When you read a book like The Hours, you have to decide whether you want to see it as a work in its own right or as an illumination of something else. In this case, The Hours can either be seen as a standalone novel telling the parallel stories of three women in three time periods or as a complementary text to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

I struggled with The Hours. (Full disclosure: I struggled with it mostly because I heard Michael Cunningham speak at a screening, and he was an arrogant, pompous snob. So I didn’t want to like The Hours. Or be impressed by it.)

Unfortunately, I do rather like it, and I was impressed by parts of it. But I wasn’t smitten—and I don’t think it’s completely due to a grudge. And truly, the Pulitzer committee must have had a dearth of options in 1999. (I just looked it up. By my measure, they did.)

At its core, the novel plumbs the quiet desperation of three women. They struggle with finding a purpose, with their sexuality, with building a healthy home, and more—and their insecurities rise and fall as their hopes and dreams clash with the humdrum of every day successes and failures. Cunningham tells their stories with a great deal of empathy. He lets us into their minds and reveals to us the kinds of doubts and self-examination that haunt all of us, and he does so with some sensitivity.

And yet, many elements of The Hours feel cliché to me: the plot turns, the characters’ desperation, the coincidental interactions. They feel calculated more than they feel human, designed for the purpose of packing an emotional punch. The characters sometimes even seem to slip—caricature-like—beyond sentimentality and into saccharine. Made into a movie (I haven’t seen it), I imagine it would fit nicely in between soaps.

And yet, and yet, as I asked myself whether I would teach this, I had to acknowledge that it is ripe for discussion. What is the range of the characters’ emotions? Where do they come from? How do Cunningham’s descriptive bursts set up the characters’ self-doubt? Why tell the story of Clarissa and Lauren and not of Richard? Students can dig in, if not to the story and to the prose, then to the space opened up between or within them.

Finally, the text did raise a recurring question for me: how do novels with third-person omniscient narrators resolve the issue of voice? Here, as in other similar novels, the voice changes as it narrates the lives of different characters. It slips in and out of the characters’ voices without declaring so. With one character, the prose is spangled with “almost” and “sort of,” seeming to reflect the character’s wispiness, while with another, the sentences are short and clipped. This seems wildly undisciplined, or at least inconsistent, to me.

Do I recommend it? Mmk. (sigh)
Would I teach it? If I were desperate. It would sustain it.
Partnered texts: Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
Lasting impression: Cunningham’s stories build small buildings out of blocks on our living room floor. He labels them with the names of a few buildings we’ve seen before, and draws some nice pictures on some others. We look at the result and remark to each other about how nicely they reflect what we know and want to think. It’s pretty neat what he did.

”We throw our parties; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep--it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’ve very fortunate, by time itself.”

It’s about the hours right? Those few precious hours over a lifetime when we feel we have a chance to do something special, to prove that we can do something that will forever immortalize us as someone exceptional.

It was Charlotte who pressed this book upon me. We were at a party conducted by a Mrs. Clarissa Galloway.

“I hear you are on a reading binge.” She’d leaned in close, as she had a tendency to do with me. Her lips mere millimeters away from my ear. It made me shiver somewhere in the core of me.

When I was between assignments, which was all too frequent, I would read book after book; usually I would be in the middle of at least three at any one time. I was getting about four hours of sleep a night which right now was making me a cheap drunk. One martini was going to be more than enough.

“The Hours by Michael Cunningham, didn’t they make a film out of it with Kidman?”

She nodded. She leaned in close again. I often wondered if she knew what she did to me. “The book won a Pulitzer Prize. Catherine told me you just finished reading Mrs. Dalloway. This is a terrific follow-up.“

The sisters.

You couldn’t really be involved with one without being involved with the other. Catherine, my girlfriend, was writing a novel. It was brilliant in fact, but now was somewhat weighed down with its own brilliance. She was happy with the beginning and the ending, but the middle was not living up to the standards of the rest. Charlotte designed book covers for publishing companies. She had a gift for it, but frequently had to endure someone further up the chain asking for modifications, her masterpieces often becoming something more commercially appealing and soulless. When I was doing research on Virginia Woolf, before reading Mrs. Dalloway, I couldn’t help thinking of Catherine as Virginia and Charlotte as Vanessa.

