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The Hours is one of the subtlest novels you will ever pick up, yet also one of the most powerful and haunting. Nothing seems to really be happening, yet so much has already happened because everything interior is alive and well. Just as there is not much to be said about the impending grief of losing a dear friend to AIDS, why not realize the breeze and its whispers while fetching him flowers in an early spring morning full of possibility? Such is life. 

Therefore, instead of fashioning characters that hover above their banality, Michael Cunningham wisely chooses to locate personal stories amidst their everyday condition. Characters and their pasts meander in and out of their structured circumstances, showing their faces like hallowed ghosts. The choices that are revealed under such setting render the characters’ humanity, in all its shades, starker, and it is a very beautiful thing to witness. Standing tall on the shoulders of Virginia Woolf’s vision in Mrs Dalloway, The Hours is perched as a fitting postmodern companion. The durable scaffold of the former is revived as a recurrent situational text for reality referencing in the latter. However, what is borrowed are never the mere details and manners of one era (early 20th century England), but the common emotional undercurrents that echo through time, such that the years that divide them erode away, only to exist as convenient chapters of one same book. Cunningham knows this, and here, his interpretation allows a re-reading of Woolf, updating her text with an urgent contemporary relevance. This is a great personal homage that is tastefully done. The visionary is dead, long live the visionary. Unlike in Specimen Days (c.f. Walt Whitman was his muse) where this strategy was employed to a slightly contrived and inconsistent effect, the result here is an intricately-woven cross-stitch of life’s tapestry that is ‘equally poised between despair and the desire to live’ (Meryl Streep, 2002).

Contributed by: s.t