The Years

"The Years" is a mature novel but also a hybrid work straddling a family saga and a collection of robbed moments that would have vanished into the river of time. Capable of capturing the elusiveness of an atmosphere, of words left unsaid, of a particular landscape in any season, of the details that dress a room or the people that come in and go out of it scarcely leaving any trace, Woolf manages to give human quality to the passage of time, the real protagonist of this story. It's true that she uses the Pargiter, a bourgeois family in extinction at the beginning of the twentieth century, to flesh out something as ungraspable as the passage of time. We get to know the Pargiters in their childhood days and observe, in fragmentary manner, the evolution of their personalities as they grow up and become active actors in their lives. Oddly enough, the cumulative changes they suffer only strengthen their innate characters, boosting their childhood traits.