”Vanessa laughs. Vanessa is firm of face, her skin a brilliant, scalded pink. Although she is three years older, she looks younger than Virginia, and both of them know it. If Virginia has the austere, parched beauty of a Giotto fresco, Vanessa is more like a figure sculpted in rosy marble by a skilled but minor artist of the late Baroque. She is distinctly earthly and even decorative figure, all billows and scrolls….”

As usual, I wasn’t really sure why I was at this party. I thought with remorse of the lost pages of reading the party had already cost me. I could see the books strategically scattered around the room of the flat. A book by each of my favorite reading places. This party was bad for me, and if it was not good for me, it had to be an absolute torture for Catherine.

I looked past Charlotte’s large, attentive eyes and could see that Catherine was pale. Her complexion was always pale, but there were various shades of pale that would tell me exactly what was going on with her. She closed her eyes and took too long to open them. I could tell it was time to go.

I leaned in and kissed Charlotte’s ear, raising the stakes, and then muttered in the sea shell of her ear that I was going to take Catherine home. Charlotte always smelled so good, but I was never able to quite identify the scent, something old, something new. Somehow it would be breaking the rules of the game to ask her. I walked over to Catherine and put my arm around her and kissed her on the side of her mouth. She looked at me with surprise. I could see the slender flutes of her nose flutter as she took me in. Could it be that she could sense her sister’s scent even among the mingling fragrances of flowers that filled Mrs. Galloway’s party?

She put her slender, fluted fingers on my shoulder. “I can feel one coming on.”

“I’m here to take you home.”

”She can feel the headache creeping up the back of her neck. She stiffens. No, it’s the memory of the headache, it’s her fear of the headache, both of them so vivid as to be at least briefly indistinguishable from the onset of the headache itself.”

I went to see Robert the next day. I’d read most of The Hours last night. Charlotte had been right. It was the perfect followup to Mrs. Dalloway. Robert had been my friend almost my entire life or at least for the segment of my life that I still wished to claim. He’d had a good career on the stage, had mother issues of course, and had always been unapologetically gay. The young nurse from Hospice was taking a vial of blood from him when I arrived. There was something so intimate about blood letting. I averted my eyes as if I’d just caught her furtively giving him a hand job.

“I’m so weak. This is it, my friend.” His voice, the voice that had boomed out to theaters full of people, had been reduced to a whisper.

I patted his hand. He weakly grasped it. I left my fingers there surrounded by the parchment of his hand. “You’ve rallied before.” I’d meant to put exuberance into that sentence, but somehow it all went wrong. My voice cracked and tears sprang to my eyes.

“Oh, come on now. Tears now? You should have wept with joy when I looked like a young Marlon Brando. Not now, not over this decrepit body. If you were a true friend, you’d pick me up and hurl me out that window.”

I thought of Septimus from Mrs. Dalloway and Richard from The Hours. It was almost too much.

“Don’t say that.” My voice was still shaking. I freed my hand from his grasp to wipe my eyes. When I put my hand back on the bed, his hand was gone.

“Do you think six floors would be enough to kill me? God, what a tragedy if it only breaks my bones, and leaves me somehow alive with fresh sources of pain. I was thinking about it the other day. I wouldn’t want to fall on the concrete. I want to land on a car. I want to explode through the top like they show in the movies. You own a car, don’t you? Couldn’t you park it beneath my window?”

“You are hurting me, Robert.”

He sighed. Closing those magnificent blue eyes that had mesmerized women and men in equal numbers, “That is the last thing that I want to do to you, my friend.”

When I got back to the flat, they must not have heard me. Catherine was leaning over Charlotte. ”Virginia leaned forward and kisses Vanessa on the mouth. It is an innocent kiss, innocent enough, but just now,...it feels like the most delicious and forbidden of pleasures. Vanessa returns the kiss.” I wanted to wrap my arms around both of them and nudge them across the room to the bed. I wondered if Leonard Woolf had ever had such desires? They might have willingly went, but then what? By trying to hold them closer, I’d only lose them both.

