The years
A stirring, straightforward work written near the end of her luminous career, Virginia Woolf's *The Years* is a portrait of the Pargiters, a staid London family presided over by Colonel Abel Pargiter.  In some ways, "portrait" is not an entirely appropriate word, because Woolf's subject in this novel (and an abiding concern in  all of her works) is fluidity and flux: the movement of the seasons and years, the experience of maturing and growing old, and the pain of change, passing, and loss.  Although it spans a fifty year period, it is not an epic novel in the sense that Mann's [*Buddenbrooks*][1] or Tolstoy's [*War and Peace*][2] are epic.  The fifty years under consideration in *The Years* are not continuously narrated; instead, the novel deals with only certain years-1880, 1891, 1908, 1911, 1914, 1917 and "The Present Day" - punctuated with large gaps of time in between.  At each new juncture, the reader is left to surmise what has happened in the intervening time with little assistance from a controlling narrative presence. 

Although *The Years* is written in the third person, the novel's narrative voice roves among the point of view of different characters fluidly, and recounts the events of the past through memory and dialogue rather than through a third-person summation.  Leaping over years and even decades - as the novel does - infuses it with a sense of time's rapid, relentless movement, as the reader watches characters age significantly with the turn of a few pages. The subject matter of *The Years* is also decidedly not epic, but it is what gives the novel its remarkable power.  Although it does discuss what might be termed monumental events in the lives of its characters, such as the death of Mrs. Pargiter in the first chapter, the novel leaves out many events that might seem particularly noteworthy, such as the birth of a child, a courtship, or a wedding.  These traditional milestones are often consigned to the blank, unnarrated stretches of time that pass between the chapters.   Woolf instead focuses our attention on smaller, less self-evidently significant moments of experience:  a girl writing a letter to her brother, a college student sipping a glass of port and studying ancient Greek, the goodnights exchanged after a dinner party.  These tiny moments exist in a tension against the sweep of seasons, years, and lives passing in the background, and this ever-present tension is what makes the novel ultimately so disquieting and so moving.  Not only does the book's structure keep us constantly aware of the time's march, but also many of the smaller details - the sound of cars moving in the streets, the sight of a hearth fire dying, a gust of wind and rain - subtly keep an atmosphere of change, flow, and passing defining the experience of the characters.  The things that lend a sense of fixity to life, such as rank, employment, or marriage, or those things that pass for it, such as a painting, a text, or a sentimentalized object, are touchstones for Woolf as well.  The discord between the desire for stasis and the inevitability of change in many ways defines the novel, and is everywhere evidenced in the very environment in which the characters live and breathe.


  [1]: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL14867081W/Buddenbrooks
  [2]: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL267129W/Vo%C4%ADna_i_mir
Fiction, Social life and customs, Families, Family, Translations
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf  was an English novelist, essayist, diarist, epistler, publisher, feminist, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary  figures of the twentieth century. ([Source][1].)

[Comment from Ursula Le Guin on The Guardian][2]:

> You can't write science fiction well if you haven't read it, though not all who try to write it know this. But nor can you write it well if you haven't read anything else. Genre is a rich dialect, in which you can say certain things in a particularly satisfying way, but if it gives up connection with the general literary language it becomes a jargon, meaningful only to an ingroup. Useful models may be found quite outside the genre. I learned a lot from reading the ever-subversive Virginia Woolf.

> I was 17 when I read [Orlando][3]. It was half-revelation, half-confusion to me at that age, but one thing was clear: that she imagined a society vastly different from our own, an exotic world, and brought it dramatically alive. I'm thinking of the Elizabethan scenes, the winter when the Thames froze over. Reading, I was there, saw the bonfires blazing in the ice, felt the marvellous strangeness of that moment 500 years ago – the authentic thrill of being taken absolutely elsewhere.

> How did she do it? By precise, specific descriptive details, not heaped up and not explained: a vivid, telling imagery, highly selected, encouraging the reader's imagination to fill out the picture and see it luminous, complete.

> In [Flush][4], Woolf gets inside a dog's mind, that is, a non-human brain, an alien mentality – very science-fictional if you look at it that way. Again what I learned was the power of accurate, vivid, highly selected detail. I imagine Woolf looking down at the dog asleep beside the ratty armchair she wrote in and thinking what are your dreams? and listening . . . sniffing the wind . . . after the rabbit, out on the hills, in the dog's timeless world.

> Useful stuff, for those who like to see through eyes other than our own.


  [1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf
  [2]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice
  [3]: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL39360W/Orlando
  [4]: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL39320W/Flush