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Books : Fiction : Authors, A-Z : C : Cunningham, Michael
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The Hours is both a homage to Virginia Woolf and very much its own creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back to life, he intertwines her story with those of two more contemporary women. One grey 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 Vaughan is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of an AIDS-related illness. 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. These women's lives are linked both by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility each keeps returning to. Clarissa is to eventually realise: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 ... Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
As Cunningham moves between the three women, his transitions are seamless. One early chapter ends with Woolf picking up her pen and composing her first sentence: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." The next begins with Laura rejoicing over that line and the fictional universe she is about to enter. Clarissa's day, on the other hand, is a mirror of Mrs. Dalloway's--with, however, an appropriate degree of modern bevelling as Cunningham updates and elaborates his source of inspiration. Clarissa knows that her desire to give her friend the perfect party may seem trivial to many. Yet it seems better to her than shutting down in the face of disaster and despair.
Like its literary inspiration, The Hours is a hymn to consciousness and the beauties and losses it perceives. It is also a reminder that, as Cunningham again and again makes us realise, art belongs to far more than just "the world of objects." --Kerry Fried
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The Hours is both a homage to Virginia Woolf and very much its own creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back to life, he intertwines her story with those of two more contemporary women. One grey 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 Vaughan is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of an AIDS-related illness. 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. These women's lives are linked both by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility each keeps returning to. Clarissa is to eventually realise: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 ... Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
As Cunningham moves between the three women, his transitions are seamless. One early chapter ends with Woolf picking up her pen and composing her first sentence: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." The next begins with Laura rejoicing over that line and the fictional universe she is about to enter. Clarissa's day, on the other hand, is a mirror of Mrs. Dalloway's--with, however, an appropriate degree of modern bevelling as Cunningham updates and elaborates his source of inspiration. Clarissa knows that her desire to give her friend the perfect party may seem trivial to many. Yet it seems better to her than shutting down in the face of disaster and despair.
Like its literary inspiration, The Hours is a hymn to consciousness and the beauties and losses it perceives. It is also a reminder that, as Cunningham again and again makes us realise, art belongs to far more than just "the world of objects." --Kerry Fried
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It's hard to overestimate the impression made by Michael Cunningham's The Hours; this was literary fiction of a rare order, detailing the inner lives of its female protagonists with sympathy and understanding. Now we have Specimen Days, and this has to be counted among the most eagerly anticipated novels in recent years, such is the reputation of the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist has acquired in a relatively short time. And if Specimen Days does not immediately exert the grip of its predecessor, this is due to no failure of technique. Cunningham knows exactly what he is doing, and his slow, penetrating accretion of detail ultimately pays off in ways that are richly satisfying.The various sections of the novel describe the same group of protagonists: a young boy, a young woman and an older man. But the treatment of these characters is strikingly varied from section to section, and the ambitions of the novel are jaw dropping. In the Machine is set during the industrial revolution, and balances the carefully examined pathology of its characters against supernatural elements. We are then taken to the early 21st century in The Children's Crusade which has a far grittier tone, with a terrorist group setting off bombs at random throughout the city. Finally, we are plunged 150 years into the future, when the city of New York is struggling to deal with the host of refugees from a planet that astronauts have reached.
All of these widely disparate narratives are united by the telling presence of the poet Walt Whitman, who acts as an anchor for the reader in a narrative that disorients as much as it stimulates. Not everyone will be able to accept the massive reach of Cunningham's novel, and the wrench between different time periods is certainly more shocking than that in The Hours. But for those willing to accept the new and challenging, Specimen Days is a masterful and visceral read. --Barry Forshaw
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It's hard to overestimate the impression made by Michael Cunningham's The Hours; this was literary fiction of a rare order, detailing the inner lives of its female protagonists with sympathy and understanding. Now we have Specimen Days, and this has to be counted among the most eagerly anticipated novels in recent years, such is the reputation of the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist has acquired in a relatively short time. And if Specimen Days does not immediately exert the grip of its predecessor, this is due to no failure of technique. Cunningham knows exactly what he is doing, and his slow, penetrating accretion of detail ultimately pays off in ways that are richly satisfying.The various sections of the novel describe the same group of protagonists: a young boy, a young woman and an older man. But the treatment of these characters is strikingly varied from section to section, and the ambitions of the novel are jaw dropping. In the Machine is set during the industrial revolution, and balances the carefully examined pathology of its characters against supernatural elements. We are then taken to the early 21st century in The Children's Crusade which has a far grittier tone, with a terrorist group setting off bombs at random throughout the city. Finally, we are plunged 150 years into the future, when the city of New York is struggling to deal with the host of refugees from a planet that astronauts have reached.
All of these widely disparate narratives are united by the telling presence of the poet Walt Whitman, who acts as an anchor for the reader in a narrative that disorients as much as it stimulates. Not everyone will be able to accept the massive reach of Cunningham's novel, and the wrench between different time periods is certainly more shocking than that in The Hours. But for those willing to accept the new and challenging, Specimen Days is a masterful and visceral read. --Barry Forshaw
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The Hours is both an homage to Virginia Woolf and very much its own creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back to life, he intertwines her story with those of two more contemporary women. One grey 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 Vaughan 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. These women's lives are linked both by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility each keeps returning to. Clarissa is to eventually realise: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...Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
As Cunningham moves between the three women, his transitions are seamless. One early chapter ends with Woolf picking up her pen and composing her first sentence: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." The next begins with Laura rejoicing over that line and the fictional universe she is about to enter. Clarissa's day, on the other hand, is a mirror of Mrs. Dalloway's--with, however, an appropriate degree of modern bevelling as Cunningham updates and elaborates his source of inspiration. Clarissa knows that her desire to give her friend the perfect party may seem trivial to many. Yet it seems better to her than shutting down in the face of disaster and despair. Like its literary inspiration, The Hours is a hymn to consciousness and the beauties and losses it perceives. It is also a reminder that, as Cunningham again and again makes us realise, art belongs to far more than just "the world of objects." --Kerry Fried
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