The Hours by Michael Cunningham
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Book Reviews of The Hours
Book Review: Beautifully written
Summary: 5 Stars
I've just finished The Hours and have started to read it all over again. What a wonderful book. Brilliantly structured and so delicately conceived that the plots, the women, the moments in time dip in and out and against each other.
It's Cunningham's prose however that lifts it into a category all of its own. These are sentences you can bathe in. He riffs against the original, takes Woolf's turns of phrase and uses them for his own purposes, enlarges and magnifies them. Is there anything, anyone, who can sum up a moment, a memory, so acutely? This is a book that makes you feel cleverer and more humane by the simple act of reading it.
"Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at a pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway and they had kissed.....
...It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipiation of dinner and a book...
...What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk,on a patch of dead grass, and walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is 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."
Wonderful.
Book Review: Highly reccomended - liked the movie, loved the book
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm a conservative, straight, ususally vote republican kind of guy, so let's get that out of the way. But I do make attempts at wrting poetry from time to time, and some of my work has actually been appreciated by friends and family, and I've become less inhibited about this, and here's where I'm going with this reivew. If you've ever loved poems for the beauty that can be conveyed in capturing a moment, buy this book. I enjoyed the movie, immediately purchased the book and it is completely deserving of the Pulitzer Prize and all of the rave reviews due to the fact that this is some of the most lovely prose that has been written in a very long time, in my humble opinion. The plot is easy to follow, the characters are interesting, but the strength of this book is in the poetic images that are presented for the reader to contemplate. It is easy to read, completely accessible - the reader will find that this short novel is well worth the few hours that will leave the reader wanting to know more about Virginia Woolf, if nothing else (I went to library and found that there are multiple volumes of her journals that have been published). I guess the reason I identified with the characters in the book is that as an aspiring poet and painter I related to the desire and the process of creating. And I think Stephen King was correct in his Memoirs (on Writing) that many, if not most of us could be/should be writers/poets or painters or whatever you are inspired to be. Life is short and precious - don't be afraid to be creative, and this book could be an inspiration for just about anyone who wants to "capture a moment."Book Review: "There are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead."
Summary: 5 Stars
"I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters," Virginia Woolf wrote in her 1923 diary; "I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment." Readers of Michael Cunningham's THE HOURS will experience the same type of connections in his characters' development.Cunningham's deeply moving novel tells three parallel stories, which eventually intersect at page 217. He begins his novel "on a day early in the Second World War" with Woolf's 1941 suicide (p. 8), before returning to the writer completing her novel, MRS. DALLOWAY, in 1923 London. Cunningham then shifts seamlessly forward to 1990's New York City, where he introduces us to 52-year-old Clarissa Vaughan shopping for flowers in Greenwich Village for her dying friend, Richard's party, and then again to 1949 Los Angeles, where he introduces us to Laura Brown "trying to lose herself" (p. 37) from her perfect life. In the course of THE HOURS, all three women undergo subtle but profound transformations. Each of them realizes that there is only 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 (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more" (p. 225). After finishing THE HOURS, many readers will undoubtedly want to add MRS. DALLOWAY to their reading list.
G. Merritt
Book Review: Stunning!
Summary: 5 Stars
The Hours is quite possibly the best written novel I have read in years. It fully deserved its Pulitzer.What's great about The Hours is that what's great about The Hours is something different for everyone. Writers and avid readers will appreciate its shockingly unique style. Michael Cunningham sort of trusts us to know what he's talking about. We hear a lot less "Virginia carefully approached the child so as not to alarm her..." and more "She approached the child with caution..." (note: not a direct quote) It's nice to her a lot more pronouns that names and a lot less "she said." He seems to grasp that we know who he's referring to, allowing the complex story to get on with itself and unfold.
People with problems in their lives and people looking for life-assurance will find the provocative power of the book to be of some comfort. If you don't leap from your seat, your heart doesn't stop, or you aren't left to think for (no pun intended) hours after you set the book down, you may want to consider yourself legally dead.
Those who feel they are connected to others in the world will find the strings of three women's lives, brilliantly woven and unwoven throughout the book, to be incredible. All the stories are richly intertwined. It's as if Michael Cunningham took a handful of each woman and blew it gently across his pages, writing more of a collage than a novel. Details are sprinkled throughout each woman's life that also appear in another woman's life, showing us that we are not alone in this universe.
Brilliant, beautiful, and deep; you must read The Hours!
Book Review: Chunks
Summary: 5 Stars
"Special" is not the word to use for readers who might enjoy this novel, "specialized" is better, for we must never embrace elitism--snobs being bad, humility good. Thus I think a person must be a "specialized" reader who enjoys writing itself, even if it sits alone, to delight in "The Hours." This novel is best enjoyed in small chunks independently devoured. Certain readers--and that's fine with me--do not like that sort of meal.I think the same premise is what makes Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" such a great novel for some, including me, and disliked by others. But I have never been excited the same way about Joyce's "Ulysses," a novel written more or less with a similar style. Chunks, chunks, chunks. In fact, I have never been able to complete "Ulysses." This demonstrates that art is communication and a connection may or not be made at any given moment. But "The Hours" connected with me.
As for complaints that the novel's ending is implausible, I say thank God for that. It is art, a story, a fiction, a creation, a matter of Cunningham's imagination, and then of the reader's reimagination. What should Cunningham have done, woven his tale into a mundane set of matter-of-fact conclusions just so his critics might call it realistic and plausible? A writer of fiction chooses such "implausible" connections on purpose, for that's what makes a story.
Because of its many wonderful chunks I give "The Hours" five stars.
Further, thank God for my powers of reimagination, for I can change certain orientations within the plot of "The Hours" to suit my own orientation.
-----Joseph A. Psarto,