"The Hours" by Michael Cunningham

I did not get around to reading this until I was twenty-two years’ old and yet, it was a great book and I found the experience almost overwhelming. I was actually reading it for university and because I had to, but for some years before - one of my friends had been recommending it to me for an awfully long time and I had not actually read it off their recommendation (I’m pretty sure that annoyed her, but at least I eventually read it!). When I first read it, I was sitting bored out of my mind in a class on historical theories of western philosophy and someone was talking about Schopenhauer to which I thought ‘what is the point? we are all just going to die anyway…’ (laughs in Schopenhauer). Unfortunately enough, I’d already read the text on western philosophy that we were studying some years before and so, I began a new text, zoned out and thanked god that there were a lot of other students in the class. “The Hours” by Michael Cunningham was one of the greatest and most beautifully post-modern books I’d read since “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell.All about the great influence of Virginia Woolf on the lives after and considerably similar to her own, this book covers the lives of three women that are about to become intertwined only in their own experiences of womanhood, grief, goodness and their want to be more than themselves. I was fascinated by the language and even though I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie, I was definitely a huge fan of the book that was written like a symphony. It is truly a masterpiece of post-modern fiction. My first reading experience at twenty-two was well worth it and I often thank god that I left it for as long as I did. I thoroughly believe in reading books at the right time in order to get the right experience and this was definitely one of those books you need to do that with. It has such incredible atmosphere, the characters are so thorough and beautiful and the way in which it is written has such incredible description. It is one of the best written books of the last twenty years and yet, not many people I know have actually read it. Even the other people on my course didn’t seem to bother. I have no idea why - it was an amazing book.

My favourite thing about the book is the way in which it discusses specific aspects about the different experiences these women have of life in womanhood in different times and places. It is such an incredibly moving thing to read. One of the characters in Virginia Woolf and obviously we all know what happens to her in the end - she commits suicide. But the book goes through the way in which she experiences the life as a woman, writing as a woman, living as a woman in the 1920s era of English Literature which was far more conservative than its American Counterpart. But, when it does come to the American aspect, it really isn’t that different in its lack of progression and its treatment of women. Clarissa Dalloway is a character of extreme womanhood, as I like to call it. She is an English creation, a character of defiance and a character who often has to restrain herself from impulses - nothing really like her more obedient creator who, though she was often thought of as a female literary hero, was depressed, reserved and overtly realistic about her lack of opportunity as a woman. And though these three characters often saw the restrictions of their gender, they keep pushing against it and keep pushing against the barriers until they can push no more. In their own stories, in their own places and own times, they are each linked by something that is considered unimportant - but every aspect, every symbol and every theme in this novel is just as important as the other. I loved this book not for just its writing style, but also for its treatment of the way in which different lives at different times can come together, each to have an impact on the other in profound ways.