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Loading... The Hoursby Michael Cunningham
 cricketbats | Apr 18, 2013 |  Voor de film 5 sterren, het boek moet ik nog lezen  EMS_24 | Apr 17, 2013 | I enjoyed the book more than the movie and I liked the movie very much. However, I feel as though the author and I were at odds, that his key character was Richard, around whom the female characters existed to weave an explanation. At any rate, I admire writers who can give so much life and engagement to characters' inner worlds. (  ) veracite | Apr 7, 2013 | I enjoyed the book more than the movie and I liked the movie very much. However, I feel as though the author and I were at odds, that his key character was Richard, around whom the female characters existed to weave an explanation. At any rate, I admire writers who can give so much life and engagement to characters' inner worlds. ( ) veracite | Apr 5, 2013 | i had mixed expectations for this - it was so highly recommended and reviewed that i both thought i'd love it and not love it (in the vein of the fountainhead, assuming that if everyone loves it, it must be much worse than mediocre) and then it won the pulitzer, which doesn't bode well for my liking a book. but i loved it. it is so well written. it makes me really wish i'd enjoyed mrs. dalloway when i read it. which by the way, i think is essential to reading and fully appreciating this book. i'm sure it stands alone just fine, but to do it justice, you must have first read mrs. dalloway, and probably should remember more of it than i do. this is truly worthy of all of the praise it garnered. ( ) elisa.saphier | Apr 2, 2013 | no reviews | add a review Was inspired by
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (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 Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:00:19 -0500) In a novel of love, family inheritance, and desperation, the author offers a fictional account of Virginia Woolf's last days and her friendship with a poet living in his mother's shadow. |
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It may have influenced my 0.5 draft of "A Bargain for Salvation" a little too much; which makes me say it is a little too clever and in love with its own cleverness, but that is very much a critique in retrospect. (