The Hours

The Hours is a Pulitzer prize winning novel by Michael Cunningham, the same guy who wrote Specimen Days. It has also been converted into a motion picture, one that brought a Oscar nomination to Nicole Kidman. It is one of my favorite movies with excellent performances by all three leading ladies and others. I have watched it countless number of times.

Now it is well known that if you have read the book and then watched the movie, chances are that you will come out unsatisfied. A film only has very limited time to portray the whole range of things that a book can take pages to explore and develop. Also while reading, there is much more time to develop connections with various characters as they come and go out of the pages. However, how about reading the book after you have seen the movie and liked it? Is it something like eating the milk cake and then drinking the milk, so milk feels almost tasteless? I would kind of agree.

The problem is that having watched the movie, we already have a certain picture in our heads about the characters and the whole experience of book reading turns into an exercises in mapping back to those images. I always find myself distracted trying to find the current paragraph in the movie. This makes it somewhat frustrating.

However that should not take away anything from the book. despite the above, it managed to give me goosebumps in places (out of emotions). His love of lovely mornings is present even here.

New York in its racket and stern brown decrepitude, its bottomless decline, always produces a few summer mornings like this; mornings invaded everywhere by an assertion of new life so determined it is almost comic, like a cartoon character that endures endless, hideous punishments and always emerges unburnt, unscarred, ready for more... What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.

Like Specimen Days was about Walt Whitman, The Hours is centered around Virginia Woolf and her Novel, Mrs. Dalloway. There are three stories that we keep getting in and out of, occurring in different space and times but all having a loose connection through the novel Mrs. Dalloway. Somebody is writing it, somebody is reading it and somebody else is living it.

I will have more comments after I have read it again.