I gave the novel one star simply because Goodreads wouldn't let me give it zero! The book is about three self-absorbed, whiny and spoiled women, all from different eras, complaining and whining about their lives, even though, they essentially have it all (wealth, love, family, friends, etc). The book is vile. The characters are repulsive and the plot is tiresome. I keep asking myself how on earth did this novel win a Pulitzer Prize? There's a huge red sticker on the front of the cover, of the novel, proudly advertising this fact -- it won the prize for fiction in 1999. Are the people that judge these things on crack?

honestly the only reason i wanted to read this book is because it was included in a really pretty edition of Mrs. Dalloway.

also, because i read this immediately after reading Mrs. Dalloway, and in fact in the exact same book as i had read Mrs. Dalloway in, i feel pretty confident in saying that just about everything good about this is pretty much Mrs. Dalloway.

have i said Mrs. Dalloway enough yet?

bottom line: the tragedy of retellings. the best bits are always just the source material.

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؟

Reli este livro na iniciativa qu promovo no instragram #lerLGBTI. Será a minha terceira leitura desde a primeira experiência na primavera de 2000.
Como afirmo tanta vezes este livro é um dos livros da minha vida. Entre ambiente, personagens, temática e narrativa este livro faz de mim uma outra pessoa. Sempre que pego nele o meu diário vais se enchendo de estranhas ideias.

"As Horas" de Michael Cunningham é um livro fascinante que explora a vida de três mulheres em diferentes épocas e como os movimentos sociais do passado influenciaram seus destinos. O livro é um estudo cuidadoso de personagens complexas e das diferentes maneiras pelas quais elas experimentam o amor, a mortalidade e a identidade.

O livro é dividido em três seções, cada uma das quais segue uma das mulheres centrais - Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown e Clarissa Vaughan - enquanto elas enfrentam questões existenciais e lutam para encontrar um sentido em suas vidas. O estilo de escrita de Cunningham é envolvente, fazendo com que o leitor se ligue intensa e profundamente com cada personagem e suas histórias.

Para mim uma das maiores forças do livro é a forma como Cunningham incorpora elementos da vida de Virgínia Woolf em sua ficção, dando ao leitor um vislumbre da mente complexa da autora. Além disso, o livro retrata a luta de Woolf com a depressão e a loucura de uma maneira honesta e sensível.

No geral, "As Horas" é um livro magnífico e único que merece ser lido por qualquer um de nós, alguém que aprecie personagens bem desenvolvidos, uma prosa habilidosa e uma trama envolvente.

“We want so much, don’t we?”

“The Hours” is one of the best books I have read this year. It is astounding! I was drawn in from the first page; the writing is just beautiful prose.
The setup of the novel is that we drop into the lives of 3 woman: Virginia Woolf while she is beginning to write her novel “Mrs. Dalloway” in 1923, Laura Brown, a housewife reading “Mrs. Dalloway” in LA in 1949, and Clarissa a woman who seems to be a real life Mrs. Dalloway in current NYC. Although this premise is intriguing it pales in comparison to what the author, Michael Cunningham, does with it. Interesting side note, the ever-shifting point of view in this text is not limited to these three characters. We get into the heads of quite a few people in this book, and Cunningham does this at times when the novel needs that shift in perspective. It is a wonderful technical achievement.
In one early chapter, Cunningham writes about a mother’s resentment and uncontrollable love for her child, and it is insanely good. How does a writer capture that massive (and true) contradiction so well and in a manner that conveys to the reader the great human truth of that moment?
The closing pages of this novel are stellar writing (have I mentioned how well written this text is?). The writing in “The Hours” is the kind that makes you love the fact that you are a reader and get to experience it.
This quick read is worth your time. It is literary fiction of the highest order, but also a story with great depth and human beauty to it. Really, when it is all said and done this text is a celebration of life, the good and ill, which the final pages of the novel make abundantly clear.
“Heaven only knows why we love it so.”

the prose was genuinely stunning but i struggled connecting with how the stories intertwined. and i didn't care much for clarissa's storyline. laura tho... sheesh. her reflections on suburban living had me cringing and empathizing in a big way.

کتاب، داستان زندگی سه زن رو روایت می کنه. ویرجینیا وولف، زن خانه داری به نام لورا براون و زنی به نام کلاریسا وون. زن هایی که در دوره های زمانی متفاوتی زندگی می کنن ولی تمایلات و اندیشه های نسبتا مشابهی دارن. ویرجینیا وولف که نویسنده ی کتاب "خانم دالووی" هستش و دو زنی که هرکدوم به نوعی از این کتاب الهام گرفتن. و البته در پایان کتاب پرده از راز ارتباط بین این سه زن برداشته میشه.

مایکل کانینگهام قسمت اول رو درمورد زندگی واقعی ویرجینیا وولف نوشته و صحنه هایی از زندگیش رو بازسازی کرده ولی داستان دو زن دیگه، صرفا الهام گرفته از رمان خانم دالووی هستن.

کتاب جذاب و خوش خوانیه. بعد از اینم قصد دارم اول کتاب فیلم نامش رو بخونم و بعد هم فیلمشو ببینم. و البته به شدت راغب شدم کتاب خانم دالووی رو هم بخونم. ویرجینیا وولف از پیشگامان مکتب فمینیسم بوده و متاسفانه تا الان من چیزی ازش نخوندم.

This is Michael Cunningham's tribute to Virginia Woolf.

We have the lives of three women connected in a literary way: Virginia Woolf in her retreat away from London; Clarissa Daloway, an editor preparing a party for her birthday, and, finally, Mrs Brown, a housewife in the 50s living an unsuitable life for herself.

All of then are struggling with her own issues. Virginia is fighting with the fact that she is hearing voices again, writing Mrs Dalloway and trying to make her husband understand that she would die of boredom if she stays in the countryside as the doctors recommend.

Clarissa moves herself through contemporary New York, buying flowers and in a way, reenacting what happens to her according to what Virgina has written in her already classic novel. She visits her dearest friend, ill with AIDS and trying to keep him alive.

Mrs Brown is desperately trying to convince herself that becoming a housewife and mother is what she has desired all her life. Being an invisible bookworn, she couldnt say no to the captsin of the school/medalled veteran asking her to marry him. Now, she feels imprisoned.


Cunningham cleverly interwines their lives, making a path for the reader to discover the secrets they are hidding from themselves in plain sight.

You are going to love the literary reference to Woolf's life and works, and the poetic language the author uses to create beautiful atmospheres that surrounds the characters. You will anguish with the characters' decisions, their hearts full of fear, their minds full of voices.

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.

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.

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.

Great book, but a tiny bit of disappointment, here, but only a really tiny bit, and that's just because I first saw the movie and that also is really good. The idea of Cunningham to pay tribute to Virginia Woolf by working in three time periods and with three split characters (including Woolf herself) is simply brilliant, because with it the special complexity of the person Virginia Woolf really comes into its own. It took me a little bit longer (compared to the movie) to get into the story, but certainly the last third of the book contains fragments of great subtlety and delicacy.

According to me, the very characteristic of Woolf is that hypersensitivity, that 7th sense she had, and that perhaps was also fatal for her, and this book really brings this in full daylight. I can not add much, unless maybe the following quote, on one of the last pages, that also gives an explanation for the title of the book: “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. Heaven only knows why we love it so.”
Rating 3.5 stars.