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The Hours
written by Michael Cunningham
Studio : Turtleback Books Distributed by Demco Media
by Turtleback Books Distributed by Demco Media
Publisher : Turtleback Books Distributed by Demco Media
Released : 2000-06
Availability : This Item is currently Not Available
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780606191005
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 535 reviews)
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Product Description |
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Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her rebellious mind and make a start on her new novel. In 1990s New York, Clarissa Vaughan goes shopping for flowers for a party for her AIDS-suffering poet-friend. This novel meditates on artistic behaviour, love and madness. |
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Americancivilwar.com Review |
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 |
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A window into Virginia Woolf's soul |
I didn't realize until I actually picked it up and started reading that the author of "The Hours" was a man. Given the subject, I just assumed the author would be female.
It was a strange book; it didn't completely hook me, but definitely engaged me. The story lines wound around each other in a delicate way, like separate vines up a wall. Touching, related, but not entirely one. The depth of Cunningham's exploration into Virginia Woolf was lovely. He found a place in himself to write from her; to know her from her. The other two stories were somewhat less poetic, but certainly interesting. However I felt Mrs Brown's storyline was somewhat unfinished. I would say modern Clarissa's story seemed the most concrete.
I guess this book seems to me more like a painting or a feeling than a book. It left me with a taste of something, but it's like vapor. Not completely tangible.
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Elegant, Stylish, and a Little Gimmicky |
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a lyrical but highly experimental writer whose novels frequently deal in both the endless details and transitory nature of life, shifting back and forth in time, and frequently employing a style that is commonly known as "stream of conciousness." With THE HOURS, writer Michael Cunningham referrences Woolf's concerns and style while interweaving the stories of three women: Virginia Woolf herself in the 1920s, as she begins to write the novel MRS. DALLOWAY; Laura Brown in the late 1940s, who reads MRS. DALLOWAY while struggling against the confines of a middle-class marriage; and Clarissa Vaughn, a book editor who is known to an old friend as "Mrs. Dalloway" and who spends of her day in activities that reflect Virginia Woolf's MRS. DALLOWAY.
The novel is essentially a series of "literary conceits," concepts and ideas which constantly reference and imitate the original MRS. DALLOWAY without actually copying the novel itself. Cunningham strives to capture Woolf's tone of voice without exactly copying her style, and is largely successful; the three stories are interesting in and of themselves and they ultimately merge in a surprising manner; and the entire thing is written with tremendous style and grace. It is also a fairly easy read, a novel which can be consumed over the course of a day or two.
But for all its charms, there is no getting around the fact that THE HOURS is fundamentally gimmicky, and the gimmicky quality of the book is actually emphasized by whatever knowledge the reader may have about Woolf and her novel MRS. DALLOWAY. In consequence the whole thing feels a little affected and a little sterile, too much of a literary game, too little of an organic whole. I certainly enjoyed reading it--once. But it is not a work to which I believe I will return in the future, for it gives up all its secrets in a single reading.
GFT, Americancivilwar Reviewer |
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All in a Day |
I am the last person I know to have read THE HOURS. I admit I delayed for mostly wrong reasons, put off by the success of the popular movie, and then by hearing that is was a reworking of one of my favorite books, MRS. DALLOWAY by Virginia Woolf. I still haven't seen the movie, but within the first few chapters of the book, I realized that this was far from being a mere spin-off. Michael Cunningham seems virtually to channel Virginia Woolf, not only capturing her style and sensibility, but revisiting her deepest concerns to show their relevance to the setting and mores of our own day.
I cannot imagine how it would be to come to THE HOURS without having read MRS. DALLOWAY first. The distinctive structure of that book -- an hour-by-hour account of a single day in the life of a woman as she prepares to give a party in the evening -- is copied in each of the three interleaved stories that make up Cunningham's novel: Virginia Woolf herself, living near London in 1923, beginning work on MRS. DALLOWAY; Laura Brown, a young wife and mother in 1949 Los Angeles, preparing for her husband's birthday dinner, reading the Woolf novel, and beginning to question her life; and Clarissa Vaughan, in New York City at the end of the century, preparing for a party in honor of an old friend who once nicknamed her "Mrs. Dalloway." The three stories move forward together, hour by hour, paralleling the progress of the book, and linked to one another by a series of references (such as the yellow roses that crop up in all three stories) that give a little lift of recognition each time they occur. But there is nothing systematic about this; the action seems natural, not preordained. When Virginia thinks about the novel, for example, she at first plans something rather different from the book she finally wrote; we see her ideas for the book changing over the course of the day, in response to her emotional reactions to its small events. So when even the model is fluid, the stories that are patterned after it can be fluid too.
And then there is the style. When writing about Virginia or Laura, Cunningham uses a straightforward modern style, but he writes of Clarissa uncannily like Woolf might have done, had she been living in New York in the nineteen-nineties. For example, as she sets out: "The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Clarissa pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths." A little overwrought, perhaps? But read on: "New York in its racket and stern brown decrepitude, its bottomless decline, always produces a few summer mornings like this." That is New York all right, not a translated Bloomsbury. It is quite amazing how beautifully Cunningham balances the reflective mental imagery that is the hallmark of Woolf's style with a practical sense of urban life as it is lived today, with its share of street people, oddballs, AIDS, and four-letter words.
Yet structure and style alone do not make a novel; Cunningham uses his three stories (which ultimately interconnect, though in a slightly artificial way) to develop themes that are also central in Woolf's own work. Most obviously, there is the role of women. All three, at some point in the day, question what they are doing, and attempt small escapes that may be harbingers of something larger. This is clearest in the story of Laura Brown, who apparently lives the American dream, so her growing unease raises questions by coming from left field. Virginia's end by suicide is prefigured in a prologue, and Clarissa, by contrast, seems already to have made her break for independence, living openly as a lesbian and having a child by a donor. Woolf touched lightly on gay themes in MRS. DALLOWAY and elsewhere, but Cunningham develops these a lot more explicitly, enabling him to examine many more shades of the sexual spectrum than his model, but always honestly and often with a touch to stop the heart.
But the quality that Cunningham captures best, I think, is the very essence of MRS. DALLOWAY: the sense of looking back at the past from middle age. The third Clarissa chapter (pages 89-98 in the paperback) is a perfect distillation of the bittersweet scent of past loss intruding on present contentment. Perhaps if I put together a few sentences from the end of that chapter, I can have Michael Cunningham say it better than I can: "She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as pleasant and dangerous as literature itself. Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. Venture too far for love, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that." And then the very last lines of the chapter: "There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: that was the moment, right then. There has been no other." But Clarissa, nonetheless, is content. |
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Beautifully Written and a Joy to Read |
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I loved this book. Thoroughly and completely, I loved this book. I am shocked that there are 48 people who gave this book a rating of 1 star. I have never read Virginia Woolf's, Mrs. Dalloway, and I probably won't. But this fact did not take away any enjoyment or appreciation I felt for this book. To each their own, I suppose. From the first paragraph I was hooked. The words are beautiful and profound. I was amazed how Michael Cunningham could create such real and vivid characters, with such insightful, intuitive thoughts and observations. In reading over the thoughts of each character there were times I thought, "I've felt this way." or "I have thought that myself," and often I was amazed that such thoughts were so well articulated and richly described. The words flow beautifully from page to page and I love the way the storylines come together. When I was down to the final 10 or so pages, I was both excited to keep going and sad that the pages flew by so quickly and the story would soon end. Nevertheless, I appreciate how the author tied up loose ends instead of dropping the reader off at the curb. I completely understand why this book won a Pulitzer prize. If you are looking for a though provoking, honest account of life, it's beauty and blunders, then this is a book worth reading. |
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So depressing I could barely get through it |
If I had only one word to sum up this book it would have to be "depressing". Even the author/narrator sounded depressed as he read this book in a monotonous tone. I found this story a very difficult one to stick with as the book was populated with people who were unhappy, suicidal and unsatisfied with their lives. It left me feeling extremely gloomy. I most definitely will not be renting the movie as I don't care to relive the story again.
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