Rating: 
Summary: A gutsy leap of faith. An amazing novel.
Review: It is pure joy to read a novel where the writer dared to defy convention, dared to defy Madison Avenue and wrote a story straight from the heart. This novel is a tapestry, an intricately woven masterpiece, definitely otherworldly, almost as if Virginia herself showed up and played muse. I bought it as a beach book because it felt so simple and pure in my hand, yet this is no beach book. I was awed as I read. I wept at the last page. Literary fiction is alive and well in THE HOURS. A well-deserved Pulitzer Prize winner.
Rating:
Summary: Breathtaking and wise.
Review: What a marvelous creation. Not only has the author managed to create a work of technical grace and emotional power, but he has been able to present the thoughts and lives of women with an accuracy I have rarely found with male authors. This is one of the best books I have read all year, and coupled with Mrs. Dalloway, may be one of the best reading experiences I can recommend. Highly deserving of the Pulitzer.
Rating: 
Summary: Hours of Preciosity
Review: At the risk of sounding like a philistine, I have to admit I was rather disappointed with this book and all the hoopla surrounding it. Cunningham fashions some pretty sentences, but his writing has neither the intellectual rigor nor the incandescent beauty of Woolf at her best. At its essence, this book is just another foray into the lives of sensitive bohemian types with the specter of AIDS looming ominously as a surefire means of eliciting sympathy and respect. Cunningham should concentrate on developing his own voice as a writer and not paying homage to writers who clearly outrank him.
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece of the highest order
Review: After eavesdropping on a conversation in a bookstore (sneaky, I know, but one way to learn about gifted talent!)I picked up Michael Cunningham's "The Hours" and prepared myself to be transformed. The lofty challenge was met by this stunning work of verbal artistry. Never before has a book so entirely captured me, refusing to let go; allowing me to wander through the words as if tasting a fine wine or a rich banquet prepared for my convienience. Michael Cunningham has produced a complex, thoroughly wonderful narrative that challenges the formulaic writing so prevalient today. His gift to literature shall never be, as Clarissa fears about Richard's poetry, forgotten, but a benchmark of the highest order for any author to aspire to meet. "The Hours" is a gift to the world, and any reader destined to cross its path.
Rating:
Summary: The most brilliant book I've read this year
Review: Michael Cunningham has produced a genuine masterpiece, a brilliant work of art truly deserving of the Pulitzer Prize Award. It is to my mind the most outstanding novel I have read this year. Nobody who loves serious fiction or literature should miss it. It is THAT good. I can only surmise that Cunningham is a follower of Virgina Woolf. He is so imbued with her spirit that his prose reads almost like hers. His uncanny grasp of her "stream of consciousness" style lends a special resonance to the exploration of the "interior lives" of three women from different times who share a common predicament, that of a disconcerting dislocation from their external existence. There's Virgina Woolf, the author of "Mrs Dalloway" and central inspiration for the novel ; Laura Brown from a later age who reads "Mrs Dalloway" to escape the crushing nihilism of her domesticity and unconvincing contentment ; and Clarissa Vaughn, the modern day reincarnation of Woolf's celebrated heroine. While "The Hours" is a tour-de-force in its own right, my own enjoyment of it was so greatly enhanced by my familiarity with its source that I can only recommend fellow readers to first read the Woolf classic for inspiration before taking the plunge. The recurring theme of suicide, madness and sexual ambiguity as they are explored in the novel take on a special meaning armed with that understanding. There are two images which haunt the novel like a great spirit towering over the action - that from the opening sequence of Virginia calmly filling her pocket with a stone as she prepares to drown herself in the river and the closing sequence, where Laura is revealed to be the old woman from the contemporary story who looks out from the window opposite and witnesses a suicide. The use of the latter as a technical devise to draw the threads together for the close is a pure stroke of genius and a masterful sleight of hand ! This is a brilliant, brilliant piece of work that deserves the widest readership possible. I would have given it a SIX STAR rating had it been possible.
Rating: 
Summary: A beautifully tragic search for comfort in life.
