The Hours by Michael Cunningham

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

(Michael Cunningham, The Hours)

In 1999 this very book brought Michael Cunningham the Pulitzer Award for the best novel (Rogers, 2006). "The Hours" is one of the most touching, affecting, moving, and at the same time one of the most unbiased, nonchalant, and indifferent books about the lives and destinies of women in three spatial dimensions - in the early, the mid-, and the latter XX century.

The hours pass by and people, who want to love, and to feel these touching feelings, as if stay on their places still, - they feel joy, sufferings, try to struggle with life, fail, and commit suicides. The virus of being lonely is transmitted through the mother's breast milk, - through red blood and black letters of good novels. When you read the book, it seems that the novels are written for us simply to make us remain weak. Virginia Wolf's schizophrenia of the early XX century is slowly transformed into the life of Lora Brown, and Clarissa Dalloway.

Obviously, "The Hours" deserved to win a Pulitzer Award, as this novel consists of so-called layers, where several stories are interdependent, as all of them have much in common with each other. The main characters of the novel are Virginia Wolf from patriarchal Richmond of the 20ies, Lora Brown from the post-war Los Angeles, Clarissa Dalloway from the New York City... All of them are the prisoners of their own lives, but all of them meet with each other because of their creative and literary works (Missis Dalloway is Virginia Wolf's novel).

When you read the novel you become absorbed in the author's reflections. Involuntarily you want to find answers for plenty, thousands, myriad of questions. You want to find out how the time is constructed, how the novels are born, how the author's words become so smooth, how the events influence each other (as all of them are located at different times and places), and how the events have influence on words, and words affect the events... You want to find the answer on the question how to live in the world where everything is so complicated...

All main characters of the novel have relation to the literature. Michael Cunningham has a dialogue with Virginia Wolf, Joyce, and Proust over the length of the whole novel. However, it is difficult to call this novel some sort of modernized 'remake' of "Missis Dalloway".

In one of the episodes of the novel Clarissa stands near the bookstore and tries to choose a book that she wanted to give as a present to one of her friends. Suddenly she finds herself lost in recollections, where the branch of the tree touches the window, and the music plays. Clarissa is about four years old. Probably, she is in the house her parents rented for summer. She has no other recollections about this house, except of these clear, vivid, and bright feelings, and these feelings reveal something very remarkable, something very important, unexplainably comfortable and giving hope. Clarissa understands that she would like to find the book able to provide her and her friend with the same feelings; the book that would be able to give them power to change.

This stream-of-consciousness style definitely intersects with another episode, where Richard voices the words Cunningham wanted to tell to his readers. These words are devoted to the world and creative works, as he asserts that the main aim of any writer is to create something new, something vivid, something alive and amazing, shocking and very important... Indeed, when you read the novel, you understand that "The Hours", being "passionate, profound, and deeply moving" is Cunningham's most important achievement to the date (The Hours, 2007).

Bibliography

Cunningham, M. (2000). The Hours. Picador.

Rogers, D. (2006, January/February). Game for Change: Author Michael Cunningham is full of surprises. Stanford Magazine . Retrieved October 17, 2007, from http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2006/janfeb/show/cunningham.html

The Hours. (n.d.). Retrieved October 17, 2007, from http://www.michaelcunninghamwriter.com/books/the_hours/