

Loading... The Hours (1998)by Michael Cunningham
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» 65 more Best Historical Fiction (106) Female Protagonist (53) 20th Century Literature (133) A Novel Cure (69) Favourite Books (540) Books Read in 2015 (239) 1,001 BYMRBYD Concensus (103) 1990s (37) Contemporary Fiction (11) Best LGBT Fiction (71) Best Feminist Literature (146) Historical Fiction (616) Women's Stories (67) Overdue Podcast (304) Books tagged favorites (307) Books Read in 2011 (88) To read (2) My TBR (18) Spirit of Place (28) Contemporary Fiction (11) Protagonists - Women (12) Experimental Literature (130) Unread books (891) No current Talk conversations about this book. The Hours : A Novel by Michael Cunningham (2000) Although I don't usually like stream-of-consciousness or the use of historical figures as characters, I really enjoyed this book. Surprisingly, the author was able to make three ordinary days in the lives of the three women very compelling. I would have liked more insight from Leonard Woolf or Richard, whom I found the most interesting - besides Virginia, of course - but I suppose Michael Cunningham wanted to keep the focus on the women. All I remember from watching The Hours is sobbing while watching Meryl Streepês character, who I loved/hated, sob in her kitchen. This book feel beautiful and round and sad and true. Wish IÂêd re-read Mrs. Dalloway first. This is one of my all time favorite books. For once, it was deserving of the Pulitzer Prize [so many PP winners don't live up to the hype and expectations]. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolf is the inspiration for the book, and that didn't really appeal to me. BUT IT WORKS! Along with Cunningham's prose, descriptions and feelings he portrays. This book is like a favorite painting- how does one describe exactly what makes it all work?
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 byHas as a student's study guide
A trio of stories based around the writer, Virginia Woolf. In the first, set in 1923, Woolf is writing her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. In the second, in 1949 Los Angeles, Laura Brown can't seem to stop reading Woolf. In the present, 52-year-old Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of AIDS. These women's lives are linked both by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility. No library descriptions found.
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54 — Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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― Michael Cunningham, The Hours
I read it AFTER seeing the film and loved it. The book and film are pretty similar. I enjoyed both the movie and the book.
I skimmed a few reviews and was shocked at some of the low ratings. As one other reviewer who loved it noted: it is a tough book to review. I am glad, honestly that I saw the movie first or I might not have given this a try. Highly recommended. (