THE YEARS.
by VIRGINIA WOOLF
- Used
- Very Good
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- Very Good/Very Good
- Seller
-
London, London, United Kingdom
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Synopsis
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
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Details
- Bookseller
- Camden Lock Books, ABA, IOBA. (GB)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 5213
- Title
- THE YEARS.
- Author
- VIRGINIA WOOLF
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Very Good
- Jacket Condition
- Very Good
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Edition
- 1st Edition
- Publisher
- The Hogarth Press, Tavistock Square, London.
- Date Published
- 1937
Terms of Sale
Camden Lock Books, ABA, IOBA.
About the Seller
Camden Lock Books, ABA, IOBA.
About Camden Lock Books, ABA, IOBA.
My book expertise came with four years as Chairman of London P.B.F.A. , many more years of exhibiting at monthly London Rare Book Fairs & owning my own bookshops continuously since 1984.
Every book here was valued by the person who first bought it and will be just as prized by the person who buys it now from my shopping website.
I am an accredited professional & a full member of the ABA, ILAB and the IOBA, "Setting the standard. The books you want...from booksellers you can trust".
You can meet me on my stand at Firsts 2024, London's Rare Book Fair, at the Saatchi Gallery, London SW3 4RY, 16-19 May 2024.
I also am joint owner of Burley Fisher Books , an independent bookshop offering new and secondhand books.
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- The outer portion of a book which covers the actual binding. The spine usually faces outward when a book is placed on a shelf....
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- Cloth
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