the hours by michael cunningham sparknotes

This party was bad for me, and if it was not good for me, it had to be an absolute torture for Catherine. A book by each of my favorite reading places. I could see the books strategically scattered around the room of the flat. I thought with remorse of the lost pages of reading the party had already cost me. She is distinctly earthly and even decorative figure, all billows and scrolls….”Īs usual, I wasn’t really sure why I was at this party. If Virginia has the austere, parched beauty of a Giotto fresco, Vanessa is more like a figure sculpted in rosy marble by a skilled but minor artist of the late Baroque. Although she is three years older, she looks younger than Virginia, and both of them know it. Vanessa is firm of face, her skin a brilliant, scalded pink. Dalloway, I couldn’t help thinking of Catherine as Virginia and Charlotte as Vanessa. When I was doing research on Virginia Woolf, before reading Mrs. She had a gift for it, but frequently had to endure someone further up the chain asking for modifications, her masterpieces often becoming something more commercially appealing and soulless. Charlotte designed book covers for publishing companies. She was happy with the beginning and the ending, but the middle was not living up to the standards of the rest. It was brilliant in fact, but now was somewhat weighed down with its own brilliance. Catherine, my girlfriend, was writing a novel. You couldn’t really be involved with one without being involved with the other. Catherine told me you just finished reading Mrs. I often wondered if she knew what she did to me. “ The Hours by Michael Cunningham, didn’t they make a film out of it with Kidman?” One martini was going to be more than enough.

I was getting about four hours of sleep a night which right now was making me a cheap drunk. When I was between assignments, which was all too frequent, I would read book after book usually I would be in the middle of at least three at any one time. It made me shiver somewhere in the core of me. Her lips mere millimeters away from my ear.

“I hear you are on a reading binge.” She’d leaned in close, as she had a tendency to do with me. It was Charlotte who pressed this book upon me. It’s about the hours right? Those few precious hours over a lifetime when we feel we have a chance to do something special, to prove that we can do something that will forever immortalize us as someone exceptional. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills more die by accident and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’ve very fortunate, by time itself.” We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep-it’s as simple and ordinary as that. ”We throw our parties we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes.

The hours by michael cunningham sparknotes