Skip to main content

Bibliophilic Book challenge: The Hours by Michael Cunningham

This book perfectly fits the Bibliophilic Books challenge. Not only is one of the characters preoccupied with reading a novel, but another character is busy writing the same novel, and the third main character is preparing a party to honour a writer friend who has won a literary award.

Year published: 1998
Genre: Novel
Setting & time: New York, end of the 20th century; London, 1923; Los Angeles, 1949.

The lives of three women, separated from each other by decades, are intertwined and mirrored by each other, as each goes about her business on a single day. Clarissa, nick-named Mrs. Dalloway by the friend she is preparing a party for, goes out to buy flowers; Virginia Woolf, in a London suburb, is living in fear of the return of her migraines, writing Mrs. Dalloway and longing to move back into the city; and Laura Brown, in L.A., is straining against the ordinariness of her life, reading Mrs. Dalloway and trying to be a good wife and mother but wanting something else.

The narrative alternates between the three women, and as you get into the story, you see their lives and actions as mirrors or what-if’s of each other, and occasionally they cast long shadows that affect the others. The language is smooth, soft and detailed and the descriptions are sensuous and at times you wonder where the story is going, if it’s going to be another one of those open-ended, resolutionless literary novels, or if there is going to be a climax and a satisfying denouement. But the resolution does come, and you close the book, satisfied by a mostly pleasant but still thought-provoking read.

Rating: An excellent and beautifully written literary novel. 4+ stars.

Epilogue:
From what I have read about this novel, it is an echoing of or a tribute to Mrs. Dalloway, so the logical action would be to read that next. If I had read it first, I am certain I would have done what I always do when I read a book after I have seen a movie based on it, namely to compare, even look for similarities. I can’t help doing this, but more than once it has diminished my enjoyment of a book, so I am glad I read this first. Mrs. Dalloway is going on the TBR list, but it might still be years until I get around to reading it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme