Rating: 
Summary: Exhilarating
Review: This is truly a fine work by this author. '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.' We can't ask for any more from this author. This book was written exceptionally well for its time and relevance to our society. There are none like it in the world. Dreams gateway to the self is also another book that has given me a newfound respect for life. Check them both out at Amazon.com.
Rating: 
Summary: Depressing story
Review: I read this book, based on its Pulitzer prize status and it being a feminist story, however, I was disappointed. It was very well written and had a few lovely and poetic parts, but mostly it was full of unhappy, depressed, hopeless gay people who I could not sympathize with in any way. They were either unable to accept and live with being gay or couldn't figure out how to get help or antidepressant meds. I couldn't understand what was the point of all the angst and misery. The theme seemed to be "life is hopeless and terrible, and if you are lucky, you may get a few good hours in a lifetime". Very big downer. I won't see the movie.
Rating: 
Summary: A day in the life....
Review: Michael Cunningham has captured the spirit of three very different women. Even though we only get a glimpse of one day out of a lifetime, Cunningham is able to show the strentgh and integrity that each character shows in times of crisis, loss, or sadness.
The three women are Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughn. Virginia has to deal with a life full of dead pan headahces and voices that won't leave her in peace. She has a semi droll existence in a suburb od England and she dreams of going back to the city. She wants to explore. Virginia is in the process of writing her masterpiece, Mrs. Dalloway, on this day of days. She has a visit from her sister in which a death is experienced. Virginia wishes she could lay in the place of the bird her niece and nephews have created a funeral pyre for. Laura Brown is a Los Angeles housewife in the 1950's. She is pregnant with her second child, and it is her husbands birthday. The husband that she married not because she "loved" him, but because he was a good man and he was strong. Laura uses books to escape from her unhappiness. The frivolity of life sends her to a motel to get away from the child that always seems aware of her and the cake with the crumbs in the icing. Her current escape is Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, which she reads in the hotel room that would be a perfect place to die alone. The third woman is Clarissa Vaughan. Clarissa is planning a party in honor of a friend dying of AIDS who has won a literary award for his astonishing poerty. Clarissa is what one would call a modern day Mrs. Dalloway, they even share the same first name. She spends the day flitting around trying to make things perfect for her party, including moving a flower vase 5 times. The hours is a look at how droll life can be if you allow it to be. Each woman will inspire as well depress the soul, and make you question what is important in life.
Rating:
Summary: blown to bits
Review: how amazing is this book. i'm so glad i was never tempted to read the last chapter before it was due...and what an ending the book has!!!
the book definitely deserved the Pulitzer. I am vowing NOT to see the film - i know it will only destroy the sheer beauty of this work. that's how good this book is.
Rating:
Summary: Haunting little treasure
Review: This wonderful book, almost a novella, will haunt you long after you've finished the last page. In fact, you may want to reread it. Surprisingly, the current movie version is an excellent adaptation of this insightful and thought provoking work. However, if you can possibly avoid seeing the film until you've read the book on which it is based, do so! Without preaching, the author manages to make exquisit commentary on the complexities and many aspects of Happiness. You should come away from the experience enthralled.
Rating:
Summary: What was the point of that?
Review: Yes Michael Cunningham is a wonderful writer of prose, but it is inserted in unrealistic streams of consciousness revelations during his characters' mundane activities. The lack of action in this book causes the focus to be on the characters who are revealed as self-absorbed, narcissistic and somewhat delusional while consistently whiny. It is not hard to discern why this book, as insignificant as it is, has been lauded by the press and Hollywood. It caters to sympathies that the press and Hollywood universally suscribe to without a search for greater truths or real meaning. Additionally, the writer creates no sense of urgency or intrigue for the reader. It is the equivalent of watching a soap opera in which the writers are trying their best to write like Shakespeare.
