The Hours by Michael Cunningham, ornate and moving

I don’t read novels as much. If I devoured it before with zest, from Thornbirds to Wizard of Oz, now, not as much. I prefer to read memoirs because real life is more interesting to me. Reality with its true struggles feels more authentic. And I usually read the books that have been translated to film. I know it sounds lame but it saves me from reading uninspired material.

And as I am in my usual jaunt of browsing Booksale, I chanced upon The Hours of Michael Cunningham. I leafed through it and was caught by its disarmingly ornate prose, lovingly crafted and one that created deep images. The feelings he evoked alternated from raw to sentimental.

I love how he was able to capture the feelings of unrealized love and the feelings of helplessness and despair of different women, it was a marvel.

Here are some of the passages I liked, the pictures are from the film version.

Mrs. Dalloway

“How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she’d tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard’s kiss on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him 

Couldn’t they have discovered something…larger and stranger than what they’ve got?...

She could, she thinks have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself”

Mrs. Brown

“She wonders. While she pushes a cart through the supermarket or has her hair done if the other women aren’t all thinking, to some degree or other the same thing;

Here is the brilliant spirit, the woman of sorrows, the woman of transcendent joys, who would rather be elsewhere, who has consented to perform simple and essentially foolish tasks, to examine tomatoes, to sit under a hair dryer because it is her art and her duty.”'

A man who can write these things like it was true to him was quite a surprise. Especially the feelings of a housewife. There were a lot of moments  in the book that moved me.

There were also homosexual undertones between some characters but these were handled well. It was done with subtlety.  And if the female characters are quite moving, the character of Richard was tragic. Abandoned by his mother, unreciprocated by the woman he loves and confused by two longings, his end was surprising and at the same time expected.  Maybe the throb of his emotional losses became stronger at the grasp of his heartbreaking disease.

I remember seeing the movie based on this book. It starred Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman ( she won an Oscar here). Though, I found it intriguing, the book offered much more. Maybe because you were able see inside the character’s head, their feelings, their longings, words make a more powerful impression in the mind than just images. It makes you think and feel.

This book won the Pulitzer prize and it is well deserved. The characters stay with you even after you turn the last page. And even if I didn’t read it in one sitting, I was still able to follow it easily, the emotions stayed to me after leaving it for a day or two and re-awakened again when I read it again.

I read Michael Cunningham teaches Creative Writing at Yale. Wow, I wish I’m given the chance to attend a class. To meet a man who can delve that way in a woman’s psyche would be quite incredible.