Eleanor Pargiter, The Years by Virginia Woolf (1937). x Rose De Witt Bukater, Titanic by James Cameron (1997).

Despite being Virginia Woolf's most popular book during her lifetime, a copy of The Years was surprisingly difficult to track down. But I got my hands on a copy, and rather impossibly, devoured it in the course of a day.

The novel tracks the lives of the Pargiter family from 1880 to the 1930s. I'm familiar by now with the ways that Woolf's prose twists and tumbles, and so compared to The Waves, for example, this was a relatively easier read (if you have trouble, try to make a family tree early on, as it will help you keep the relationships straight). I fell in love with Eleanor, the serious-minded woman forced to take charge of the household too young; I also had a bright spot in my heart for Kitty. It is a novel full of Woolf's usual queer subtext, but also has an openly gay character.

It was a large and epic story rooted in small details and moments: it reflects the strange ways that time slips by us, in nostalgia and memory, and Woolf portrays their lives in the small moments, only alluding to the life-changing scenes (a heartbreak, a death). As in life, deep meanings and serious thoughts are often interrupted.

Woolf drags at the old values of suppression and restraint in this novel: those who follow those rules of decorum feel pressed and anxious, but some break free into a happiness that younger generations can't quite figure out. As always, her imagery and descriptions of nature and the sky, and the ways she twists those into deeper stories, are breathtaking. One more Woolf novel down.

I'm at our family friends' 25th wedding anniversary party and everything about it keeps strongly reminding me of a Virginia Woolf novel, specifically the final scene of The Years. I'm whatever North's sister was called (I read it a couple months ago why can't I remember) and the celebrating husband's 79 year old mother is Eleanor Pargiter