us about places and events in their own voices. It's a unique and interesting tactic, one that gives the book a dreamlike quality, more like a long poem than a novel proper.
But does it work? I'll confess that it's the kind of book that invites slow, patient reading, even when the division of chapters doesn't always allow it. If you're not paying too close attention, it can be easy for the voices to change and you to not catch it. Part of me thinks this is a subtle flaw: if it takes a few pages to suspect that a different character is speaking, then aren't the characters not drawn nearly as well as they should. Or am I not reading carefully enough? It's a tough call. Don't get me wrong: there are scads of beautiful language of The Waves, and it's possible to appreciate the book on strictly those terms. It's just that, as with most Woolf, it feels to me like there's more going on there--and frankly, I'm just not sure at this point what it is.
Despite having just finished it a few days ago, I still find it so hard to say anything more of substance about the book. It's just too unique to compare to anything else, and it's so radical and different that I'm not even sure on what terms to assess it. It's a challenge and an experience, for sure, and it's definitely not for everybody. Woolf fans will surely find it a revelation; most everyone else, I figure, will wonder if they've missed something. As for me, I'm still on the fence between those two, and I suspect it will take another, more careful reading before I can assess for certain which side I'm on.
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LibraryThing member bettyandboo
"Tell me about William Whatney," she said. "When I last saw him he was a slim young man in a boat."
Peggy burst out laughing.
"That must have been ages ago!" she said.
"Not so very long," said Eleanor. She felt rather nettled. "Well -" she reflected, "twenty years - twenty-five years perhaps."
It
We've all experienced this, haven't we? This somewhat unsettling realization when something that we perceive in our minds to have occurred "not so very long" ago really happened more like two decades (and then some) in the past.
Nice to see that Virginia Woolf understood that even in 1937 when she wrote this novel.
I mean, I fall into this mind trap ALL THE TIME. I still, on more occasions than I care to admit, think 1990 was ten years ago rather than (gulp) 22 years long gone. I chalk this up to approaching my mid-40s, but after reading Virginia Woolf's novel The Years, now I'd like to look at this differently.
"They talked as if they were speaking of people who were real, but not real in the way in which she felt herself to be real. It puzzled her; it made her feel that she was two different people at the same time; that she was living at two different times in the same moment." (pg. 167)
Yep. That's it exactly. We are two different people at the same time, living at two different times in the same moment. We're a combination of our present and our past. ("What is the use, she thought, of trying to tell people about one's past? What is one's past?" (pg. 167)
Virginia Woolf's second-to-last novel The Years is a commentary about the passage of time, which she brings forth for the reader by showing her characters - members of the large, well-to-do Pargiter family and their extended family - through 1880-1918. (The last chapter is titled "Present Day," which I suppose is 1939, when the novel was published.) The Pargiters live in London, and at the beginning of the book, are in that sort of odd stage when you're just watching and waiting for a loved one to pass away. (In this case, their mother.)
Not too much happens in The Years. People visit each other, talk about their life and their travels. They sometimes die. It's a reflective, thoughtful sort of novel, and truthfully, this takes a little while to get used to - especially if you, like me, are not generally a classics reader or one who doesn't normally read novels set in this time period. (Woolf's passion for the semicolon is also more than a bit distracting.) It isn't until almost halfway through the story that you begin to see the connections among the characters, the passing of time as evidenced by the changing seasons and the weather.
Honestly, up to that point, I kind of considered abandoning this, but then I started gaining an appreciation for what Woolf was trying to say. With the exception of Mrs. Dalloway, which I absolutely loved right off the bat (kudos to one of the most awesome college English professors ever), I'm finding that this is my typical reaction to Virginia Woolf. I start off a little perplexed, a little lost and confused, and then I get immersed in the story.
Just like life, no?
"My life, she said to herself. That was odd, it was the second time that evening that somebody had talked abut her life. And I haven't got one, she thought. Oughtn't a life to be something you could handle and produce? - a life of seventy odd years. But I've only the present moment, she thought. Here she was alive, now, listening to the fox-trot. Then she looked round. There was Morris; Rose; Edward with his head thrown back talking to a man she did not know. I'm the only person here, she thought, who remembers how he sat on the edge of my bed that night, crying - the night Kitty's engagement was announced. Yes, things came back to her. A long strip of life lay behind her. Edward crying. Mrs. Levy talking; snow falling; a sunflower with a crack in it; the yellow omnibus trotting along the Bayswater Road. And I thought to myself, I'm the youngest person in this omnibus; now I'm the oldest ... Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?" (pg. 366-367)
Peggy burst out laughing.
"That must have been ages ago!" she said.