I cleared my throat and hung up my jacket. When I turned around, they were both looking at me with clear, intelligent eyes. Two sisters, so different, but so much alike as to be indistinguishable when standing in the same space.

It was hard not to think about the big stone. ”She selects one roughly the size and shape of a pig’s skull. The one that took her down to the depths of the river. The one that would not let her escape the embrace of the water even if her natural desire for self-preservation had kicked in. The stone was too real to be denied.

Catherine had read Mrs. Dalloway and was now reading The Hours. She had needed a break from her own writing anyway. Reading sometimes gave her a fresh source of inspiration. I wasn’t sure about her reading either book, but both together could enhance her already acute suicidal tendencies. I’d seen her more than once raking a butter knife across her wrists as if testing how it would feel. I’d had the gas oven taken out and replaced it with an electric one.

I read her diary.

She wasn’t particularly careful with it. She left it out all the time, rarely tucking it back under the mattress on our bed. I don’t know if she trusted me not to read it or she, being a writer, always wanted an audience for her writing. ”Everything she sees feels as if it’s pinned to the day the way etherized butterflies are pinned to the board.” She was obviously feeling trapped. Like Leonard Woolf decided to do with Virginia, I arranged to take Catherine to the country for a month. She was being overstimulated in the city.

Robert threw himself out the window.

He asked the nurse to open the window to give him some air. The stubborn bastard crawled across the floor, pulled himself up the wall, and threw himself out the window. Though he would have preferred a Rolls Royce, he landed on a Mercedes.

Six floors, as it turned out, was enough.

Two days after we reached the country Catherine disappeared. As I walked the river, along with every other able body in the county, I kept thinking about a stone the size of a pig’s skull.

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Tick, Mrs. Dalloway. Tock, Mrs. Woolf. Tick, Mrs. Brown. Tock, Mrs. Dalloway…again.
Reviewing The Hours I find myself stuck somewhere in between tick and tock. Reading a novel, poem, play, screenplay, it’s often easy for me to lose touch with reality and completely absorb myself into the world of a story. I lose touch with myself. The sounds around me. The smells hovering under my nose. The world happening around me. Time elapses into nothingness.
The Hours, however, made me fully aware of my position in reality, the noises of the outside world, the stuffiness of the air, and the slowness of time. In brief, The Hours leaves me feeling strangely hollow and irked.

The book alternates between the stories of three women Tick: Mrs. Dalloway; Tock: Mrs. Woolf; and Tick: Mrs. Brown - all whom appear vaguely dissatisfied with their lives. It remains rather obscure and somewhat misleading, until the very end, as to how their narratives converge, apart from their longing and entertaining of the possibility of a life different and perhaps more meaningful than that which they find themselves trapped within.

Tick: Mrs. Dalloway.
Also known as Clarissa Vaughn, heroine of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. An exquisitely loyal friend, caretaker and avidly nostalgic observer of the writer and AIDS sufferer, Richard Brown.

Tock: Mrs. Woolf.
Despairing, yet romantically hopeful, Mrs. Woolf spends her ticks and tocks dreaming up stories and possible plot turns for the writing of her new novel. Residing in Richmond with her protective husband, Leonard, Mrs. Woolf longs for the fog, business and sweet transparency of London.

Tick: Mrs. Brown.
Dear Mrs. Brown. Beseeched in suburban Los Angeles with a loving husband, Dan and curiously observant son, Richie, Laura Brown hopes without knowing what she hopes for. She lives without knowing what she lives for. She escapes without knowing what she is escaping from.

Tick tock, tick tock go the hours.
One day; one utterly transformative and inescapable 24 hours of each of the women's lives is slowly narrated, beginning with life, and ending with the possibility of death as means of escape from a banal, yet disheartening existence. Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Woolf and Mrs. Brown all seem to lead banal, ordinary lives dealing with the daily hardships typical of the era in which they live, but are curiously described in a way that renders them different, yet also relatable. They have a home, health, and « happiness » yet find themselves unhappy and nostalgic for a feeling or situation that perhaps may not even exist.

