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Loading... The Hours (1998)by Michael Cunningham
  
» 59 more Best Historical Fiction (131) Female Protagonist (54) 20th Century Literature (134) Favourite Books (509) A Novel Cure (85) 1990s (23) Books Read in 2015 (231) Historical Fiction (582) Books tagged favorites (303) My TBR (15) Spirit of Place (28) Contemporary Fiction (10) Protagonists - Women (12) Experimental Literature (130) Contemporary Fiction (11) Women's Stories (67) Unread books (889) No current Talk conversations about this book.  curious_squid | Apr 5, 2021 |  She will do all that’s required, and more. So many women, doing what other people need/want them to do. There’s Virginia Woolf in 1923, obliging to her husband’s request that she recover her mental health in the suburbs, when the only place she wants to be is London. There’s Laura Brown, performing the duties of wife and mother in conformity-laden 1949 Los Angeles. And there’s Clarissa Vaughan in late-20th-century New York City, organizing a party to honor her longtime friend/former lover who’s been ravaged by AIDS. Each of them enduring the hours of a single day, and then the hours after those. I first read this in 2014 -- a fascinating riff on [Mrs. Dalloway], where the original novel’s author (Virginia), its main character (Clarissa), and a reader (Laura) are imagined in their own storylines. I watched the film again yesterday after I’d finished my re-read. The novel is a beautiful and melancholic tragedy; the film is devastating. (  ) DetailMuse | Feb 7, 2021 | ACADEMY AWARD WINNER  InstructorFlip | Nov 10, 2020 | The novel moves between three narrators: • Virginia Woolf at Richmond outside London in 1923 as she writes Mrs Dalloway, helps her husband in their Hogarth Press and meets her sister, Vanessa Bell, for afternoon tea. • Laura Brown in California in 1949 reading Mrs Dalloway and preparing for her husband’s birthday with her four year old son. • Clarissa Vaughan in New York in 1998-ish, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway by her friend Richard, who is being awarded a prize for his poetry, but is now debilitated by AIDS. Beautiful, elegant, elegiac and clear prose provides a glimpse into the life of these three, quite different, women. Although I was disappointed that the style for each narrator appeared undifferentiated, I really enjoyed each story and how they were brought together. The three narrative strands reminded me of three books that I have read recently: • A Boy at the Hogarth Press by Richard Kennedy • Where I was from by Joan Didion • A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (  ) CarltonC | Nov 4, 2020 | slojudy | Sep 8, 2020 |
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. Has the adaptationWas inspired by
Intertwines the stories of three women linked by their relationship to Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway: Woolf herself, in the throes of writing Mrs. Dalloway and contemplating suicide; Laura, a young wife and mother suffocating in the confines of her tidy life in Los Angeles in 1949; and Clarissa, who is giving a party in the present in New York City for her closest friend, Richard, a writer dying of AIDS. No library descriptions found. 
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At the beginning of the book , I kept picturing the author leaning back and giggling at how clever he was. And yet I was still bored. I have never seen the movie and would be interested to see what I missed in the book, because it just didn't do it for me.
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