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The Hours
Summary
1. Il libro racconta di tre donne. La prima è la sua musa, Virginia Woolf, ritratta prima nel momento in cui decide di suicidarsi e poi a ritroso nel tempo, mentre è alle prese con la stesura del romanzo che poi intitolerà Mrs Dalloway. L’altra protagonista è Clarissa Vaughan, un’editrice newyorkese contemporanea descritta in un giorno in cui sta preparando un ricevimento per festeggiare la vittoria di un premio letterario da parte di Richard, un amico di vecchia data di cui fin da ragazza è innamorata e che ora sta morendo di AIDS. La terza donna è Laura Brown, una casalinga californiana dell’immediato dopoguerra, profondamente inquieta nonostante l’apparente serenità familiare, alla ricerca di uno spiraglio di fuga, che inizialmente trova nella lettura del romanzo della Woolf e che poi concretizza scomparendo improvvisamente dalla vita dei suoi cari - il marito e il piccolo Richard di soli tre anni. Richard non festeggia la premiazione della sua carriera da scrittore perché si getta dalla finestra dinnanzi agli occhi di Clarissa. Così il ricevimento in onore del premio letterario vinto da Richard si trasforma nel suo funerale, a cui partecipa anche la madre Laura, che moltissimi anni prima lo aveva abbandonato. Il romanzo si conclude comunque con un inno alla vita, nonostante le difficoltà e le amarezze di fronte alle quali ognuno di noi si trova.
Oppure
2: Romanzo diviso in capitoli ambientati in tre diversi contesti locutori ciascuno dei quali ha una donna come protagonista, un tempo e un luogo. Tutte e tre le donne sono legate dalla scrittura, lettura, esperienza del romanzo di V. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. Il romanzo parla del senso di inadeguatezza verso la vita, del ruolo/funzione dell’artista nella vita e nell’arte; del rapporto tra creazione artistica e fruizione dell’arte; della vita come scrittura di una vita; del significato della scrittura e della lettura.
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The novel is about many, many things and it would be a quite a thesis to unravel them all. It seems to be a meditation on creation, destruction, ordinariness, sanity-insanity and the fine line between the two. The sub-text is rich and varied and celebrates creativity in the ordinary. And yet the prose is highly accessible and reaches out to the reader with its delicate emotional depth.
The Hours was Woolf's working title for Mrs. Dalloway . In Cunningham's novel, he imagines several events in a single day in the life of Woolf in 1923. It is the day that she begins writing Mrs. Dalloway . Using biographical details, Cunningham recreates the events in a day of Woolf's life, like her conversations with her husband and sister, her arguments with her cook, and her attempts at preserving her sanity. He sets these events against a day in the life of a Los Angeles suburban housewife, Laura Brown in 1949 who reads Mrs. Dalloway , cares for her young son and prepares a birthday cake for her husband. Laura is trying not to panic at her feelings of suffocation in her humdrum domestic life.
Cunningham's third character is Clarissa Vaughan who is a book editor in the present-day Greenwich Village in New York City. He describes a day in her life when she is organizing a party for her former lover and oldest friend, Richard, an AIDS-stricken poet who has just won a major literary prize. As the novel traverses through the century, the lives and stories of the three women converge, unexpectedly and movingly, the night of Clarissa's party for Richard.
He also invents the afternoon of Woolf's suicide: "She hurries from the house wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has begun."
(…)
The Hours is about the richness of time, creativity, and about trying to live true to oneself, if only for an hour.
Stabilisce gerarchia tra le tre narrazioni e include anche la prefazione alla storia del suicidio\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
It weaves three storylines together, focusing on a book editor in New York, a housewife in California, and the suicide of Virginia Woolf. He says it's a masterful and delicate book with deep themes and elegant writing. (2:00)
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\The Hours begins with a reconstruction of Virginia Woolf's 1941 suicide by drowning. What follows is an exploration of despair and tenacity, of the reasons that some people choose not to continue living, and of the things that enable others to go on. Patterned as a kind of theme and variations on Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, this novel has three strands, each tracing a day in the life of a woman: Virginia Woolf herself, in 1925, as she begins to write Mrs. Dalloway; a middle-aged 1990s New Yorker named Clarissa Vaughan, but nicknamed "Mrs. Dalloway" by Richard, her ex-lover, an acclaimed writer who is dying of AIDS; and Laura Brown, a young mother in Los Angeles in 1949, pregnant, depressed, and reading Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.
