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

4.5

The bursts of bright, sparkling descriptions of a perfect moment in a perfect day, the moment that makes everything clear for just a second, that is what kept me going through a story full of sadness and regret.

The sentence and story structure and the microscopic observations of everyday life gives us a story of three women who grapple with their befuddled lives and struggle to get through expectations of lovers, husbands, children, and society. Life is full of doubt, regret, death, and sickness. “Heaven only knows why we love it so.”

Unforgivably cringeworthy!

I have read and liked Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I enjoyed being inside Clarissa’s head in that one ordinary day. I saw what she saw, I felt what she felt and heard the Big Ben chiming and announcing each hour through her ears.

This book read like an apologia for being a woman. It is more a parody than “Draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf”.
Imagine copying a Picasso, adding a couple of cubes and lines here and there and calling it your own. It may be yours, but no matter what you do, your work has lost its originality.

The author’s imitating Mrs. Dalloway and Woolf’s style of writing was disastrously in vain. What was the purpose of the book? What was the point? That women spend way too much time philosophizing about every single item they observe in daily life?
You know who does that? People who have everything- family, money, job, house, in short, a good life and are bored to death of their every day richness. People like the women portrayed in this book.
In a word, the author has taken the concept of ‘Stream of Consciousness’ to a whole new level. Everything is analyzed to death.

“She runs down the stairs and is aware (she will be ashamed of this later) of herself as a woman running down a set of stairs, uninjured, still alive.”

What does that even mean? Why ashamed? If it was a man would he have been ashamed? What is there to be ashamed of anyway? Is it because of being a woman and running down the stairs? Is it because of being an uninjured woman? Is it because of being a woman who is still alive? Or is it the ‘being a woman’ which is a disgrace??

There is a whole chapter about a child blowing candles. The thoughts that are produced by the mother’s brain while her 3 year old child is in the process of blowing a candle is absurd to say the least. In fact most of the thoughts thought are absurd.

A beautifully phrased novel about how awful it is to be a wife and mother, to be an ill adult residing in less than splendor, and to have once loved either of these two life-sucks-let's-die depressives. I do not care if it is lovely literature or not, angst after the age of 17 is self indulgent crap. I did not care about any of these characters one bit.

I approached this book in completely the wrong order. By that I mean, I watched the movie first, in the theatre when it was released in 2002, having absolutely no prior idea as to what it was about. I had no clue that that it was based on a Pulitzer prize winning novel, which was itself based on a novella by Virginia Woolf.

The movie decimated me (in a good way!). My best friend and I went from theatre to cafe in a daze, bludgeoned by the film, and spent the following hour in very awkward silence. The evening could not be resuscitated.

A decade later, I read Mrs. Dalloway. That marked my only successful foray into Ms. Woolf's oeuvre. Maybe I shouldn't use the word 'successful'. I should just say it's the only book of hers that I have actually finished, and that is only because it is short. Virginia Woolf is a writer who I have long wished to connect with. I know she had a beautiful, impressionistic mind and that her impact on literature is vast. She's the only writer who makes me feel illiterate, though. She seems impenetrable. I can't stay in - hell, I can't even get in - and I am so jealous of those who do! I want to be part of that club.

It's a few years later, and I finally read this book. Like Mrs. Dalloway, it is brief. And like the film, it broke me. Three people are straddling life and death. The story is equal parts pain and beauty. Pain being those interminable, almost unbearable hours life has to offer. Always, the hours... Beauty being those precious hours, oh those precious ones. You know what I'm talking about. Those hours that stand out to you after decades have left them behind, but you still see them glittering, shining warmly as a reminder of what your life is all about.

I could feel dismal, reading this book that tells of illness, suicide, abandonment, and, yes, depression. But somehow, those illuminating hours, the precious ones, overpower everything else. Our mortality is so grey, homogenous, unoriginal. But those precious, beautiful hours? Those filled the story and my heart with hope, with the excitement at being reminded of a treasure that had always been right in front of me.

At times the book feels a little audacious - periodically I wondered, who are you, Michael Cunningham, to tell me what life is all about? But it works because he's really talking through Virginia Woolf, and somehow I don't mind her telling me. He's like her translator, and what she has to say is sort of a miracle. I'm so glad he wrote this book.

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.

I hesitated between 3 and 4 stars for this book. It was beautifully written and has a somewhat unexpected (and yet unsurprising) ending. The references to Virginia Woolf are omnipresent as she also comes to life under Cunningham's pen along with Mrs Brown and "Mrs Dalloway". Yes, it did relight a flame in me to read the primary Woolf works (Orlando, Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Waves) and reminded me of the one I did read (A Room of One's Own), but still, something about it felt a little superficial. Was it the length (just 220 pages) and the relative ease with which I read it (less than 2 hours)? Or perhaps the heavily laden sentences that perhaps dipped low towards being pretentious? No, I have never seen the movie. And, yes, perhaps I should. But as a standalone novel, I have a hard time understanding why this one was chosen for the Pulitzer in 1997. There are interesting (if somewhat obvious) parallels between the three parallel lives described - and of course a palpable presence of Virgina herself as one of them. Not having read the runner-up (Cloudsplitter by Russel Banks about abolitionist John Brown), I have read or The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver about the Belgian colonization of the Congo and felt it was a far more deserving choice and a real masterpiece. And yet, the Pulitzer committee settled on this short novel (nearly a novella).

Personally, I was not blown away by The Hours, but perhaps will read Flesh and Blood by this author as suggested by another reviewer here on GR.

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...

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.

Hislerimi yazıya dökeyim diyorum ama yazıp yazıp siliyorum. Daha yeni bitti, okurken ki coşkun ruh hali hala devam ediyor. Kitap bitince yatışacak sandığım duygular daha da yoğun şimdi. İyi ki okumuşum. Bir de filmi var bu kitabın, o da ayrı güzellikte. Önce filmini izleyip sonra kitabını okudum ve etkisi hiç azalmadı tam tersine daha da sevdim eseri.
Okuma listenizdeyse öne çekin derim, pişman olmazsınız.

I'll write a better review later, I want to collect all my thoughts (and all my feelings), but I have been out all day and I just want to go to sleep right now BUT I do want to write about this marvellous book. Undecided whether to see the movie before or after, I opted for watching parts of it (I divided it into thirds) and after reading the related parts. I think it was the right choice, because it helped me dilute the book and therefore savour it, and compare the two of them. The book is so much better thought. I could say that the movie is quite shitty, but that is not true it's a nicely done movie, but it's a shitty transposition of the book. Early feelings? I loved loved loved it.

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.