|
This book was chosen as a book club selection. I found myself having to re-read parts just to remember what character I was reading about at that point. I would consider myself a very open minded reader and choose books from all subjects. There are very few books that I have not been able to finish and this is one of them. I would not recommend this book to anyone and now I know why the library I picked it from had only one copy and it was on the shelf. This is one book I definately won't be paying a late fee on and will be back in plenty of time for another sucker to pick up off the shelf.
The writing is great to the point that it is just too much. The story was intriguing, and the last 40 pages or so kept me reading until the end. You have long flowing paragraphs filled with description after description. None of it's really necessary. But take away the fluff, and what you have is a completely mediocre book.
An Astounding peice of writing that can change the way you think abt life.My Favorite so Far
Laura Brown ended up a librarian so her dithering as to whether she had talent was just part of her inconsistencies and inaccuracies about herself. "ah, one of these." Fine writing has a patina of ageless insight and provides an education into a deeper truth than we usually get. Richard had some talent, but it didn't help him; it threw him further off-balance. It's as if someone much wiser than me (or anyone I've ever met) is telling a story and explaining it as he goes. and how talent or the idea of talent, especially in a person with unsturdy qualities, throws them off balance. The stories are original and the end was satisfying and sturdy, which I didn't expect because the stories appeared somewhat disconnected and I couldn't see how it could end in a cohesive way, until it did. They were also similar in regards to whether they were going to be lesbians or not but that didn't seem to be a cause of great unhappiness, just another wild idea, lack of consistency.
There is a haunting disturbing element to these stories, the yeasty dark psychology quivering right below the surface of these stories. The writerly bits are not only brilliant but come one after another. (There really are only two stories; the third is central but is actually an extension of one story, ahead in time). I ordered four more of Cunningham's books.
Minutes into this book, I realized what it was. Both married, Laura Brown had children at least one of which was destroyed by her lackings; from babyhood, as a toddler, her son Richard intuitively understood something serious was wrong with his mother and was terrorized as a child with her inconsistencies and instability; she damaged him immeasurably. The third female character, Clarisa, on the sturdier end of the continuum of unbalance, was still capable of feeling quite out of touch with reality.The writer touches on the connection between lack of balance and talent. Not counting the writer, the only character in the book with serious talent was Virginia Woolf. In this depiction, Virginia Woolf seemed more driven by demons, seriously mentally unbalanced and not destructive of others, concerned about the imposition her mental illness might have on those who cared about her. The author's depictions in my head are, I am quite sure, better than the screened version mostly because this seemed to me to be a writer's story written for those who love to read. The beauty of the experience is that he has years to distill his observations and I read through it in hours.What more anyone wants from a story, I cannot imagine. The author did a stellar job of portraying writing talent as an ephemeral quality, desired by many, but mostly present in insignificant quantities as well as portraying that talent or even end product doesn't make people happy, in fact it could be a tipping point for tragedy.
One is the real life tortured childhood of Virginia Woolf and the other, a reference to the mother and childhood of Richard, the character who eventually suicided himself. Laura Brown (Richard's mother)was more self-centered, destructive, indulgent, but with similar ideations of suicide and wild inconsistencies and lack of boundaries. He described writerly flow as being bigger than the author and an almost hallucinigenic experience.I'm not going to see the movie. he is amazing.
In the book it makes more sense that she dies in Richard's book in real life and later he asks Clarissa to call her.I'm sure some people would be annoyed that I'm comparing and contrasting the book and movie and not taking them as separate entities. References are made to the past relationship between Clarissa and her former lover Richard, who's dying of AIDS, and his other former lover Louis, who is not dying of AIDS, but still I would have liked to have known more. In particular I didn't understand how she shows up at the end of the movie when they seemed to imply earlier that she was dead. For the film version of "The Hours" Clarissa was played by none other than Meryl Streep. Dalloway" and sees parallels to the book and its author in her life. The movie conveys much of this through dialog between the characters, which makes for better drama, especially when Virginia Woolf and her husband are arguing at the train station. So it's hard overall to say which is better, though in the end I think I'm more attached emotionally to the film because of the heightened drama, whereas the book seems a little dry.To summarize the plot, it involves three women, as I mentioned above. Still, it's a good book and an even better film.
I suppose it helped a little, but not much.I think that about summarizes my entire problem with the novel--it's too short. I feel cheated by this novel. She's reading "Mrs. She sets off to writing "Mrs. But three years later she's not happy.
The book does a better job, as books do, of giving characters internal life. And parallel to this we have Clarissa Vaughn in the present. Some of the background characters like Sally, Clarissa's lover, and Julia, Clarissa's daughter, are given more depth in the book than the movie while Virginia's husband Leonard and her sister, niece, and nephews seem to get more time in the film. On the whole, I think it was a push as to which is better. I suppose that was in part because it's only supposed to cover one day for each of the three main characters--Virginia Woolf in 1923, Laura Brown in 1949, and Clarissa Vaughn in "the present" or late 90s--and so to maintain that the author couldn't go so much into a lot of backstory.
Dalloway." (Sally as Mr. Dalloway for Clarissa Dalloway and like that character, Clarissa Vaughn is giving a party. Her former lover Richard nicknamed her Mrs. It works much better in the film version when they're talking than in the novel where most of it occurs in Virginia's head as she sits on a bench. Dalloway," a novel about a woman who is giving a party and what all happens to her and those around her in London that day. Dalloway, daughter Julia as Elizabeth Dalloway, Richard as Septimus, Louis as Peter Walsh, and writer friend Walter as Hugh).
The sole reason I read the book is because I had just watched the film version and thought the source novel might shed some light on a couple of points, especially the relationship between Richard and his mother. This section of the book often has parallels to the Woolf novel, with modern characters recreating the roles of those in "Mrs. In her case it's a party for Richard, who has won a prestigious poetry award. Most of the events of this section also mirror those of "Mrs.
I recommend both.That is all.BTW, it's ironic in the novel that Clarissa thinks she sees Meryl Streep in the trailer of a movie being shot in New York. A socially awkward girl, she seems to have struck it rich when Dan returns from the Pacific and asks to marry her. As I mentioned at the beginning, the relationship between Richard and his mother was something I didn't quite understand in the movie, but it makes a little more sense in the book. It might have been richer if the author had expanded a little more, as I indicated earlier.
First there's Virginia Woolf, the brilliant but mad author who in 1923 is living in the countryside of England with her husband, a printer, and not altogether happy about it. Concurrently, Laura Brown is living in LA in 1949 with her husband Dan and son Richie and is pregnant with another child. Dalloway," which is really obvious to pick up if you do like I did and read Woolf's book immediately prior to reading "The Hours."All three sections of the book are interwoven together to create a rich tapestry of the lives of these three women. (This probably explains why that scene was omitted from the film as it would have been pretty cheesy to have Meryl Streep trying to meet herself).
|
