In 1941, Virginia Woolf put rocks in her coat pockets, waded into a river, and drowned herself. That was the prologue – a disquieting start to The Hours, a book I started reading with nary an inkling of its subject matter.

Little did I know that The Hours was anchored in the life of Virginia Woolf and that of Mrs Dalloway, one of her fictional characters. I read To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway when I was too young to grasp the awe accorded to them; all I recalled at the time of reading was the certain hunch I had that Woolf must have had a mental breakdown at some point in her life. All the wonder surrounding the stream of consciousness eluded me at that time. And I have been afraid of Virginia Woolf ever since.

It was with trepidation that I dipped my toes into the chilling waters of The Hours. I emerged from the haunting, deep darkness of this book with the exhilaration of a survivor. I saw brilliance and beauty in how Michael Cunningham re-created Woolf’s personal story and interwove it with that of two characters in two later time periods who battled mental health issues. The Hours captured the interior world of these three women over the course of one day.

In the foreground is the story of Mrs Woolf in 1923 living with her husband in Richmond, an eight-year exile from London for which she longed, to recover from her headaches and voices, and to write her novel, Mrs Dalloway. The second story relates to the life of Mrs Brown, a pregnant housewife and mother in 1949, who feels trapped and tries to escape from a cake she is baking for her husband’s birthday. She spends long hours in bed reading Mrs Dalloway. In parallel to the story of the fictional Mrs Dalloway is the story set in the 1990s of Clarissa Vaughan who is planning a party for Richard Brown, her best friend and writer who is mortally ill. 'Mrs Dalloway' is Richard’s nickname for Clarissa, with whom he shared a kiss when they were in their teens. The last story is an almost identical modern re-creation of that one day in the life of Mrs Dalloway as told by Woolf.

The Hours grapples with the thought life of vulnerable individuals that include not just these three women but also Richard (the award winning poet who perceives himself as a failure); Louis Waters (Richard’s lover), a playwright who weeps at the paucity of love in this world; and Richie Brown (the anxious 3-year-old who adores his mother and fears losing her). Cunningham distilled with insight and empathy the myriad shifts in mood over the course of an ordinary day: the dark abyss into which any ordinary person can descend when overwhelmed by self-loathing and rejection as well as the sunlit moments where life offers a gift that is accepted with gratitude.

One recognizes the fight several of these characters put up within themselves as they try to regulate their feelings and yield to the shreds of rationality they hold on to. We see this in an episode of Mrs Woolf talking herself out of her antagonism toward her servant, Nelly, who is preparing a lunch she dislikes: “‘A lamb pie sounds lovely,‘ Virginia says, though she must work to stay in character. She reminds herself food is not sinister. Do not think of putrefaction or feces; do not think of the face in the mirror.’”

The Hours is a work of stunning brilliance. It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. I love how the stories of Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Brown seamlessly become one. The language is painfully beautiful and yet one must read it. However, a book like this is perhaps better read when one is not knee-deep in a miry bog of despair. Read it when the heart is stable and strong.

Here's what heterosexual sex is like:

She thinks sometimes, can't help thinking, of those cans of peanuts sold in novelty shops, the ones with the paper snakes waiting to pop out when the lids are opened. There will be no reading tonight.

There will be no heterosexual sex in this novel, in which all the main characters will at least consider suicide and also make out with other girls. At one point Virginia Woolf makes out with her sister, which I'm not sure that really happened.

There are three thematically linked stories here, each spanning a single day. The first stars Virginia Woolf herself as she begins one of her best books, Mrs. Dalloway. The second focuses on a woman named Clarissa in 2001 as she plans her own party, very loosely mirroring the plot of Mrs. Dalloway. (Her friend Richard, veteran of a different kind of war (talking about AIDS, sits in for Septimus.) And the third, smallest and in some way scariest one stars a pregnant Mrs. Brown in the 50s as she reads Mrs. Dalloway in a shitty hotel room.

