The Hours

Rating:
Summary: moods of the women
Review: I thought this movie was unbelievable. This movie/book is about Bipolar or Manic Depressive Illness. I wonder why nobody is bringing this up.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Pleasurable read.
Review: This was a pleasurable read, but by pleasurable I mean cathartic. It was utterly depressing. But in a good way. A great follow up to Mrs. Dalloway if you don't mind brooding for a while afterwords.

Rating:
Summary: Cool book
Review:
A little masterpiece, clever and bright as it is heartbreaking. A friend read it thrice in a day. Once in a lifetime is enough for me. I'm interested in seeing the film now. If this is the future of fiction, it will be a very nice place. Not a word or notion wasted. Thanks, Michael Cunningham.

Rating:
Summary: Ms. Woolf Would Be Proud
Review: Michael Cunningham has written a beautiful modern version of Virginia Woolf's classic "Mrs. Dalloway," managing to capture the complexities of the original and add a few of his own.

Clarissa Vaughn begins her day searching for flowers for a party she will throw to celebrate an award her writer friend, Richard, has won. It is Richard who compares Clarissa to the famous literary character "Mrs. Dalloway." As Clarissa goes about her day we are taken back in time to meet Virginia Woolf as she begins to write her classic story. And as we read Virginia's beginning words another of Cunningham's characters, Mrs. Brown, picks up the book to read...."Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." Cunningham weaves the story of three women into one, all suffer from melancholy, and all struggle with an aspect of her day as they each deal with their own hours in circumstantial and age related ways. Mrs. Brown fails at baking a cake, Clarissa fails as a friend, and Virginia wonders how she failed in life but all the while lurks "Mrs. Dalloway," going about her day hoping to extinguish her own emptiness.

Cunningham has managed something quite extraordinary with his re-written modern version of "Mrs. Dalloway." In his version the famous character is free to experience her true heart with the freedoms that modern society has provided. Clarissa and Sally have carried their infatuation from the original story into a committed lesbian relationship here. Richard, a tortured and reluctant soul, finds himself a character confronting AIDS and pondering the direction of his life while still seemingly obsessed with Clarissa. Clarissa's daughter is again pursued for her youth and vitality by both old and angry lesbians seeking her energy. The party begins the day but in Cunningham's novel the ending arrives quite differently. Cunningham writes beautifully and captures a whisper of Woolf as he goes along to reveal how "Mrs. Dalloway," may have went about her day had she experienced this age. Cunningham guides us between his three stories always sure to connect them in some seemingly insignificant way that is actually hauntingly real.

While I fully believe Cunningham's work here can stand on its own I also believe it is enhanced with a familiarity to Virginia Woolf's original story. As a reader I did not grasp all of the intricacies of Cunningham's novel until I had read Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," and then re-read Cunningham, only then was I able to understand just where Cunningham's ideas stemmed from and fully marveled at his talent. But no matter how you read between the lines this novel is well worth the hours spent within its pages.


Rating:
Summary: Gravy Train
Review: Here's a "novel" approach to winning a pulitzer prize: simply copy an existing novel.

I liked this better the first time when it was called "Mrs. Dalloway".

Rating:
Summary: Not worth my time
Review: I really wanted to like this book, but I couldn't get past the feeling that the author thinks he's writing something important. All the details and observations about the characters remind me of the writings of a 15 year old who feels they've got the world figured out. I think the details may have been an attempt to avoid writing a short story.

Rating:
Summary: 5 stars are not enough.
Review: If you are a fan of long rambling novels full of characters and scenes superfluous to the plot, then this is probably not the novel for you. Multilayered and spanning the better part of the last century, "The Hours" is a beautifully articulated exercise in imagination and literary economy. Author Michael Cunningham has fashioned a triptych of stories dealing with three women - a writer, a reader and a character - in a stunning hommage to his favorite writer, Virginia Woolf, and his favorite novel and literary character "Mrs. Dalloway."

This novel, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a masterpiece of succinctly expressed thoughts and ideas - each absolutely subervient and germane to the plot. "The Hours" is a uniquely rendered work, eloquent, compelling and compassionate. Novels of this quality don't come along often, perhaps only once in a generation.