The Hours - Mille feuilles

Hardcover, 229 pages

English language

Published Nov. 11, 1998 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

ISBN:: 978-0-374-17289-3
OCLC Number:: 39339842

(1 review)

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, who is recognized as 'one of our very best writers' (Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times), draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters who are struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair

The novel opens with an evocation of Woolf's last days before her suicide in 1941, and moves to the stories of two modern American women who are trying to make rewarding lives for themselves in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family.

Clarissa Vaughan is a book editor who lives in present-day Greenwich Village; when we meet her, she is buying flowers to display at a party for her friend Richard, an ailing poet who has just won a major literary prize. Laura Brown is a housewife in postwar California who is bringing up …

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, who is recognized as 'one of our very best writers' (Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times), draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters who are struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair

The novel opens with an evocation of Woolf's last days before her suicide in 1941, and moves to the stories of two modern American women who are trying to make rewarding lives for themselves in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family.

Clarissa Vaughan is a book editor who lives in present-day Greenwich Village; when we meet her, she is buying flowers to display at a party for her friend Richard, an ailing poet who has just won a major literary prize. Laura Brown is a housewife in postwar California who is bringing up her only son and looking for her true life outside of her stifling marriage.

With rare ease and assurance, Cunningham makes the two womens lives converge with Virginia Woolf's in an unexpected and heart-breaking way during the party for Richard. As the novel jump-cuts through the twentieth century every line resonates with Cunningham's clear, strong. surprisingly lyrical contemporary voice.

Passionate, profound and deeply moving, The Hours is Michael Cunningham's most remarkable achievement to date.

6 editions

4thace@books.theunseen.city reviewed The Hours by Michael Cunningham

The celebrated book fell flat for me

3 stars

I picked up this book I had on my shelves five mnoths ago to read on vacation and only now got around to finishing it. It is told as three parallel stories told in stream of consciousness style about three women experiencing trouble following the prompts of their own hearts owing partly to the people in their lives. There are many colors of blue they feel, chronic barriers to communication, secrets they feel obliged to keep, regrets about the way life has gone, and so on. We start out with the famous one, Virginia Woolf, whose story Mrs. Dalloway informs the way we experience the other two, in a prologue at the very end of her life. There are echoes between the stories concerning mental turmoil, of illness, of self-harm, and more. At the end a link between two of the storylines is uncovered which did seem clever.

I never …

I picked up this book I had on my shelves five mnoths ago to read on vacation and only now got around to finishing it. It is told as three parallel stories told in stream of consciousness style about three women experiencing trouble following the prompts of their own hearts owing partly to the people in their lives. There are many colors of blue they feel, chronic barriers to communication, secrets they feel obliged to keep, regrets about the way life has gone, and so on. We start out with the famous one, Virginia Woolf, whose story Mrs. Dalloway informs the way we experience the other two, in a prologue at the very end of her life. There are echoes between the stories concerning mental turmoil, of illness, of self-harm, and more. At the end a link between two of the storylines is uncovered which did seem clever.

I never really felt in harmony with this book, from the opening prologue which felt manipulative to me, to the way dialogue was used to depict character. I know things don't have to be expressed in a naturalistic way in fiction, but I had a hard time entering into these characters' lives or taking them seriously. Even the scenes I thought were striking along the way felt more artificial than I prefer. I can imagine coming back to this sometime in the future from a different frame of mind and maybe having a more positive response, but it doesn't seem too likely. I don't fault the author's craft as much as feel that the tale is just not for me.