It's a wonderful book: perfectly planned and executed, exceptionally written, engaging to read and very moving. Cunningham has totally knocked this out of the park, and you can see why it won a Pulitzer. It joins The Master on my list of weird brilliant semi-fictionalized metafictional books starring other authors.

You should read Mrs. Dalloway before this. The Hours contains major spoilers for Mrs. Dalloway, and anyway you should just read Dalloway in general, it's fuckin' awesome.

First, a personal qualm. I find it a bit distasteful to piggyback on the popularity of an original work. Like oh, you know what would be great? Pride and Prejudice WITH ZOMBIES! It’s funny, but come on! There’s no need for a book for that. That’s what AO3 is for. Significant monetary gain off of someone else’s work and life doesn’t feel quite right. Under Mrs Dalloway on AO3 are 4 entries. Where are their fucking Pulitzers?

Anyway. The book starts with Virginia Woolf’s suicide. Here’s the bizarre and voyeuristic description of a real person's suicide, try not to feel uncomfortable, Michael Cunningham will distract you with his beautiful writing (I'm serious, the writing in this segment is lovely). Now that you’re hooked, we’ll follow Mrs Dalloway going about her day in – wait for it – NEW YORK! Because it’s not really Mrs Dalloway, it’s a modern version of her, vapid and one-dimensional. Then we go back to Virginia Woolf who’s alive again, the suicide part was of course a bait that had to be put in the beginning because apparently it’s the most interesting part of her life, and she’s thinking of ideas for her new novel, Mrs Dalloway, initially titled The Hours. Then we jump in time to a woman reading Mrs Dalloway, baking an ugly cake, and thinking of suicide.

Michael Cunningham parades us back and forth between these three storylines and it’s all so mundane and fogettable that you want to ditch this drivel and dust off your copy of Mrs Dalloway. The only thing this book has going for it is its relation to a famous writer. It has no discernible merit on its own. Even the melancholic, calming writing gets on your nerves very quickly and screams third-rate imitation.

Virginia Woolf said she builds interconnected caves behind her characters? Michael Cunningham builds walls. Everyone’s flat as a fucking pancake.

And the absolute worst part is that even when you look at it as an homage to Virginia Woolf, you have to squint really hard to see it. Cunningham concentrates on her suicide, not on her genius. He’s judgemental. His voice is louder than his characters’. And he is OBSESSED with age.

Passages like this abound:

“She’s grown craggy and worn. She’s begun to look as if she’s carved from very porous, gray-white marble. She is still regal, still exquisitely formed, still possessed of her formidable lunar radiance, but she is suddenly no longer beautiful.”

Did Leonard think all this about his wife? Can’t women in their forties (she is only 41 here!) be beautiful?

It's almost impossible to believe, but here you have Michael Cunningham creating women who think that small breasts don’t make you desirable, women who feel embarrassed for being slightly older than their husbands, young girls who aren’t beautiful because they are overweight, women who cannot be attractive because of their age.

Imagine this man making all these commentaries in a book based on an author who created characters like Mrs Ramsay (physically charming, who "felt herself very beautiful", an older mother with young children) and Mrs Dalloway (“She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second year.”). Virginia Woolf loves and understands her characters, Michael Cunningham is separated from them by an enormous gap of superficiality.

I knew right from the start that I will not love this book, but I wasn’t prepared to spend every page in a state of irritation. Although I have enjoyed Michael Cunningham in the past, The Hours is a poor effort of an undeservingly celebrated epigone.

Gorgeous and teeming with life and joy, despite the heavy topics it takes on
A beautiful book which I first read 12 years ago. It captures one day in the live of three women, Laura Brown, housewife in the 50s, Virginia Woolf and Clarissa “Dalloway” Vaughan in modern day New York.

Clarissa her storyline closely but modernly, and free of 1920s social norms, mirrors Mrs. Dalloway of Virginia Woolf, culminating in a suicide.
Mrs Brown seems to be contemplating the same act to escape her married life while finally Virginia Woolf tries desperately to return to “living”, which she equates to London in all its totality, even though it might be, and will be as we already see in the prologue, her undoing.

