Book One: The Hours

Book One: The Hours
Finished January 1, 2010
Pages: 240

I had put off reading this book for what seems like years. It seemed like years because it has been about seven years since the first person told me to read it. Several of my friends read it when the movie came out in 2002, but at the time it seemed so depressing that I didn't want to see the movie, much less try to read the book.
I read Mrs. Dalloway my sophomore year of college, I think. It might have been my junior year, it's hard to remember. I really can’t say that at the time I liked Mrs. Dalloway very much at all. Although my dislike for the book probably had more to do with my dislike of the teacher (an overbearing woman from Minnesota who spoke with a fake Irish accent) than anything against the book itself. Considering my background with Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf, it was amazing how much of the story came back to me as I was reading The Hours, which is the obvious point that Michael Cunningham was going for. Although there are many parts of the story that I no longer remember, some parts are very clear to me. I’m sure that if I were to re-read Mrs. Dalloway I would find even more of these parallels that escaped me. I will say this about Mrs. Dalloway: unlike many nerdy English major-types, I don’t usually remember famous first lines, but I have always enjoyed “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
I enjoyed the parallels that Mr. Cunningham developed between the three seemingly unrelated stories. I particularly enjoyed the eventual connections shown between the story in the 1950's and the present day; it was surprising that it took me so long to figure out that Ritchie was Richard, but I liked that it took a long time to get to that point. I'm not sure what my reaction would have been if they had made the connection sooner. It certainly would have taken the surprise out of the fact that Laura didn't kill herself after all.
The quiet desperation in these lives is something that I think many people can identify with, although I found the parts where Virginia Woolf discussed the voices in her head harder to take simply due to my lack of personal experience with true mental illness. She certainly had the stereotypical British reserve, for I don’t know if I was hearing voices if I would have a similar reaction of resignation.
The language of the novel particularly struck me. I would have to re-read it to pick out the particular phrases that appealed the most to me, but I can certainly remember times when I thought to myself 'how lovely that was'. I enjoy a well-written sentence as much as the next English teacher.
For example, I enjoyed, rather morbidly:
“The body of the thrush is still there (odd, how the neighborhood cats and dogs are not interested), tiny even for a bird, so utterly unalive, here in the dark, like a lost glove, this little empty handful of death. […] She thinks of how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest” (165).
The problem with reading books that belong to other people is that I feel bad to dog-ear pages like I do with my own. As I was reading, I thought of many other passages that I wanted to talk about, but I don’t want to re-read the entire book to find them.
Overall, I found this a deeply moving and well-written novel, with beautiful symmetry and language. In the future, if enough people tell me to read a book, I won't wait seven years to read it.

Good reading,
Caitlin