Ha individuato un tema e lo usa per leggere i tre personaggi: suicidio
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Publishers Weekly:
… Cunningham's insightful use of the historical record concerning Virginia Woolf in her household outside London in the 1920s is matched by his audacious imagining of her inner life and his equally impressive plunge into the lives of Laura and Clarissa... Rich and beautifully nuanced scenes follow one upon the other... The overall effect of this book is twofold. First, it makes a reader hunger to know all about Woolf, again; but hers is an abiding presence, more about living than dying. Second, and this is the gargantuan accomplishment of this small book: it makes a reader believe in the possibility and depth of a communality based on great literature, literature that has shown people how to live and what to ask of life."
Ha individuato un tema e lo usa per leggere i tre personaggi: suicidio
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From Booklist , September 15, 1998
It takes courage to emulate a revered and brilliant writer, not to mention transforming her into a character. Cunningham has done this and more in his third novel, a graceful and passionate homage to Virginia Woolf, his goddess and his muse. The Hours was her working title for what became Mrs. Dalloway, the template for this evocative tale, and Cunningham makes beautiful, improvisational use of every facet of Woolf's novel and life story. He neatly cuts back and forth in time among three women: Woolf, whom he portrays in the throes of writing Mrs. Dalloway and contemplating suicide; Laura, a young wife and mother suffocating in the confines of her tidy little life in L.A. in 1949; and Clarissa, who is giving a party in the present in New York City for her closest friend, Richard, a writer dying of AIDS. Clarissa is Mrs. Dalloway once removed--a distinguished book editor and mother of a teenage daughter, she has lived with her female lover for 18 years. These particulars match surprising well with the intellectual, sexual, and artistic complexities of Bloomsbury, Woolf's hothouse world, thus revealing the full extent of Cunningham's identification with his mentor. And his prose! He is almost eerily fluent in Woolf's exquisitely orchestrated elucidation of the torrent of thoughts, memories, longings, and regrets that surges ceaselessly through the mind. Even if Cunningham's moving tribute served only to steer readers to Woolf's incomparable books, he would deserve praise, but he has accomplished much more than that. He has reaffirmed that Woolf is of lasting significance, that the questions she asked about life remain urgent, and that, in spite of sorrow, pain, and the promise of death, the simplest gestures--walking out the door on a lovely morning, setting a vase of roses on a table--can be, for one shining moment, enough. Donna Seaman
Copyright© 1998, American Library Association. All rights reserved
Paralleli tra Bloomsbury e la realtà contemporanea; domanda su cos’è la vita
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In this remarkable book, Cunningham draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, life and death, creation and destruction. The novel moves along three separate but parallel stories, each focusing on the experiences of a particular woman during the course of one apparently unremarkable but in fact pivotal day. …
Gruppo di personaggi. Individua dei conflitti
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Cunningham costruisce tutto attorno alla figura di tre donne in tre epoche diverse del nostro secolo. La prima è Virginia Woolf (l'anno è il 1941, quello del suo suicidio); la seconda è Laura Brown, una casalinga californiana scontenta e depressa, moglie di un marito che non ama fino in fondo e madre di un bambino, Richard (gli anni sono i sessanta e Laura è presa da un romanzo di Virginia Woolf, La signora Dalloway, che legge incessantemente); la terza è Clarissa Vaughan (come Clarissa Dalloway: lei è un editor newyorchese, vive con una donna, Sally, da molti anni, l'epoca è i nostri giorni).Ha individuato i tre contesti locutori
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