Time, the passing of time, the inevitability of time lies at the heart of the novel, as it is time, it’s passing, and its prevalence that causes each of the narratives to ultimately converge in the book’s final pages.
Although the plots and events of the stories prove to be difficult to piece together and disallow for a completely pleasurable « readerly » experience one CANNOT deny the beauty and artistic way in which each character, event, place is illustrated. Cunningham’s language is brilliantly seductive and offers an evocative portrayal of life and how we, as readers, lovers, feelers - humans - experience time, the passing of time, and the inevitability of time.
In therms of plot, I would not recommend The Hours (who cares if it won the Pulitzer Prize or that it’s Oprah’s favorite book or that Meryl Streep doesn’t shut up about it), but in terms of language, it’s impossible not to utterly fall in love with Michael Cunningham’s words:
We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. 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…
- and I’ll leave you to ponder on that dear, dear babblers.

Yours Truly,
Delphine, the Babbler

Nadal nie mogę wyjść z podziwy, jak diametralnie - w ciągu zaledwie kilku dni - zmienił się mój stosunek do tego tytułu. Pierwsze kilkanaście stron przewertowałam bez większego zainteresowania, a nawet z lekką dozą dezorientacji (zrzucam to teraz na karb dławiącej mnie wówczas gorączki). Drobne rozeznanie w opiniach sprawiło, że zapragnęła poznać tę historię, bez względu na to, ile ofiar będę zmuszona ponieść (pomimo swojej niewielkiej objętości, nie jest to coś, co przeczytacie na jedno posiedzenie). Zaufajcie czasem intuicji. Zapewniam, że warto.
Odczuwa się pewien dysonans, pomiędzy ukazanym w "Godzinach" dojmującym smutkiem, a absolutnie wspaniałym językiem, który posłużył do jego opisu. Chcąc być szczerą, zauważyć muszę, że zabrakło mi kompetencji do zrozumienia niektórych posunięć bohaterów, ich myśli. 
Czy jest to szczególnie problematyczne? Nie sądzę.
Żywię nadzieję, że kolejne "podejścia" (które uczynię z prawdziwą przyjemnością) okażą się owocne w coraz to nowe wnioski i przemyślenia. Na ten moment, jestem oczarowana wszystkim, co tylko mogło do mnie trafić. 

PS: pojawienie się pewnego nazwiska przypomniało mi o dorocznym maratonie z moim ulubionym filmem sygnowanym nazwiskiem Johnny'ego Deppa. Dziękuję, +0,005 do oceny (żartuję, nie ma tak dobrze). Lecę szykować chusteczki.

Pulitzer Prize winner: An exquisite tale, told in a 'stream of consciousness' style of a day in the lives of three amazing women connected by a Virginal Woolf novel. The tale covers symbiotic relationships, homosexuality, mortality, suicide, mental illness, AIDS…. It is an exquisite piece of work. I. Kid. You. Not! 8 out of 12. Now I don't feel so bad for not liking James Joyce's Ulysses - this is how to rock stream of consciousness, in my opinion.

2010 read

و ما معنى الندم اذا ما لم يكن لديك خيار؟



رواية عن الهروب بكل اساليبه
هل سننجح فيه؟
هل سنتراح بعده؟
و هل سنسعد بعده؟

رواية عن الأمومة بكل اشكالها
هل سننجح فيها؟
هل سنسعد بها؟
هل سنتهرب منها؟

رواية عن الوقت
هل سيسرقنا؟
هل سنسعد به؟
ام سنهرب من كل ساعاته؟

This is a truly beautiful book. Its language is rich and its premise is a reader’s dream of what literature should do at its best: connect, converse and contain all that haunts us when contemplating our human predicament.