Every storyline is lovingly portrayed with meticulous detail and very precise language, capturing everyday feelings that at the sametime overwhelm the characters. The book is about missed chances, not being able to every express oneself fully, getting old and, very much, life itself.
I also loved figuring out the connections between the storylines. After twelve years I still thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this book, especially reading it soon after Mrs Dalloway of Virginia Woolf.

I couldn’t put this one down. It’s rare for me to read a book in a couple of days.

Sleep? Forget it.

Most, if not all of you on GR would know this is loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s, Mrs Dalloway – I book I am yet to read.

We follow three women, Virginia Woolf, Clarissa, and Mrs Brown through the course of a day, each woman living in different decade of the twentieth century.

Suicide is a main theme throughout, as one might expect. The thought of living, hour after hour, after hour. For example, Mrs Brown has a loving husband, a little boy, a baby on the way and seems to have the dream life. But she’s as miserable as can be – hour, after hour, after hour. Booking a hotel room, to have time and space to read is her ‘guilty’ pleasure.

Clarissa’s story is impacted by suicide – a tragic story again. There’s also a link between the stories, I did not expect. We all know about Virginia Woolf’s sad demise.

This, for me, this was a profound read. I could not take my eyes off it. There were times my heart beat harder than normal (really). It sounds like this read might be a miserable experience, but it’s not. In fact, the resounding impression this left on me was the state of happiness. The fact that, we experience moments of happiness in life that are undefinable, we may not be doing anything special, we may be doing nothing at all – but at that moment, we are filled with happiness. I have had those and have them still – not when riding my motorcycle or talking to friends or family necessarily – it might be just the sight of a cloud, a tree, or the pink of the inside of my eyelids, listening to the sounds. Detached from what one is witnessing. This really hit home for me – because it is true.

We’re middle-aged and we’re young lovers standing beside a pond. We’re everything all at once. Isn’t it remarkable?

She feels briefly, wonderfully alone, everything ahead of her

We thought her sorrows were ordinary sorrows; we had no idea.

This next one takes my breath away:

They are present, right now, and they have managed, somehow, over the course of eighteen years, to continue loving each other. It is enough. At this moment, it is enough.

Michael Cunningham is new to me (yes, I know), he’s an exceptional writer.

There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds an expectation, to burst open and give us everything we have ever imagined.

Wow.

5 Stars

In his introduction to The Hours, Cunningham writes: "I've never been entirely sure what to call The Hours in relation to Mrs. Dalloway. The best I've been able to come up with is the word "riff"—the way a jazz musician might play variations on an existing piece of great music. […] A riff, then, in the sense of a variation, an homage, a new interpretation that testifies to the potency and scope of the original."

Cunningham's "riff" started out as a simple retelling of the story of Clarissa Dalloway, if she were alive today. How, Cunningham wondered, would she differ, and how would she not, in a world that offered more choices to women? Would she have a job, would she feel free to live with another woman? Or would she essentially duplicate herself a hundred years later, as a wife in Connecticut, still giving parties, getting into her Lexus to buy the flowers herself? Through the novel Cunningham wanted to figure out to what degree humans are the embodiment of their time and circumstances, and to what degree, more fundamentally, the embodiment of themselves?

But as it usually happens with stories, they change over time, and so did Cunningham's initial plan. It evolved into the novel we now know as The Hours, a novel that describes three single days in the lives of three different women—one a writer, one a reader, and one a character in a novel written by a writer and read by a reader. The nonlinear narrative unfolds primarily through the perspectives of the three women across three different decades, with each woman somehow impacted by the real novel Mrs. Dalloway.

n  "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 windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us 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) know 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. Heaven only knows why we love it so..."n

In 1923 Richmond, outside London, author Virginia Woolf writes Mrs. Dalloway and struggles with her mental illness. In 1949 Los Angeles, Laura Brown is reading Mrs. Dalloway while planning a birthday party for her husband, a World War II veteran. In 1999 New York City, Clarissa Vaughan plans a party to celebrate a major literary award received by her good friend and former lover, the poet Richard, who is dying of an AIDS-related illness. Through these three women, Cunningham attempts, as did Woolf, to show the beauty and profundity of every day in a person's life and, conversely, how a person's whole life can be examined through the lens of one single day.

