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A daring, deeply affecting third novel by the author of A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood.
In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf's last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Samuel, a famous poet whose life has been shadowed by his talented and troubled mother, and his lifelong friend Clarissa, who strives to forge a balanced and rewarding life in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family.
Passionate, profound, and deeply moving, this is Cunningham's most remarkable achievement to date. The Hours is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
- Sales Rank: #207983 in Books
- Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Published on: 1998-11-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.58" h x .98" w x 5.80" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 230 pages
- Great product!
Amazon.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
From Publishers Weekly
At first blush, the structural and thematic conceits of this novel--three interwoven novellas in varying degrees connected to Virginia Woolf--seem like the stuff of a graduate student's pipe dream: a great idea in the dorm room that betrays a lack of originality. But as soon as one dips into Cunningham's prologue, in which Woolf's suicide is rendered with a precise yet harrowing matter-of-factness ("She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa."), the reader becomes completely entranced. This book more than fulfills the promise of Cunningham's 1990 debut, A Home at the End of the World, while showing that sweep does not necessarily require the sprawl of his second book, Flesh and Blood. In alternating chapters, the three stories unfold: "Mrs. Woolf," about Virginia's own struggle to find an opening for Mrs. Dalloway in 1923; "Mrs. Brown," about one Laura Brown's efforts to escape, somehow, an airless marriage in California in 1949 while, coincidentally, reading Mrs. Dalloway; and "Mrs. Dalloway," which is set in 1990s Greenwich Village and concerns Clarissa Vaughan's preparations for a party for her gay--and dying--friend, Richard, who has nicknamed her Mrs. Dalloway. Cunningham's insightful use of the historical record concerning Woolf in her household outside London in the 1920s is matched by his audacious imagining of her inner lifeand his equally impressive plunges into the lives of Laura and Clarissa. The book would have been altogether absorbing had it been linked only thematically. However, Cunningham cleverly manages to pull the stories even more intimately togther in the closing pages. Along the way, rich and beautifully nuanced scenes follow one upon the other: Virginia, tired and weak, irked by the early arrival of headstrong sister Vanessa, her three children and the dead bird they bury in the backyard; Laura's afternoon escape to an L.A. hotel to read for a few hours; Clarissa's anguished witnessing of her friend's suicidal jump down an airshaft, rendered with unforgettable detail. The overall effect of this book is twofold. First, it makes a reader hunger to know all about Woolf, again; readers may be spooked at times, as Woolf's spirit emerges in unexpected ways, but hers is an abiding presence, more about living than dying. Second, and this is the gargantuan accomplishment of this small book, it makes a reader believe in the possibility and depth of a communality based on great literature, literature that has shown people how to live and what to ask of life. (Nov.) FYI: The Hours was a working title that Woolf for a time gave to Mrs. Dalloway.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Clarissa Dalloway certainly is a popular lady nowadays, with a recent movie and now a new book based on her life. She is, of course, the heroine of Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel about a day in the life of a proper but uninspired wife and the tragic event that changes her. In this new work by Cunningham (Flesh and Blood, LJ 4/15/95), that day's events are reflected and reinterpreted in the interwoven stories of three women: Laura, a reluctant mother and housewife of the 1940s; Clarissa, an editor in the 1990s and caretaker of her best friend, an AIDS patient; and Woolf herself, on the verge of writing the aforementioned novel. Certain themes flow from story to story: paths not taken, the need for independence, meditations on mortality. Woolf fans will enjoy identifying these scenes in a different context, but it's only at the end that the author engages more than just devoted followers with a surprisingly touching coda that stresses the common bonds the characters share. Given Woolf's popularity, this is a book all libraries should consider, with an exhortation to visit Mrs. Dalloway as well.AMarc A. Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
131 of 137 people found the following review helpful.
It Takes Your Breath Away
By glenn323
You'll either love this novel so much you'll read passages over and over, or you'll give up after a couple of chapters. I think the reason so many people have problems with "The Hours" is that they don't enjoy reading a novel with such a dark mood. Some people aren't entertained by reading about such tragic loneliness. Cunningham deals with characters who who are depressed to the point of despair even when they are surrounded by people who love them unconditionally. It's probably hard for most people who are reasonably happy to grasp that kind of pain. The author's beautiful and sometimes poetic writing is an amazing work of art; the novel deserved all the praise it received. The way the story parallels Virginia Woolf's masterpiece "Mrs. Dalloway" is inspired. The book truly takes the reader into the world in which Virginia Woolf lived her brilliant and tortured life, and the transitions from Woolf's era to those of Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughn were beautifully done. The best way to read this book is on a rainy day, classical music in the background and a pot of tea on the stove. If only other novels could compare...
