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The Hours by Michael Cunningham
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The Hours

by Michael Cunningham

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Showing 1-5 of 85 (next | show all)
Sometimes I wish books came with reading prerequisites listed on the cover. There are very few novels with which one can assume the average person will be familiar. In The Hours, I suspect it would have been rather helpful to have first read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Or be, you know, at all familiar with Woolf in the first place. Not that a quick skim of the Wikipedia plot summary wasn't enough for me to understand the story, but I think I would have gotten a lot more out of it were I able to pick up on the subtle references to Woolf's characters. All in all, I wasn't too impressed with this one. It wasn't bad; it just didn't really pull me in at all. I didn't care much about the characters, the depressing bits felt meaningless, and the introspection was nothing I hadn't heard before. I suspect I might enjoy a Cunningham novel not based on another book. I'm just not sure I'll ever get around to picking one up. ( )
  melydia | Oct 28, 2009 |
A very introspective novel that wasn't quite what I was in the mood for. Lots of detail and slow moving. The three women's lives were contrasting and didn't necessarily link easily together. Dramatic ending took me by surprise. ( )
  Tifi | Oct 14, 2009 |
'The Hours'--Brilliant. Michael Cunningham weaves a novel about three women whose lives span the 20th century. Their lives are oven into each others through the book 'Mrs. Dalloway'. Cunningham not only portrays his characters images, but he involves the reader in their thinking and emotions in such a way that one is drawn into their lives. This is serious literary art of the highest quality. The choice of words to depict scenes, emotions, memories and hours divulges an effort of labor and excellence that comes along rarely. The use of metaphore is exquisite. "The woman's head quickly withdraws, the door to the railer closes again, but she leaves behind her an unmistakable sense of watchful remonstrance, as if an angel had briefly touched the surface of the world with one sandaled foot, asked if there was any trouble and, being told all was well, had resumed her place in the ether with skeptical gravity, having reminded the children of earth that they are just barely trusted to manage their own business, and that further carelessness will not go unremarked." ( )
  george1295 | Oct 8, 2009 |
This is the ultimate homage one writer can give to another. It is the story of three women united across time and space by one powerful novel: Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. The characters, who are all profoundly touched in some way by the novel, are rendered in such exquisite, loving detail that the reader’s life in turn becomes entwined with theirs.

Woolf herself is one of the main characters, just beginning to write Mrs. D while dealing with the repercussions of what today would probably be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Mrs. Brown is reading the novel in post-World War II Los Angeles, a where where she feels completely out of place, unfulfilled and trapped. And in the present day, “Mrs. Dalloway”—as she is nicknamed by her oldest friend—bustles through the day preparing for a party she is giving in her dying friend’s honor (another author).

Following the same structure as Mrs. D, the novel spans only one pivotal day in the life of each woman, a day that seems like a microcosm of their entire lives. And as their stories unfold, we gradually learn that all three women are more closely linked than it seemed at first—indeed, their lives are inextricable entwined with one another’s. ( )
  sturlington | Jun 21, 2009 |
Well... meant as a parody of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, I cannot say I was strongly impressed: newer people, newer problems - populating the same old story. An actualization of the tale - using end-of-the-century people, with different problems and thoughts; well realized though - a great script for a bestselling movie.
All the couples used are gay in this book - as opposed to the original one; that changes a lot on the main character, to me. In terms of a parody - unquestionably a good one.
Kinda strange - to imagine one of Virginia Woolf's stories, with people wearing blue-jeans ! ( )
  Myhi | Jun 12, 2009 |
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Epigraph
We'll hunt for a third tiger now, but like the others this one too will be a form of what I dream, a structure of words, and not the flesh and bone tiger that beyond all myths paces the earth. I know these things quite well, yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me in the vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest, and I go on pursuing through the hours another tiger, the beast not found in verse.
- J.L. Borges, The Other Tiger, 1960
I have no time to describe my plans. I should say a good deal about The Hours, and my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment.
- Virginia Wolf, in her diary, August 30, 1923
Dedication
This book is for Ken Corbett
First words
She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather.
Quotations
"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep–it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
Heaven only knows why we love it so."
What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.
It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book...What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.
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Wikipedia in English (1)

The Hours (novel)

Book description
The book concerns three generations of women affected by a Virginia Woolf novel. The first is Woolf herself writing Mrs. Dalloway in 1923 and struggling with her own mental illness. The second is Mrs. Brown, wife of a World War II veteran, who is reading Mrs. Dalloway in 1949 as she plans her husband's birthday party. The third is Clarissa Vaughan, a lesbian, who plans a party in 1998 to celebrate a major literary award received by her good friend and former lover, the poet Richard, who is dying of AIDS. The situations of all three characters mirror situations experienced by Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway in 'Mrs. Dalloway', with Clarissa Vaughn being a very literal modern-day version of Woolf's character.

Amazon.com (ISBN 0312305060, Paperback)

The Hours is both an homage to Virginia Woolf and very much its own creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back to life, he intertwines her story with those of two more contemporary women. One gray suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a dream that will soon lead to Mrs. Dalloway. In the present, on a beautiful June day in Greenwich Village, 52-year-old Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of AIDS. And in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown, pregnant and unsettled, does her best to prepare for her husband's birthday, but can't seem to stop reading Woolf. These women's lives are linked both by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility each keeps returning to. Clarissa is to eventually realize:
There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined.... Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
As Cunningham moves between the three women, his transitions are seamless. One early chapter ends with Woolf picking up her pen and composing her first sentence, "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." The next begins with Laura rejoicing over that line and the fictional universe she is about to enter. Clarissa's day, on the other hand, is a mirror of Mrs. Dalloway's--with, however, an appropriate degree of modern beveling as Cunningham updates and elaborates his source of inspiration. Clarissa knows that her desire to give her friend the perfect party may seem trivial to many. Yet it seems better to her than shutting down in the face of disaster and despair. Like its literary inspiration, The Hours is a hymn to consciousness and the beauties and losses it perceives. It is also a reminder that, as Cunningham again and again makes us realize, art belongs to far more than just "the world of objects." --Kerry Fried

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:03 -0400)

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