But Cunningham's inspiration does not stop at characters and plot, he also assumed Woolf's famous stream-of-consciousness narrative style (to much lesser success than the pioneer herself, might I add). And so as in Mrs. Dalloway, in The Hours the protagonists' flowing thoughts and perceptions are depicted as they would occur in real life. This means that characters interact not only with the present, but also with memories; it is through these means that we know of their personal history and backstory.

Call it "riff", or retelling, or homage, or rewriting. I don't care. I personally don't think that Cunningham's The Hours is a success. That it turned out much less polished as its classic predecessor was to be expected, but I'm actually frustrated by how exploitative the whole affair was. I don't appreciate that Cunningham used the real Virginia Woolf as a character in his novel and truly didn't think that he did her any justice. In the prologue to his novel, he describes her suicide in detail and describes what she thought in that moment (which is so fucking presumptuous!), prints her real suicide note in full, and describes how her husband found it. It's distasteful. Throughout the novel he constantly characterises Woolf as the "drowned woman" and reduces her to her suicide/death. Even the other characters who engage with her work, are preoccupied with it, when Laura reads Mrs. Dalloway, she wonders: "How could someone who was able to write a sentence like that—who was able to feel everything contained in a sentence like that—come to kill herself?" Well, I dunno, Laura. Maybe because she was depressed. And maybe it's none of your fucking business.

There's also this suuuuuper weird moment in which Cunningham describes an interaction between Woolf and her sister Vanessa: "Nelly turns away and, although it is not at all their custom, Virginia leans forward and kisses Vanessa on the mouth. It is an innocent kiss, innocent enough, but just now, in this kitchen, behind Nelly's back, it feels like the most delicious and forbidden of pleasures. Vanessa returns the kiss." I literally cannot explain to you what is happening in this scene. These two are literally real-life SISTERS (and portrayed as such in the novel)??? What the heck is going on??? It made me so uncomfortable.

And there are many moments like these throughout the book that made me uncomfortable and that just made me realise that Cunningham doesn't understand women, or at least is incapable of capturing them authentically in his fiction. For instance, when Laura looks at her son Richie, she thinks: "At this moment she could devour him, not ravenously but adoringly, infinitely gently, the way she used to take the Host into her mouth before the married an converted. She is full of a love so strong so unambiguous, it resembles appetite." I don't think so, buddy. This does not authentically capture what motherhood feels like, it's not an "appetite" and it's not a "devouring". Sit your ass down.

On the topic of Laura and Richie though, I have to say that, whilst I saw the "twist" from a mile away (young Richie of Laura's POV would turn out adult Richard in Clarissa's POV), it was so harrowingly sad (but well done) to have Laura failing her suicide attempt (due to being overwhelmed with her life as a mother and wife), only for her son, the person for whom she wanted to stay alive, to die by suicide as an adult. It must've been such a sucker punch in the gut for her to hear these news.

On top of all of these issues, I also have to admit that I found the whole affair to be simply boring. Cunningham is not a good writer, and I had a hard time connecting to anything he was saying. His style is so dramatic, if not pretentious, and I was rolling my eyes throughout the whole thang.

Nonetheless, I want to end on a happy note and point out two things that I really enjoyed. First of all, it was refreshing how gender and sexuality were handled in The Hours. Whilst Woolf couldn't give us more than queer subtext, due to the constraints of her own time and circumstances, Cunningham can go full out. He shows us three generations of lesbian and bisexual women. He points out that Virginia Woolf was known to have affairs with women, Laura Brown kisses Kitty in her kitchen, and Clarissa Vaughan is in a relationship with Sally who was previously Richard's lover. It's nice that all of this is finally in the open, and not hidden away.