I don’t know whether Michael Cunningham set out to write this novel in order to pay tribute to Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” or if that book just happened to serve as the perfect vehicle for his own reflections on Love, Life and Death. Whatever the case, the result is a masterful narration that uses Mrs. Dalloway's plot and character as the link between three women, Virginia Woolf included, who share the same fears and yearn for more meaningful lives although they live in different times and places.
Cunningham improvises on Woolf’s theme of Time, how it unrelentingly flows and how it mercifully seems to stop sometimes, to offer us those precious, wholesome moments that keep us carrying on; or not…

I think the book is also a tribute to the reading experience itself; how readers find themselves containing and contained in certain authors and fictional characters. How reading suspends us in time, has us occupying a space that is neither here nor there, a unique time-bubble that is common secret among those eager to live in it every once in a while. How authors and readers find themselves engaged in a conversation that transcends time and place.

It helps but is not necessary to have read the original. This book stands on its own but the pleasure is enhanced if one can spot the references to the source material and the way Cunningham manages to weave them into his novel.
I underlined so many dazzling sentences. I put exclamation marks next to so many passages, along with little arrows to help remind me exactly what was worth pointing out. I scribbled words such as ‘self-detachment’, ‘remorse’, ‘continuity’, ‘consolation’, ‘transcendence’, planning to elaborate on them in this review. In the end the author perfectly summed it up himself in this paragraph ... the way a painter might brush a final line of color onto a painting and save it from incoherence:

Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep – it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. 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, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

What more could I possibly add except for my admiration?

Can an author presume to take one of the best novels in literary history as a model, transpose its story and narrative technique into modern times, and create a link between the classic and his own book in the process? That sets the bar for the book very high, but no problem for Michael Cunningham. What he does with Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is quite outstanding. I had seen the film version of this book (The Hours) with Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore several times and think it is an excellent film. Usually the novels take a back seat for me if I've already seen the story. In this case, that was a mistake. Of course, the movie story about the three women in different decades who all feel their lives are a lie and each put their own life behind someone else is much more intense and profound. The streams of thoughts in the book have to be translated into long dialogues in order to be effective, which makes the film more loquacious than the book.

The triple jump from Virginia Woolf, who is writing Mrs. Dalloway, to a woman in the 1950s, who is reading Mrs. Dalloway, to a modern woman in the 1990s, who is nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway because she resembles the character in Woolf's novel so much, is simply ingenious. One experiences Clarissa Dalloway in this way in a completely new way, senses how much of the woman always looking out for others was also in Virginia Woolf herself. Sees again the thoughts of death and the longing to break out of the previous life in Laura Brown, who in the 50s feels a disgust for herself in the housewife and mother role. And then sees the many parallels between Mrs. Dalloway and Clarissa Vaughan in New York, who also wants to throw a party for a friend in the evening, getting the flowers, roaming the big city, and listening again and again to the sound of the striking hour that makes the day and life finite. It's just terrifically interwoven. A new favorite book and a great longing to read Mrs. Dalloway again.

----------------------

Kann man sich als Autor anmaßen, sich einen der besten Romane der Literaturgeschichte als Vorbild zunehmen, dessen Geschichte und die Erzähltechnik in die Neuzeit zu übertragen und dabei eine Verbindung zwischen dem Klassiker und dem eigenen Buch zu erstellen? Da wird die Messlatte für das Buch gleich sehr hoch gelegt, aber kein Problem für Michael Cunningham. Was er hier mit Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway anstellt, finde ich ganz hervorragend. Die Verfilmung dieses Buch (The Hours) mit Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman und Julianne Moore hatte ich schon mehrmals gesehen und halte es für einen ausgezeichneten Film. Normalerweise rücken die Romane für mich in den Hintergrund, wenn ich die Geschichte schon gesehen habe. Das ist in diesem Fall ein Fehler gewesen. Natürlich ist die Filmvorlage über die drei Frauen in unterschiedlichen Dekaden, die alle ihr Leben als eine Lüge empfinden und ihr eigenes Leben jeweils hinter einer anderen Person hinten anstellen, wesentlich intensiver und tiefgründiger. Die Gedankenströme im Buch müssen halt filmisch in lange Dialoge übertragen werden, um zu wirken, was denn Film geschwätziger macht als das Buch.