Review: A few sentences into Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours, one is aware that the reading of this book will be an altogether different experience. It will be trance-like, a dreamed interlude with a beautifully tragic story. A relatively short novel at 226 pages, it is somewhat astonishing what the author achieves. Intricately woven story lines, together with an impressive lyrical and poetic language, Cunningham has written a novel that transcends itself.Named after Virginia Woolf's temporary title for her acclaimed novel, Mrs. Dalloway, this novel treads on rather cautious ground. Woolf is not only a major character in the book, but is an ever-present voive almost reading the words to us. Cunningham has talked of the enormous amount of research that went into the writing of the book--the reading of Woolf's entire literary canon, as well as letters, biographies, critical essays on the eccentric author. He also made a trip to London to Woolf's old residence and to the river where she took her own life. (See Poets & Writers, July/August 1999 issue for an interview with Cunningham) I say "cautious ground" in that Cunningham takes great literary freedom with Woolf's persona and psychological being. The prologue begins the novel with Woolf's last moments alive, of her chilling walk down to the river. It is a tragically moving opening, tense and intimate--a walk toward what we know will be an end of life. Here, in the first paragraphs of The Hours, we become aware that Woolf is guiding Cunningham who is guiding us: "She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really, she is merely a gifted eccentric[...] She has failed, and now the voices are back, muttering indistinctly just beyond the range of her vision, behind her, here, no turn and they've gone somewhere else." Many voices are heard in the novel, which follow one day in the life of three women at three different eras of the twentieth century. We find Virginia Woolf in Richmond, a suburb of London, in 1923, as she begins to write and formulate what would become her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. We also follow Laura Brown, a disenchanted housewife in 1950s California, on the day of her war hero husband's birthday. And thirdly, we discover Clarissa Vaughn in modern day Greenwich Village, as she prepares a party for her good friend, an AIDS-stricken poet who has just won a major literary award. The chapters weave in and out of each other, paralleled in many ways. In the end, Cunningham brings the stories together in a well-crafted manner that the reader can almost sense before the final chapters. These are the stories of dissatisfied women, human beings finding themselves at the center questions of life. There is, in each character, a pulling away from what they think is real, the identity, the living. They undergo the act of finding a new perspective of things, of the understanding of not understanding, the momentariness of things, feelings, and perceptions. The reader gets a sense that he or she is at the heart of it all. Woolf is caught at the center of mortality and creativity--she must endure the droll suburbs of Richmond for her health's sake, though she is spiritually pulled toward her London sanctuary of art and culture. Laura Brown is imprisoned in the ideology of family and womanly duty--her only escape is in the reading of Woolf's, Mrs. Dalloway, in a hotel room she rents for the afternoon. And for Clarissa Vaughn, we find a stuggle to reconcile the past, present, and future of a life's ongoing experience. Each character wants one thing: freedom. Freedom from the hours of restraint, when one is held by the responsibilty to oneself or to others. Freedom from decision, from anything that interrupts the will, the dream, the soul's breath. Whether or not any of these characters achieve this freedom is no doubt the reader's own decision to make. The Hours marks the fourth novel of Cunningham's career. And it is clear that this is a novel just as much about him as it is by him. One can sense that the work is about creation, about the labor of making. For the characters in the novel, they seek to create comfort--comfort in a life that clearly does not offer it, and sometimes might even deny it. The author seeks to find himself in the writing process, and thus to find his own comfort as a writer. One cannot help but to see the relationship between Woolf and Cunningham as they begin to become voices for each other. A scene of Woolf at her desk is also a scene of Cunningham at his desk, of his ideas of the process. It is not a surprise that this novel garnered such high praise as the Pulitzer. The Hours is what a novel should be: an exploration into the heart of life, and of what we create for ourselves while we live it.
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece
Review: The Hours is a masterpiece in prose, structure and emotional impact. Of the many contemporary novels I've read, this is the finest.
Rating:
Summary: Woolf Revived
Review: I am an avid reader of Virginia Woolf. Cunningham restores her voice to us without glaring intrusion. The author is masterful in his ability to breathe life into Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway. This, added to his talent to delicately weave "the hours" experienced by each character from chapter to chapter, leaves the reader conscious of their own heartbeat and pulse. Thank you Michael Cunningham for returning the precious gift of Virginia Woolf with your sensitivity for her work, her voice, and her raw understanding of what it is to be a woman, a human being.
Rating:
Summary: A little piece of distilled genious
Review: Beautifully crafted and a joy to experience. People who love Woolf will find this book utterly compulsive. Cunningham's own prose is eerily familiar and evocative of Woolf's. His seemless manner of relating the two contemporary womens' lives to Woolf's own acts like a kalidescope. True genious! I hope to discuss this novel at my Cambridge interview. Definitely food for thought.
Rating:
Summary: A well written book.
Review: The book is very well written. It makes me think about what's important in life and what I want in life. I highly recommend it.
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