And second of all, there are two quotes in this book that just GET ME. There's this one quote toward the end that sums up depression really well. It's so bleak and sad, but it means a lot to me. Before his suicide, Richard tells Clarissa: "But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick." I won't forget "and then, my god, there's another" for a long time. It's the worst feeling in the world and it's a hard to fight your way out of that. And then there's this other quote that just makes me wanna cry because it reminds me of my best friend: "Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together." It's true for me, it's true for us. I don't think I'll ever form a relationship like the one we have ever again.

But to sum it all up, at one point, Cunningham has Clarissa say: "I know all about making a splash. It isn't hard. If you shout loud enough, for long enough, a crowd will gather to see what all the noise is about." And that's kinda how I feel about his novel. With a project like this, it was easy to get a crowd that would gather to see what "all the noise" is about. Well, I saw it. And I didn't like it one bit. Sorry.

Our lives are made up of years, of days, of hours. What happens around us on one particular day can make us take a blind, or even desperate, leap forward, or it can force us to look at life with patient gratitude. Each one of us would make different choices, according to our own personal system of values and beliefs, our sense of reasoning, our temperament and most importantly, our state of mind at the final hours of that particular day.

With lyrical prose, the author knits and weaves the events of one particular day in the lives of three women living in separate spaces and times. One of them is Virginia Woolf, who is recovering from her mental illness in a London suburb in 1923, while the other two are fictional variants of the leading character of her novel Mrs. Dalloway, one a modern-day bisexual (Clarissa Vaughan) living in New York in the late 90s and the other a bored suburban housewife (Laura Brown) living in post-WWII Los Angeles. The decision each of them makes at the end of their particular day has repercussions on their individual life.

I found this passage deeply touching:

“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.”

First I saw the movie; then I read Mrs Dalloway; and finally I read the book. With this unusual order, I really liked it. But given that a lot of other reviewers seem dismissive, it's possible that Cunningham is getting a free ride from Virginia Woolf, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman.

Whatever the truth of the matter, and despite the fact that I did it more or less by accident, I recommend the recipe!

Rating: 5.0/5.0

Genre:
Historical Fiction + Literary Fiction

Synopsis:
The Hours is the story of three women at different time frames. Laura Brown living in the 1950s with her husband and son begins to feel the constraints of her perfect family and home. Virginia Woolf is writing her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. And Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party for her friend. By the end, all these stories will be intertwined.

Book Structure:
The book is 226 pages. Every chapter is about one of the three characters. The story is told from a third person's perspective. This edition has a stunning cover!


“What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. And there it is... It was death. I chose life.”

My Thoughts:
This book is thought-provoking! so beautifully written and shall remain with you for a long time. The movie adaptation starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore is one of my all-time favorites. I have watched it a long time ago and this time I needed to pick up and read the book first before rewatching it. There are some minor differences as I can recall but the difference I clearly remember between the two forms of media is that in the movie Clarissa is the one who breaks down when Louis visits her (I still can recall how brilliant was Streep in that scene) while in the book it is Louis who suffers from a breakdown.

Before reading this book I highly recommend you read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (Another great novel). Reading Mrs. Dalloway should make you understand the beauty of this novel and appreciate the many references to it in this novel. Mrs. Dalloway is what connects these three ladies. One is writing her (Virginia Woolf), another one is reading that day in her life (Laura Brown) and the third one is living Mrs. Dalloway's life (Clarissa Vaughan). This book has many characters, they are all well written and developed. Usually, when there are many characters in a book it becomes difficult to appreciate them all or like them all, but here I loved all the characters. I related to their insecurities, hopes, and despairs.


“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.”

Michael Cunningham created three passionate yet sad worlds for the readers. Three worlds lived through the eyes of three women with all the emotions of love, grief, and longing mixed together and combined into such a deeply moving and profound story of life and death. No wonder his poetic writing style won the hearts of many readers, lots of praise, and many awards including the prestigious Pulitzer Prize.

