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The Years

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The Years

By: Virginia Woolf
Narrated by: Finty Williams
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About this listen

Written in 1937, The Years was the most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime. It explores a rich variety of themes such as sex, feminism, family life, education, and politics in English society from 1800 to the 1930s, as they affect one large upper-class London family.

The principal theme of this ambitious book is time, threading together three generations of the Pargiter family. The story begins on a day in 1880 in the household of Colonel Abel Pargiter, his dying wife, and their seven children, and it ends in the 1930s with a brilliantly depicted party at which the Pargiters, young and old, pass in review.

Important events - births, deaths, marriages, wars - occur in the wings; it is the commonplace moments that are captured here in a sequence of perfectly drawn scenes. As the Pargiters move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, capitalism, empire, and the rise of Fascism.

Finalist for the 2007 Audie Award for Classics.

©2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)1965 Leonard Woolf Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Marriage War

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Most relevant  
While I have finished listening to the main text, I have yet to read Woolf’s essays on the Pargiter essays, written at roughly the same time (1937). I find The Yeats a remarkably complex and compelling novel and look forward to reading it again. I recommend it to anyone in search of another novel by Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf, The Years.

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Virginia Woolf and her unique observations, does require a more ‘poetic’ voice, perhaps?
This voice too thin, lost some of the delicious timing, and humour, after all it is for listening,
Nice to have another VW though, more please, Juliet Stevenson ? Alex Jennings?

Perhaps a different reader?

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lovely as usual. such insight into people's thoughts. it doesn't age and gives us a window onto that time.

timeless insight

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Woolf’s prose is hypnotic, it draws me in and engages me in everything of hers I’ve read, and this is no exception. She makes the everyday remarkable and has an amazing ability to use little details to delineate character. Here, she focuses on one extended family as they develop between the 1880s and the 1930s - their characters and relationships altering subtly over that time.
Finty Williams does a great job with her performance of this, distinguishing characters’ voices elegantly and finding just the right tones for Woolf’s writing.

Engaging performance of engaging novel

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Virginia Woolf is one author I found difficult to read, but marvellous to listen to.

However, this complex multi-generational story was impaired not aided by the choice of narrator.

She has a high-pitched voice and is poor at accents, so that all the characters merged into each other.

I'm sure I would have a better appreciation of this interesting story if someone with more range and gravity had been chosen.

Unsuitable Narrator

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It is a shame Woolf's magnificent writing should be butchered by appalling narrating. The reading is too fast, as if she is reading a shopping list. Her voice is too harsh. There is no emotion, no understanding of the text or rhythm. I wish Juliet Stevenson would have narrated this one as she so brilliantly did another Woolf's book.

An unfortunate choice of narrator

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Excellent performance and captures the different moods and characters very well. Four more words required

The Years

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Hours and hours I have re listened to each chapter. I just can’t get to grips with this, my first Virginia Woolf. Probably my last. I have no clue what’s going on and now yearn to read an Elizabeth Gaskell. Probably too ‘modern’ and high brow for me! First book I’ve left in chapter 11.

Tried and tried but failed

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Imagine taking the Forsyte saga, randomly ripping out pages and then settle down to listen to the resultant audiobook. The book is multigenerational and spans some 55 years from the 1880s. She writes in extraordinary detail about a conversation or a party etc. and then without apparent reason leaps forwards many years to repeat the same exercise.
The prose is ok but a bit clunky at times. (Eg she repeated a description of ‘veins standing out’ on someone’s forehead 3 times in as many paragraphs. )
I found it deeply unsatisfying and forced my way to the end.
Some reviewers found Finty Williams narration poor. I didn’t. I thought she did a good job although I do agree she could have varied the timbre of her voice to denote different characters.

Deeply unsatisfying

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