The Book Depository The Hours by Michael Cunningham
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Price: £17.00
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Description: The Hours : Paperback : St Martin's Press : 9780312243029 : 0312243022 : 22 Mar 2012 : The author of At Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The Book Depository The Hours by Michael Cunningham - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9780312243029
MPN: 0312243022
GTIN: 9780312243029
Author: Norman Housley
Rating: 5
Review: This is a very clever and immensely readable novel, one full of ideas and insights. Cunningham gets a lot out of his three intertwined narratives, establishing fascinating parallels and contrasts. For me the juxtaposition of upper middle class Londoners in 1923 and well-heeled New Yorkers in the 1990s was particularly telling, but he is also very good on 1949 Los Angeles. His protagonists are all highly introspective. Freed by their wealth from material concerns, they have the leisure to get obsessed with trivia (roses, dead birds, imperfect birthday cakes). But this central theme, which Marxists would have dismissed as bourgeois self-indulgence, never becomes annoying because Cunningham moves things along with panache, and unlike much contemporary fiction, his novel does not outstay its welcome. A worthy winner of the Pulitzer prize (1999).
Author: D. Smith
Rating: 1
Review: I was rather compelled to read this for a Book/Fim Club choice, so in a sense the book was recommended to me. I am not, I have to say, a fan of Virginia Woolf, and I can only imagine that Cunningham has written an extended pastiche of her style. The writing is eloquent, detailed, and attempts an examination of the internal monologue in the minds of his three protagonists. However, those monologues are no more interesting nor illuminating than those in the head of any reader (I imagine) and the repetitive content and rather predictable meandering storylines eventually turn the whole affair into banality. Orwell said of Dickens, "Wonderful gargoyles, rotten architecture." In The Hours we have an interesting architectural framework in the three women at different times and places, but rotten gargoyles. As I made (slow) progress through this short book an ever stronger image of three different women trapped in prisons of their own making with a right wrist held hopelessly up to their over-wrought foreheads, and once that picture had taken hold it was impossible to shake, and I speed read the rest of the damnable book until I reached the final page like an explorer returning from a horrible Swiftian voyage to the land of Banal. The author's tics (or are they part of the pastiche?) such as the last half sentence of internal monologue being questioned in paranthesis; the incessant "Here, then, was..." and "So, then..." actually brought audible groans to my lips. Finally, the cake, the failed cake... words fail me. I'll just say that if you've ever heard the lyric of McArthuer Park, about the cake left out in the rain...and it took so long to bake it...and I'll never have the recipe agai... Well this book has that covered, and the pastiche goes over the top into farce. After that I just couldn't take another word seriously. All of the women in this book would have benefitted from buying a motorbike - live a little!
