The Hours |
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Michael Cunningham
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Pages: 229 (Hardcover)
ISBN: 1841150347
Pub: Fourth Estate
Pub date: 1999-01-21
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 471648
Editorial 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 grey 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 realise:
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 bevelling 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 realise, art belongs to far more than just "the world of objects." --Kerry Fried
Reader Reviews:
A beautiful but tragic novel (1/1 people found this helpful)
This, Michael Cunningham's fourth novel, has deservedly been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in America. Its theme is that of escape and despair told through three interwoven stories that have at their heart Virginia Woolf's novel 'Mrs Dalloway'. Indeed in what could so easily be a fictional conceit one of the stories centres on Woolf as she sets about writing her novel. Carefully researched it offers us an opportunity to witness the mixture of personal angst and domestic mundaneness that were present as she toiled with the story. In particular the character of Laura Brown, a young mother in 1940's Los Angeles, is beautifully created. Her daily routine and its emotional vacuum is captured in fragile prose which mirrors perfectly her struggle and the escape she finds in the pages of 'Mrs Dalloway'. This is an intensely passionate novel. The prologue sets the tone so that at the novels opening we are witness to Woolf's breakdown and act of suicide. The novel could easily be somehow morbid yet it transcends this and the reader is left with a sense of hope.
Categories
Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories:
Books -> Subjects -> Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> C -> Cunningham, Michael
Books -> Subjects -> Fiction -> General