Den Dreisprung von Virginia Woolf, die gerade Mrs. Dalloway schreibt, zu einer Frau in den 50er Jahren, die gerade Mrs. Dalloway liest, zu einer modernen Frau in den 90er Jahren, die den Spitznamen Mrs. Dalloway trägt, weil sie der Figur in Woolfs Roman so ähnelt, ist einfach genial. Man erlebt Clarissa Dalloway auf diese Weise ganz neu, spürt, wie viel von der sich stets nach anderen richtenden Frau auch in Virginia Woolf selbst steckte. Sieht die Gedanken an den Tod und die Sehnsucht nach dem Ausbrechen aus dem bisherigen Leben in Laura Brown wieder, die in den 50er Jahren einen Ekel vor sich selbst in der Hausfrau- und Mutterrolle empfindet. Und sieht dann die vielen Parallelen zwischen Mrs. Dalloway und Clarissa Vaughan in New York, die auch am Abend eine Party für einen Freund geben möchte, die Blumen besorgt, durch die Großstadt streift und immer wieder dem Klang der schlagenden Stunde lauscht, die den Tag und das Leben endlich machen. Das ist einfach grandios ineinander verwoben. Ab sofort ein neues Favoritenbuch und die große Sehnsucht, Mrs. Dalloway erneut zu lesen.

I don't have much to say about this. The words refuse to dislodge from the cobwebs of my mind. I love this book.

I'm not entirely sure why I liked this novel as much as I did - plot-wise it's quite hard to sum up any more than what is already given in the blurb.

Cunningham portrays a day of the live in three very different but very connected women: Clarissa Vaughan, a middle-aged woman living in New York in the 1990s; Laura Brown, a young house-wife in 1940s Los Angeles; and Virginia Woolf herself in 1920s London, or thereabouts. Virginia Woolf has just begun writing Mrs Dalloway, Laura Brown is trying to find time in between her household-duties to read Mrs Dalloway, and Clarissa is nick-named Mrs Dalloway by a close friend and ex-lover who is dying of AIDS.

Cunningham manages to write from a woman's perspective incredibly well, and the fact that he managed to juggle three very different women in three very different situations as beautifully and honestly as he did is to be commended. The novel explores various themes including loneliness, the role of women in society and particularly in relation to men, and of course the ever-present thought (and sometimes lure) of the grave.

I read Mrs Dalloway a couple of years ago, and although I wasn't a big fan of the stream of consciousness style of this classic, I liked how the writing was at times mirrored in this book, particularly in parts of Clarissa Vaughan's narrative. The beginning of her day very much mirrored Clarissa Dalloway's morning, and I appreciated the link between the two texts there. In terms of my favourite perspective, I have to give it to Laura Brown - I felt her frustration at her housewife-life and the role she had to play with her needy son and husband. Her thought process was suffocating at times, and I really felt for her, even if at times her thoughts could be somewhat selfish. As for Virginia Woolf, although of course her storyline was fictionalised, I still felt like I was getting in the real author's head at times, and I loved the insight into her relationship with her sister Vanessa (which was researched I believe through their letters and diaries).

I'd recommend this to everyone, whether you're a fan of Mrs Dalloway or not. It's a quick easy read, but quite poignant in its own way.

Tive curiosidade de ler este livro após saber que o filme era baseado no mesmo e tendo já lido o famoso Mrs Dalloway, de V Woolf, essencial para a compreensão desta obra.

Cunningham conta um dia na vida de cada uma das três protagonistas - abordando temas como a depressão, a feminilidade, a sexualidade - de uma forma eficaz e subtil até ao ponto em que estas três narrativas se interesetam no final da história. Gostei muito do retrato de uma dona de casa dos anos 50, presa a um papel que não lhe assenta, de um poeta moribundo que se vê a braços com uma homenagem feita talvez por pena, e de Woolf, uma das minhas personalidades preferidas da literatura.

Aconselho este livro a todos os que tiverem gostado de Mrs Dalloway, por se tratar de uma homenagem e complemento muito interessantes!

This book made me want to weep and to sing with joy.