The Hours

The Queen of Procrastination strikes again. Here I sit at my computer at 10 PM (PST) trying to say SOMETHING intelligent about two books I read a month ago.

I think that if I had read "The Hours" first I would have liked it better. My dislike of "Mrs. Dalloway" colored my view of Cunningham's book. I found myself wondering why he bothered. I understand the idea of doing homage to a "great writer" but I also kept thinking he could have told his story in a different (more original?) way. The only other "homage" work I've ever read was "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" which I really loved. I guess you might call that work a "re-imagining" but still, I was hoping for that kind of thing when I started "The Hours." Y'all know how disappointed I was :(

The main problem I had with "Mrs. Dalloway" was not being able to relate to any of the characters. The book was written 80 years ago about people in a country I have no first hand experience of and a class I am not part of. I wasn't interested in any of the people so I didn't care about them.

I was confused by the forward to the book saying that Woolf had written an amazing book about the lives of women. Thinking back on the women in "Mrs. Dalloway," the only female characters that were even partially developed were the ones of Woolf's own class. The "lower classes" just seem be there to add validity (or colour) to

the people of Clarissa's class.

I like the idea of story telling about "a day in the life." The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Data's Day" which deals with Data's experiences as he prepares for O'Brian's wedding was great. I supposed that could be seen as homage to "Mrs. Dalloway." The popularity of the new series 24 seems to say that this can