Rating:
Summary: A good book...once you get into it
Review: At first, I found the book extremely boring. I almost put it down. Luckily I didn't. It is a wonderful piece of literature. Mr Cunningham did a wonderful job of creating rich characters that you want to care about. I bought three books worth mentioning This one. CHILD ABDUCTION: How to protect your children, and Self- Matters. All worth it.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, haunting, memorable
Review: Cunningham not only brings Virginia Woolf to life in his novel "The Hours," but he also brings her novel "Mrs. Dalloway" to life as well. The book is a joy to read: *it's unutterably clever in the way it unobtrusively echoes the plot and characters of "Mrs. Dalloway," serving as a tribute to that novel and recalling its very themes *it's gorgeously written in long, rhythmic, sumptuous sentences that echo Woolf's own style *it's brilliantly constructed as it moves back and forth among its three story lines, and I truly can't remember a more satisfying conclusion to a novel in years *it will move you and it will stay with you once you've finished reading it And now a confession: when I read "Mrs. Dalloway" as an immature college student many years ago, I failed to appreciate it. In fact, I put off reading "The Hours" for some time because of my college reading experience. I'm certainly glad I've grown up enough to have opened the covers of this lovely, lovely book.
Rating: 
Summary: Why?
Review: Mrs. Dalloway is an experimental, modernist novel that is very much of its time (think Gertrude Stein, James Joyce) -- no one would publish it today. Its chronology bounces around freely, and it tells two stories at once that never intersect (the other being about Septimus, the shell-shocked vet who is being taken to the doctor by his Italian wife), with the exception of one brief moment where both characters observe the same airplane passing overhead. It's not an easy novel to read, but it is a rewarding one. Cunningham's novel The Hours IS the kind of novel that can get published today -- it references the more interesting original, but isn't remotely as challenging, or engaging. The whole thing struck me as an academic exercise, and written in present tense with a dying-of-AIDS poet, well, it's just a little too calculated. It's depressing to see art eat its own head this way -- movies are all remakes of other movies, or make fun of other movies (Austin Powers), music recycles styles every couple of years, and now books are following suit. I'm not sure why no one was outraged -- remember The Wind Done Gone? What's the difference? He's just piggybacking on an already successful title. Cunningham is a good writer, but he certainly gets no points from me for originality with this one. Too easy. And when he includes actual excerpts from Woolf's prose, it's like parking a beautiful old Jaguar next to a Ford Focus.
Rating:
Summary: Admirable intentions, but part of the book is too derivative
Review: Michael Cunningham's THE HOURS has been much adored as an homage to Virginia Wolf's MRS. DALLOWAY. The novel, of course, tells three interlocking stories, after first beginning with the narrative of Woolf's suicide in 1941. It tells of Woolf's attempts at starting the novel in 1923, while in enforced isolation with her husband at Hogarth House in Richmond; of Laura Brown, a post-war Los Angeles suburban housewife's unravelling on a day when she read the novel for the first time; and of "Clarissa Vaughn," a contemporary woman much like Clarissa Dalloway herself who prepares a party to honor her dearest friend who is dying of AIDS on the day he is to win a major literary award. The first and second strands of Cunningham's novel are lovely. Cunningham admirably brings something new to our conception of Virginia Woolf and her complicated relations with her sister, husband and servants. His second strand, "Mrs. Brown" (a tribute, of course, to Woolf's famous essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" and its conception of what 20th-century authors owe to their characters), is the most beautiful and original section of the book: Laura Brown does seem to carry out luminously Woolf's exhortation for contemporary authors to represent faithfully the inner life. But it is in the third strand, the contemporary story, that the book doesn't come off at all. rather than as a postmodern homage, the section reads as a simultaneously bad and derivative imitative of MRS. DALLOWAY: I found myself cringing in these sections at Cunningham's weak imitations of Woolf's plot and prose. Despite its ingenious and noble intentions, this sequence prevents the novel, in the end, from fully deserving the praise it has garnered.
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