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The Hours: A Novel, by Michael Cunningham
Fee Download The Hours: A Novel, by Michael Cunningham
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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.
- Sales Rank: #31467 in Books
- Brand: Picador
- Published on: 2000-01-15
- Released on: 2000-01-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.20" h x .68" w x 5.48" l, .51 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 240 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
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Pulitzer Prize for BORING
By Viktor Wolfe
First off, I can't stand Virginia Woolf's writing; it is pointless and un-entertaining--BORING, to put it simply. With that said, a book ABOUT Virginia Woolf as a character that remains true to her writing style, is a no-go for me. I didn't GET this book, therefore, I didn't like it. I liked the scene toward the end where the guy falls out of the window and dies on the pavement below. Believe me, that is the ONLY interesting thing that happens in the entire book. And that's after page 200. Other than that, I couldn't say what the rest of the book is about because I didn't care; I was just trying to get through it. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 (the reason I read it), so obviously SOMEONE really enjoyed it. Bottom line, it's an unfulfilling, unexciting book. Now let's cross our fingers and hope the movie is better!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Benign and overly crafted
By Charles S. Houser
I have never struggled less reading a modern literary novel. It was virtually a page-turner. Although I didn't identify with any of the main characters--the ficitionalized Virginia Woolf who we meet at the point in her career when she is writing MRS. DALLOWAY; Laura Brown, a young mother living in post-WWII America who makes lousy birthday cakes, harbors lesbian tendencies, and wishes only to stay in bed and read MRS. DALLOWAY all day; and Clarissa Vaughn, a present-day lesbian mother and editor who is the primary caregiver to a male poet dying from AIDS and whom the poets refers to as MRS. DALLOWAY--I didn't despise them either. The patient reader will discover that it is more than the fictional Mrs. Dalloway that connects the book's three protagonists whose lives span three generations, but to say more about this would undermine one of the book's few surprises.
Cunningham's prose is flawless and narcotizing. Mercifully, he does not attempt to give us stream of consciousness writing. Observations and descriptions (even about things like flowers) are never decorative and gratuitous. Shifts in points of view are subtle, but always well signalled. The reader should never doubt that Cunningham is in control of his story. (If Cunningham is embodied in any one of his characters, I suspect it is the outward-oriented, ever-busy, and always in control Clarissa Vaughn.) What I find puzzling after finishing the book is how such a well-made book can be so emotionally unimpressive. Although the book culminates around a single dramatic event and the three separate strands of the narrative are drawn together, there doesn't seem to be much of a point. (The movie made from this novel seems to have stuggled with the same issue and responded by adding an improbable closing speech for an elderly Laura Brown.) Perhaps there is no point and Cunningham is making a coy play at being postmodern; or perhaps the point is that all of us--famous authors, disenchanted 50s housewives, or modern activist types--struggle with the same banal unraveling of the hours that make up our alotted time on earth. Karma is a big cosmic joke and our own pathetic lives are the punch line.
Amusing detail: Meryl Streep who plays Clarissa Vaughn in the movie is mentioned in passing in an early chapter of the novel.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Atmospheric, involving and unique
By JP Colter
If you love complex, atmospheric, and literary stories that avoid pretentiousness, "The Hours" is for you.
Michael Cunningham weaves together three interconnected stories in three time periods in rather unexpected ways. Each involve the writer Virginia Wolfe - the first involves an "imagining" of Virginia Wolfe's own life during her last days as she conceives of and writes her novel, "Mrs. Dalloway".
The Hours continues, introducing two additional story lines. Throughout the book the three stories unfold concurrently. That task alone is difficult for most authors to pull off without literary trickery but Cunningham succeeds very well.
"Mrs. Dalloway" is being written by Virginia Wolfe in the first story line whilst Ms Wolfe struggles with her mental health and family relationships. "Mrs Dalloway" is a novel about a single day in the life of a woman planning a party for her first lover who has just reentered her life. It describes her activities planning and preparing for the party and the recollections it triggers of her youth and the choices she's made.
The second story line involves a pregnant, clinically depressed 1950's housewife who is reading Wolfe's novel, "Mrs. Dalloway" while she is preparing a birthday party for her husband and caring for her very young son while struggling with her serious depression and sense of displacement within her own life.
The third and final story weaves aspects of the first two stories together. It takes place in the early 2000's. In it, a woman nicknamed "Mrs. Dalloway" by her very sick lifelong best friend is preparing a party to celebrate his being awarded a literary prize for a collection of his poems. The poet is connected to the second story line as well as the third in different ways.
Is this confusing? Perhaps at first. As you read The Hours all of it comes together beautifully. The relationships are revealed gradually and naturally through the three independent tales woven together to form a beautiful tapestry.
The Hours is an unusually memorable novel. I highly recommend both The Hours and another Cunninghams novel, A Home at the End of the World.
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