The Hours

click here for more details, find new or used items	Michael Cunningham New from £0.01 Used from £0.01 Pages: 240 (Paperback) ISBN: 184115783X Pub: Fourth Estate Pub date: 2003-02-03 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 210356

Editorial Review:

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:

Rather depressing (1/1 people found this helpful)

I tried really, really hard to get into this. I did finish it but it was nearly always a chore rather than a pleasure. I was surprised and disappointed, as 1) the film was excellent 2) it's a clever, twisted three strand plot 3) I love the writing of Virginia Woolf and the author here appears to be striving to write in her style.

I just found far too much waiting with bated breath for the significance of life to strike...for the "moment" to reveal itself.

The tedium of the lives of the characters makes the reading tedious.

But in between, there are some wonderful passages: "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, though everyone but children...knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult".

A final, probably petty point. He acknowledges twenty people who helped inspire, revise, edit etc the book. Good grief.

A beautiful, unpretenious read (0/0 people found this helpful)

I waited a few years after seeing the film to open the book as so often memories of the big screen can cloud the original work. Coming to this novel with a fresh eye was a great expereince. The writing is beautiful and the characters surprisingly deep despite only being painted in broad strokes. Those wanting high action will be disappointed but anyone who looks for atmosphere and poetry will love it. The Woolf influences are clear in the writing style but this is a tribute rather than a cheap imitation. An easy read on one level but also so much more

5*: a complete modern masterpiece (8/12 people found this helpful)

This book is not merely a piece of entertainment, which I think the lower-rating readers are expecting. It cannot be passively read and its ultimate message is not presented to you on a silver platter. If approached correctly, its dynamic can entwine into your thoughts and daily life long after you have finished it and act as a catalyst, however small, to understanding your own personal development as an individual in a world of unspoken structures, prejudices and expectations.

I read this book a while ago now but every now and then a moment happens in my life, often very brief, where I have a vivid flashback to certain key moments in this book. At times the author completely exposes the human condition in such simple, often short sentences/chapters but they can hit to your essence so hard that you feel a certain loss of uniqueness in yourself whilst simultaneously finding comfort: this is how we are as human beings. An inescapable fact: comforting yet unnerving all in one.

Thus, surely after this, he has acheived all that is required to create a successful novel. His characters and storylines make you often stop mid-sentence and introspect on yourself or reflect on the wider moral and cultural issues of our time and how you can and do, in all your purity, fit into this wider mesh.

It sounds unbelievebly cheesy and over the top, I know, but these things do when you try to describe them. You just have to read it because I'm sure my experience of this book will be different to the next so there's no use me sitting here expaining it to you.

Truely deserving of 5*: an utter modern masterpiece.

Eloquent, but empty (6/9 people found this helpful)

Having recently read a lot of character-based novels (e.g. ‘Morvern Callar,’ ‘The Wasp Factory’ and ‘Less Than Zero’)…I have to confess that in comparison Pulitzer Prize winner 'The Hours' left me very cold. Admittedly, the novels I refer to are set more recently and it’s possible that it’s the various period settings of this novel (i.e. 1920’s London, 1940’s Los Angeles and 1990’s New York) and the three main protagonists imbedded in those periods that didn’t agree with me. I haven’t after all read 'Mrs Dalloway', which is perhaps a pre-requisite for this book, which would not only have introduced me to Virginia Woolf’s writing style and some of her common themes, but also would have given me an idea of what to expect from this modern interpretation of her life and the lives of two fictitious women whose lives she has touched in some way through her work.

Let me first say that I did for the most part enjoy reading about these characters and admired the author for discovering and bringing to life such unusual and engaging women. And without any doubt this is an extremely insightful novel (almost every sentence carries some simple and yet complex revelatory insight) and the human condition is captured remarkably well, but for a novel with such insight I found it incredibly uninspiring. Depression, suicidal impulses, death and disease- all figure heavily in this story, but it wasn’t these issues that depressed me- commendably the author manages to write without too much melancholy or morbidity for such serious topics. I did, however, find the prose extremely sentimental and pretentious. And I also found the dialogue the worst of any story I’d ever read- no matter which characters were speaking I couldn’t get the image of two robots conversing in the distant future- they all speak in a dull monotone, there is absolutely no passion to their speech- no one in real life speaks this way, well no one I know at least. While very little of incident occurs in the story plot-wise this novel is effortlessly sustained by the three days in the lives of each of these women, as each of them (Virginia Woolf, Clarissa Vaughan and Laura Brown) are exceptionally vivid, intriguing and not your average heroines of fiction.

The ending has a certain symmetry that I definitely appreciated and went a long way to rescuing the novel for me. But largely, despite evocative stories, engaging characters and more than a little insight…this novel simply left me cold.

Dealing with "The Hours" (4/6 people found this helpful)

So many people before me have already spelled out the plot of "The Hours" and so I felt that I simply needed to add that this potent, emotionally evincing novel is indeed worthy of the Pulitzer Prize it won itself, indeed, several times over.

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