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Loading... The Hours (1998)by Michael Cunningham
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. It's difficult in 2022 to understand the impact this book had on publication. Reading about the new Kevin Puts opera at The Met based on The Hours, I realised that although I have seen the brilliant Stephen Daldry/David Hare film I have never read the book, despite being bowled over by Cunningham's next novel, Specimen Days, when it came out. Having also recently read Mrs Dalloway I thought this would be a treat. In reality I found it slight, ineffectual. Critics at the time praised Cunningham's prose style. I have to say I found it mannered and self-conscious. If you strip away the cleverness and are unable to experience the novelty that readers in 1998 must have felt I am not sure much is left. Maybe the opera and certainly the film will weather time better than the book?
Cunningham gives you every chance to hear his echoes of Woolf's style: the whimsical similes, the rueful parentheses, the luminous circumstantial detail. And the narrative method is a homage to Woolf's novel. Each section imitates Mrs Dalloway by being restricted to the events of a single day, and follows the stream of one consciousness, only to leave it, for a sentence or a paragraph, for another....Imitation is fitting because Woolf's original novel was trying to do justice to the sharpness of new experience, even as it detonates old memories, and this endeavour is always worth trying afresh. We don't have to read ''Mrs. Dalloway'' before we can read ''The Hours,'' and no amount of pedantic comparison-hunting will help us understand it if we don't understand it already. But the connections between the two books, after the initial, perhaps overelaborate laying out of repetitions and divergences, are so rich and subtle and offbeat that not to read ''Mrs. Dalloway'' after we've read ''The Hours'' seems like a horrible denial of a readily available pleasure -- as if we were to leave a concert just when the variations were getting interesting. Belongs to Publisher SeriesHas the adaptationWas inspired byInspiredHas as a student's study guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
A trio of stories around the writer, Virginia Woolf. In the first, set in 1923, Woolf is writing her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The second story is on a woman reading the novel in 1949 Los Angeles, while the third is on a woman in present-day New York who has been nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway by her boyfriend. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Characters: 9.0
Setting: 7.0
Prose: 9.0
Tags: Mental health, obligations, depression, suicide, influence ( )