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Reviews
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
The Hours is both an hommage to Virginia Woolf and very much its own creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back to life, he intertwines her story with those of two more contemporary women. One gray suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a dream that will soon lead to Mrs. Dalloway. In the present, on a beautiful June day in Greenwich Village, 52-year-old Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of AIDS. And in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown, pregnant and unsettled, does her best to prepare for her husband's birthday, but can't seem to stop reading Woolf. These women's lives are linked both by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility each keeps returning to. Clarissa is to eventually realize: 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.... Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. As Cunningham moves between the three women, his transitions are seamless. One early chapter ends with Woolf picking up her pen and composing her first sentence, "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." The next begins with Laura rejoicing over that line and the fictional universe she is about to enter. Clarissa's day, on the other hand, is a mirror of Mrs. Dalloway's--with, however, an appropriate degree of modern beveling as Cunningham updates and elaborates his source of inspiration. Clarissa knows that her desire to give her friend the perfect party may seem trivial to many. Yet it seems better to her than shutting down in the face of disaster and despair. Like its literary inspiration, The Hours is a hymn to consciousness and the beauties and losses it perceives. It is also a reminder that, as Cunningham again and again makes us realize, art belongs to far more than just "the world of objects." --Kerry Fried The New York Times Book Review, Michael Wood
...the overall impression is that of a delicate, triumphant glance, an acknowledgment of Woolf that takes her into Cunningham's own territory, a place of late-century danger but also of treasurable hours. The Washington Post Book World, Jameson Currier
[Cunningham] has deftly created something original, a trio of richly interwoven tales that alternate with one another chapter by chapter, each of them entering the thoughts of a character as she moves through the small details of a day.... Cunningham's emulation of such a revered writer as Woolf is courageous, and this is his most mature and masterful work. The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Richard Eder
[Cunningham] has fashioned a fictional instrument of intricacy and remarkable beauty. It is a kaleidoscope whose four shining and utterly unlike pieces--the lives of two fictional characters, of a real writer, and her novel--combine, separate and tumble in continually shifting and startlingly suggestive patterns.
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Customer Reviews
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Astonishing
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Reviewer:
A reader
from New York City
December 19, 1999
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This is easily the best book I have read in a long long time. It is astonishingly beautiful. When I finished reading, I couldn't get up, I was so stunned by the quiet beauty, the gorgoeus writing, by the way his story crept inside me so deeply that I feel changed by the experience of reading it.
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Fascinating work of Art
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Reviewer:
A reader
from Madrid, Spain
December 11, 1999
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I came to read this book completly by chance and I was captivated from the very first page until the end. So much joy in this quiet masterpice! It made me plunge into the previous books by Mr. Cunningham (Flesh & Blood; A Home at the End of the World) and I was rewarded with the confirmation of an impressive writer of great empathy, insight and talent. Beautiful book of drifting lives which reminds us about the importance of love and understanding. Thank you Michael.
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3 people found this review helpful.
0 did not.
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Pure Pleasure
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Reviewer:
A reader
from Miami
December 10, 1999
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This book is so wonderful that you will want to read it again and again because you will want to focus on the use of each and every word. I don't really care how many books you have read this one takes your breath away. It is literature in the purest sense. It makes you want to read Mrs. Dolloway and this book at the same time. Mr. Cunningham visited my Literary Society a month or so ago.An author with a real brain that is willing to share his talent with the rest of us. Arn't we lucky!
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0 people found this review helpful.
1 did not.
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Absolutely Beautiful
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Reviewer:
Anne C Lebrecht
from Laguna Woods, California
December 7, 1999
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The Hours is a beautifully written book by Michael Cunningham, delicately told in a woven tale of three, about compassion, passion and love between some very different people. So moving and well written that after finishing this book, I had to re read Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Wolfe and several books about her life. To an avid reader this book was a unique reading experience. I highly recommend it.
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5 people found this review helpful.
2 did not.
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See all 93 customer reviews...
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