Collect As Horas Portrayed By Michael Cunningham Issued As Textbook

actually never read any Virginia Woolf, I remember I tried to one time when I was likebut I gave up after two pages for some reason, I feel like I should try again after reading this book though, I really enjoyed it. I loved the writing and I loved the pacing and I love the vibe and tone and themes, This is just the kind of book that happens to appeal to me the most and I'm really glad I picked it up, The film has always put me off reading the book, In particular Nicole Kidman's tawdry depiction of Virginia Woolf as some kind of demented bag lady, Surely the most unflattering cinematic portrait of any famous writer ever, So the first pleasant surprise of this novel was that, far from being some kind of overly simplistic and dismissive view of Woolf as the film veered close to at times, it's actually a glowing tribute to her work and to her as a troubled soul.


However, it doesn't begin on a good note, To go inside Woolf's head as she kills herself came across as nothing more than a literary publicity stunt of misguided hubris, Not once, I'm afraid, did I believe in Cunningham's vision of her final moments of life, And it added nothing to the novel and could easily have been and perhaps should have been excised, Especially because her suicide comes up often in the text, Sometimes, despite what it says in writing manuals, telling is more effective than showing, But what soon began to win me over was Cunningham's fabulous prose, His exciting way of putting things, Of making me see the familiar in a slightly skewed and illuminating way, Essentially The Hours is an inventive improvisation on the themes of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, It's perhaps a bit top heavy on same sex relationships with the largely unfounded implication that Woolf herself was that way inclined is it so hard to accept a person might perhaps simply possess no strong sexual impulse instead of always reading repression into inactivity My feeling about her is she did exactly what she needed to do to write what she did.
And to impose any kind of secret wish list on her is not only errant but also condescending, Socially she was a flirt, It was how she both dramatized and defended herself, If she gave Vita the come on it was done, one feels, with a pinch of salt not from unowned depths of her being,
But overall surprised by how much I loved this,.stars. ON MY TURNTABLE TONITE: THE HOURS SOUNDTRACK, BY PHILIP GLASS,

This novel buoyed me up, then dropped me like a hot potato, I was sucked right in, I regret to say along with its characters to its depressive vortex, I've declared tomorrow my very own Mental Health Day,


There, its now tomorrow, or at least thats what the clock says,

Did you ever get one of those spiffy mpattachments to a friends email You open it, follow its inside jokes with barelyconcealed amusement till you get to the punch line, and

Its just another crummy ad.
Youve been had! Well, this books the same,

It leads you by folding over your halfremembered childhoods golden moments those “timeless moments” so prized by Bloomsburian authors and then hits you with kitchensink reality with its wollop of “same old, same old” hard, cold reality.


You just fell, hook, line and sinker, my friends, And they call it the Birth of the Blues,

This is not stuff for old Bipolar Vets like me, Im happy the FDA hasnt yet banned certain books, being a civil libertarian but at the same time, Im not, Figure that one out.

Anyway, in The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli says timeless moments dont exist in the first place and thats a classic conundrum of relativity, very much like “what if you, and everything around you, were ten times bigger tomorrow would you notice”

The answer, of course, according to Albert Einstein is no.
YOUre ten times bigger too,

Timelessness is a fact, which Rovelli patiently knocks into our dumb numbskulls, Time is a result of our feeble human attempts to overorganize and invent explanations,

Timeless moments, though Only God has em, And ALL the time.


But of course I don't in the least mean to be facetious I love this book! But Cunningham started it: he grabbed my heart from my sleeve, which is where in my dotage I normally keep it, and started playing frisbee with it.


A born rube, I probably deserved it, I'm an emoter, and so is he, but he added stealth to the mix, and tripped me up with his purple wordflow,

But I forget, Today I'm enforcing a ban on all deep thought and reading,

I mean it, Michael,

I'm not following you again today, down your hellish River Acheron

And I won't pick this book up again, where I left off, until at least tomorrow.
Considering this is a novel which begins with a suicide and continues to develop the theme this is an incredibly uplifting novel, a lyrical celebration of life in the moment.
It begins with the last half an hour of Virginia Woolf's life and she, engaged in the writing of Mrs Dalloway, will be the subject of one of the novel's three narratives, each of which cover a single day in the characters' lives.
There's Clarissa who mirrors Mrs Dalloway in Woolf's book and shares her name, who is organising a party for her friend, a poet who is dying of AIDS and Mrs Brown, a suburban housewife in thes who can't find herself in the role of mother and wife.
What makes the novel such a delicious read is the beauty of the writing and the host of thrilling insights it provides, Book Circle Reads

Rating:,of five

The Publisher Says: In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, who is recognized as "one of our very best writers" Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times, draw inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters who

are struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair.


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


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

With rare ease and assurance, Cunningham makes the two women's lives converge with Virginia Woolf's in an unexpected and heartbreaking way during the party for Richard.
As the novel jumpcuts through the twentieth century, every line resonates with Cunningham's clear, strong, surprising lyrical contemporary voice,

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

My : Three women mirror the facets of the life of Clarissa Dalloway, heroine of the novel Mrs, Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, One life is Mrs. Woolf herself, shown in the depths of despair as she convalesces from one of her crippling bouts with depression in the suburban aridity of Richmond while pining for life in London's Bloomsbury, writing her novel of the exquisite nature of the quotidian.
Another is the life of Mrs, Laura Brown, dying a million deaths every day in suburban Los Angeles, raising a son and pregnant again by a good man she doesn't love, as she reads Mrs.
Dalloway and ponders escape, Lastly the life of Clarissa Vaughn, whose long unrequited love for Richard Brown, her gay poet/novelist friend, has led her to care for him tenderly in his final years as an AIDS patient.
He long ago nicknamed her “Mrs, Dalloway,” both for her first name and for her exquisitely selfabnegating strength,

Over the course of one day in the life of each woman, everything she knows and feels about her life is sharply refocused it is made clear to each that, to escape the trap she is in, she must accept change or die in the trap.
The ending of the book brings all three strands to their inevitable conclusions, with surprising overlaps,

I first read this when it came out in, I fell in love instantly, as I had with Mrs, Dalloway at a slightly earlier date, I loved the imaginative structure of interwoven lives, commenting on each other and riffing off the events in each world, echoing some facet in every case the events in the iconic novel Mrs.
Dalloway.

I can't give it five because, in the end, I wondered a bit if the cleverclever hadn't gotten in the way of the emotional core of the book, which I saw as the gritty determination of the women to live on their own terms and in their own lives not dependent on convention.
In making the book conform to this ideal, I felt that some plot strands weren't honestly dealt with but rather forced into a shape required by the author's plans.


That cavil aside, the book is beautifully written and wonderfully interestingly conceived, I'd recommend it heartily, and suggest reading it in conjunction with the movie, .