73 of 75 people found the following review helpful.
Worth All the Time You Spend With It
By A Customer
In 1925, Virginia Woolf published her masterful novel, "Mrs. Dalloway". Set during a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, Woolf brilliantly used techniques which became hallmarks of the modern novel--interior monologue, first person narrative and a stunning, albeit unrelentingly difficult, stream-of-consciousness rendering--to produce one of the masterpieces of twentieth century English literature. Nearly seventy-five years later, Michael Cunningham has used many of these same techniques to write "The Hours", a fitting homage to Woolf and a novel which deservedly won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
"The Hours" tells the story of a bright June day in the lives of three different women living in three different times and places. The first story is that of Virginia Woolf during a day in 1923, when she is writing "Mrs. Dalloway". The second is the story of Laura Brown, a thirtyish, bookish married woman living in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Laura has a four-year-old son and is pregnant with another child as she plans a birthday dinner for her husband on a day in 1949. The third story is that of Clarissa Vaughn, a fifty-two year old, slightly bohemian, literary agent who is planning a party for Richard, her long-time friend and one-time lover, a prominent writer dying of AIDS.
"The Hours" is, among other things, a nuanced and sensitive picture of middle age in the lives of its characters. Like the novel to which it pays tribute, "The Hours" relies heavily on interior monologue-on thoughts, memories and perceptions-to drive the narrative and to establish a powerful bond between the reader and each of the female protagonists. The reader feels the psychic pain of the aging Virginia Woolf as she contemplates suicide in the Prologue. The reader has an almost tactile sense of Laura Brown's claustrophobia, of her feeling that life is closing in around her, as she flees to a hotel for two hours in the middle of the day simply to spend time reading ("Mrs. Dalloway", of course). And the reader can identify with the yearning, the melancholy, that is suggested when Clarissa Vaughn thinks back to the time when she was young, when her life's choices had not yet been made.
"The Hours" is written, in short, like all great fiction--with deep feeling and love for its characters-and it stands as one of the outstanding American novels of the past decade. While resonating with the themes, techniques and characters of Woolf's difficult modern masterpiece, "The Hours" is masterful and original in its own right, an accessible and engaging work that is worth all the time you spend with it.
101 of 110 people found the following review helpful.
true to the spirit of Woolf
By M. H. Bayliss
I must say I'm a bit surprised by the vicious attacks launched at Cunningham, especially by readers who admit they have not read anything by Woolf -- there is the first mistake. Though I haven't read Mrs. Dalloway in quite a while, I have read To the Lighthouse (one of my all time favorite novels) and Cunningham captures her genius perfectly! This book demands a certain amount of concentration on the reader's behalf, but it's worth it. If you have ever read anything by Woolf, you will immediately appreciate the nuance of his language. It's not pompous just because he gets the prosody and rhythm of Woolf right on the nose! Normally I don't like split narratives that jump from chapter to chapter, but Cunningham does it so seamlessly and with such a feel for the 3 main characters that I found myself drawn into all three story lines. I don't want to reveal how they all come together, but let's just say they do, and with a bang. To give an idea of the kind of subtlety Cunningham displays, let me give one example: Lara Brown, the housewife, feels unconnected to her husband and 3 year old child and all she wants to do is finish reading Mrs. Dalloway. But, since it's her husband's birthday, she follows the expected role and tries to make him a fantastic cake. When the cake turns out to be amateurish and imperfect, she becomes almost suicidally depressed and decides to throw it out and start again. The scene continues, but the disappointment with the cake takes on a life of its own. Readers of To the Lighthouse will be reminded of the central dining scene when Mrs. Ramsey prepares a magnificant feast in much the same vein for her family. Cunningham's writing and grasp of Woolf is inspired -- I can see why he got the Pulitzer Prize. For those who criticize, be sure to catch up on your Woolf before nailing Cunningham to the cross. It's really a terrific book.
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