The Hours, named using the original title of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, feels like a biography of pain and depression. We all have hours of grief, depression, and sorrow but it is up to us if we want those hours to continue or stop them altogether in one way or another. This masterpiece gets five shining stars from me. Highly recommended ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐


“But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.”

Following the film, I wanted to discover this story that moved me deeply in cinema.
Many books deal with women and their lives, with varying fortunes. Here we are at the top of the basket.
This author can create a universe that takes the reader to the lives and hearts of these extraordinary women in such an ordinary world.
The style is delicate and profound. There is no easy writing.
The author wishes to propose an ample, in-depth, intelligent text that allows the reader to immerse himself in multiple universes without being destabilized by a lower quality according to the periods.
The author carefully portrays the different periods at the heart of the plot.
Few broad, sincere, and intelligent novels give readers the impression of having advanced their perception of human characters.
While this novel requires a particular reader's involvement, contrary to what adolescents think, literature must be adult to be alive.
In short, it must discover a novel of very high quality here.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham was a beautiful and lyrical story about the lives of two women all intersecting dramatically in the last chapter in unforeseen ways culminating in an explosive ending that I did not see coming. The common thread throughout the book being the writings and the life of Virginia Woolf in the lives of each of the women as they struggled with their own identity and place in contemporary society. The Prologue of this lovely novel begins with the final days of Virginia Woolf in London in 1941 leading up to her suicide. That was the backdrop as one is introduced to Clarissa Vaughn, a book editor living in Manhattan, and Laura Brown, a housewife and young mother in postwar Los Angeles.

This book was truly deserving of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as Michael Cunningham is one of our great writers with his beautiful and lyrical prose, a few of my favorite quotations:

n  

"It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another."

"There is true art in it, this command of tea and dinner tables; this animating correctness. Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movement of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to great literature's only subjects; but if men's standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed."

"What a lark! What a plunge! It seems that she can survive, she can prosper, if she has London around her; if she disappears for a while into the enormity of it, brash and brazen now under a sky empty of threat, all the uncurtained windows (here a woman's grave profile, there the crown of a carved chair), the traffic, men and women going lightly by in evening clothes; the smells of wax and gasoline, of perfume, as someone, somewhere (on one of these broad avenues, in one of these white, porticoed houses), plays a piano; as horns bleat and dogs bay, as the whole raucous carnival turns and turns, blazing, shimmering; as Big Ben strikes the hours, which fall in leaden circles over the partygoers and the omnibuses, over stone Queen Victoria seated before the Palace on her shelves of geraniums, over the parks that lie sunken in their shadowed solemnity behind black iron fences."

n

As long as I can remember, I've always been into movies, and at some point during high school, Nicole Kidman was my fave actress. I was obsessed with her and wanted to see everything she was in. During that time, she had a great run of leading roles. First, there was The Others, then there was Moulin Rouge! but then there was Stephen Daldry's adaptation of this book that had her as the frontrunner for the Best Actress Oscar as soon as it was released. I had to see it. The rest, they say, is history.

Many years later I've finally gotten my hands on the book and finally, FINALLY, read it, and holy shit. I was blown away. I knew it had won the Pulitzer back in the '90s, so I figured the probability of it being good was pretty high. I just did not expect it to be THIS good. The writing is sumptuous; Cunningham writes like a god. If you've seen the film, you know what happens- it's about three different women in three different time periods all connected by the work of Virginia Woolfe, namely Mrs. Dalloway. Now, although I've owned a copy of that book for years, I've never read it. What I can say is that having read The Hours, it's quite possibly one of the best books I've ever read. It is so fucking beautiful. And it's not even one of those books that you realize how good it is as you go along- you realize it on the first damn page. My goodness.

At less than 250 pages, it is the perfect length- not too short, not too long. The film changed a few minor details, which is to be expected, but if you've watched and loved it, then please read this. You owe yourself that.