In terms of style and structure, The Hours is pitch-perfect. His narrative is a meditation on the act of creation, the mundanity of the ordinary and the need to feel worth something.Īs it flits between the consciousnesses of these three women, the book reaches delicate emotional depths – uncovering basic truths in the marvels of the everyday. It is a novel that is about the very essence of humanity, and reading it, you feel like it would take a university thesis to unravel all the many rich and deep threads that Cunningham has woven through his book.
The Hours is one of those books that had I read it when I was younger, would most likely appear in all my lists of favourite books. Still, we cherish the city, the morning we hope, more than anything, for more. 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) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Richard’s nickname for Clarissa is Mrs Dalloway and as she plans to celebrate his winning of a major literary prize, she struggles with memories of what might have existed between them had things turned out differently.Īs the novel travels back and forth through the hours of these three women across almost a century, their lives converge, in a moving a devastating manner on the night of Clarissa’s party. In present-day New York, Clarissa Vaughan, a book editor, is planning a party for her former lover and oldest friend Richard, a poet who is dying of AIDS. As her day progresses, she fights rising feelings of panic and suffocation regarding her domestic life.
In 1949, hemmed-in housewife Laura Brown would love nothing more than to spend her day reading Mrs Dalloway, but she has a young son to look after and a birthday cake to make for her husband’s birthday. She has a visit from her sister Vanessa, argues with her housekeeper and works with her husband, all the while trying to wrestle the demons that have driven her from London to Richmond. In 1923, Virginia Woolf is working on the first draft of what will become Mrs Dalloway.
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