"Not so very long," said Eleanor. She felt rather nettled. "Well -" she reflected, "twenty years - twenty-five years perhaps."
It
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seemed a very short time to her; but then, she thought, it was before Peggy was born. She could only be sixteen or seventeen." (pg. 205)We've all experienced this, haven't we? This somewhat unsettling realization when something that we perceive in our minds to have occurred "not so very long" ago really happened more like two decades (and then some) in the past.
Nice to see that Virginia Woolf understood that even in 1937 when she wrote this novel.
I mean, I fall into this mind trap ALL THE TIME. I still, on more occasions than I care to admit, think 1990 was ten years ago rather than (gulp) 22 years long gone. I chalk this up to approaching my mid-40s, but after reading Virginia Woolf's novel The Years, now I'd like to look at this differently.
"They talked as if they were speaking of people who were real, but not real in the way in which she felt herself to be real. It puzzled her; it made her feel that she was two different people at the same time; that she was living at two different times in the same moment." (pg. 167)
Yep. That's it exactly. We are two different people at the same time, living at two different times in the same moment. We're a combination of our present and our past. ("What is the use, she thought, of trying to tell people about one's past? What is one's past?" (pg. 167)
Virginia Woolf's second-to-last novel The Years is a commentary about the passage of time, which she brings forth for the reader by showing her characters - members of the large, well-to-do Pargiter family and their extended family - through 1880-1918. (The last chapter is titled "Present Day," which I suppose is 1939, when the novel was published.) The Pargiters live in London, and at the beginning of the book, are in that sort of odd stage when you're just watching and waiting for a loved one to pass away. (In this case, their mother.)
Not too much happens in The Years. People visit each other, talk about their life and their travels. They sometimes die. It's a reflective, thoughtful sort of novel, and truthfully, this takes a little while to get used to - especially if you, like me, are not generally a classics reader or one who doesn't normally read novels set in this time period. (Woolf's passion for the semicolon is also more than a bit distracting.) It isn't until almost halfway through the story that you begin to see the connections among the characters, the passing of time as evidenced by the changing seasons and the weather.
Honestly, up to that point, I kind of considered abandoning this, but then I started gaining an appreciation for what Woolf was trying to say. With the exception of Mrs. Dalloway, which I absolutely loved right off the bat (kudos to one of the most awesome college English professors ever), I'm finding that this is my typical reaction to Virginia Woolf. I start off a little perplexed, a little lost and confused, and then I get immersed in the story.
Just like life, no?
"My life, she said to herself. That was odd, it was the second time that evening that somebody had talked abut her life. And I haven't got one, she thought. Oughtn't a life to be something you could handle and produce? - a life of seventy odd years. But I've only the present moment, she thought. Here she was alive, now, listening to the fox-trot. Then she looked round. There was Morris; Rose; Edward with his head thrown back talking to a man she did not know. I'm the only person here, she thought, who remembers how he sat on the edge of my bed that night, crying - the night Kitty's engagement was announced. Yes, things came back to her. A long strip of life lay behind her. Edward crying. Mrs. Levy talking; snow falling; a sunflower with a crack in it; the yellow omnibus trotting along the Bayswater Road. And I thought to myself, I'm the youngest person in this omnibus; now I'm the oldest ... Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?" (pg. 366-367)
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LibraryThing member PatsyMurray
This is a book about identity and the passage of time, about being an individual and being a part of the universal.
LibraryThing member stillatim
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
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was comparatively tedious. Show Less
LibraryThing member japaul22
And with that I've completed all of Virginia Woolf's novels. My next Woolf project will be to read the massive [[Hermione Lee]] biography and reread all or most of the novels. I also want to delve into some of her essays and short stories. I've only read [A Room of One's Own] of those.
So what
The book is smart and sophisticated and has a couple of memorable characters, but I didn't find the connection that I have had with some of Woolf's novels and didn't find the message as dramatic as I hope for in her writing.
So what
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about [The Years]? Well, I recognized Woolf's impeccable writing style and her introspective character writing, but I didn't love this one. [The Years] follows two branches of the Pargiter family, beginning in 1880. The first part of the book is a series of vignettes from 1880-1918 where one or two characters are developed (almost as in a short story). Then the final section is in the "present day" (probably some point in the 1930s) where many of the family members come together at a party. The book is smart and sophisticated and has a couple of memorable characters, but I didn't find the connection that I have had with some of Woolf's novels and didn't find the message as dramatic as I hope for in her writing.
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LibraryThing member Ghost_Boy
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
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a good thing when writers write when they are sick. It shows too. Show Less
Awards
Audie Award (Finalist — Classics — 2007)
Language
Original publication date
1937
Physical description
524 p.; 7.5 inches
ISBN
0192836625 / 9780192836625