2004-05-01 15:00:00四野
The Hours: A New Classic
You may have already seen the movie The Hours(2002) starring Mery Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman. The fantastic movie impressed me a lot, but reading the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel written by Michael Cunningham is even more pleasant.
The Hours tells the story of three women:
One gray suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a dream that will soon lead to Mrs. Dalloway. In the present, on a beautiful June day in Greenwich Village, 52-year-old Clarissa is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of AIDS. And in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown, pregnant and unsettled, does her best to prepare for her husband's birthday, but can't seem to stop reading Woolf.
"There are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead." It’s true that you might be confused by the three separate stories and time shifts at the first time. But I’m sure that you’ll find it structurally perfect if you read it twice. These women's lives are linked by the 1925 novel, with Woolf as its writer, Clarissa as its character, and Laura, exactly the reader.
The theme of The Hours is quite rich, said many readers, it’s a rewarding meditation on life, death, time, art. Etc. What Cunningham written in his novel reads as the follows:
Each of women realizes that there is only 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) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more"
The Hours is one of the best novels I've read in years. And if you a lover of experimental or literary fiction, The hours might be a suitable book for you. It’s so brilliant.
The Hours tells the story of three women:
One gray suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a dream that will soon lead to Mrs. Dalloway. In the present, on a beautiful June day in Greenwich Village, 52-year-old Clarissa is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of AIDS. And in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown, pregnant and unsettled, does her best to prepare for her husband's birthday, but can't seem to stop reading Woolf.
"There are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead." It’s true that you might be confused by the three separate stories and time shifts at the first time. But I’m sure that you’ll find it structurally perfect if you read it twice. These women's lives are linked by the 1925 novel, with Woolf as its writer, Clarissa as its character, and Laura, exactly the reader.
The theme of The Hours is quite rich, said many readers, it’s a rewarding meditation on life, death, time, art. Etc. What Cunningham written in his novel reads as the follows:
Each of women realizes that there is only 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) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more"
The Hours is one of the best novels I've read in years. And if you a lover of experimental or literary fiction, The hours might be a suitable book for you. It’s so brilliant.