About Virginia Woolf, so I was all ears, and was rewarded with a great novel. ( )

I think this is faultless.
The highlighting of the depth of meaning in everyday things is so important.
Beautiful, sad and powerful ( )

It took my son's invitation to the Met Opera debut of a new work based on this book to get me to read it. In short order my wife and I read the book aloud, watched the acclaimed film, and went back to the source to read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, before attending a broadcast of the opera. Now all of those variants are rolling around in my head in a delicious brew.

Two decades after it won the Pulitzer, Michael Cunningham's outstanding work needs neither introduction nor summary. Suffice it to say that it is both simpler and more complex than Woolf's original. His prose is simpler, his sentences often shorter and clearer than Woolf's, his narrative helpfully divided into short chapters with the speakers clearly indicated. Woolf's century-old masterwork scrolls out as one long inner narrative, with no chapter breaks and sometimes barely marked switches from one character's consciousness to another's. Cunningham's complexity comes from beautifully overlaying and intertwining three separate stories from three periods and three locations, each focused on the inner life of a woman struggling against the strictures of her existence. Each heroine reflects, dreams, yearns, and tries to cope and carry on in her own way; each considers the possibility of relief and release brought by death.

Cunningham daisy-chains the three stories and the lives of the three protagonists, planting enough Easter eggs to delight any post-modern Taylor Swifty. But it is more than tour de force or homage to Woolf. Meditative and profoundly moving, the work can be read as proto-feminist musing, post-AIDS fable, and disheartening commentary on how little has changed in the last century. Cunningham shows through these three lives how we are all both known and unknown, utterly alone and surrounded by family and friends, free to act and totally constrained, experiencing moments of exquisite joy and paralyzing fear, and finding ways to face "the hours . . . one and then another . . . and then, my god, there's another" (197-8).

First edition as new

Well written. Read it after seeing the opera. Opera follows the book to a T. Wish i didn’t know the ending. Still shed a tear though. ( )