Аннотация

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hours_(novel)
The Hours is a 1998 novel written by Michael Cunningham. It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning 2002 film of the same name starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore.

Plot introduction

Portrait of Virginia Woolf, British author and feminist
The book concerns three generations of women affected by the classic novel Mrs. Dalloway.

In 1923 Richmond, outside London, author Virginia Woolf is writing Mrs. Dalloway and struggling with her mental illness. In 1949 Los Angeles, Laura Brown is reading Mrs. Dalloway while planning a birthday party for her husband, a World War II veteran. In 1999 New York City, Clarissa Vaughan plans a party to celebrate a major literary award received by her good friend and former lover, the poet Richard, who is dying of an AIDS-related illness.

The situations of all three characters mirror situations experienced by Woolf's own Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway, with Clarissa Vaughan being a modern-day version of Woolf's character. Like Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughan goes on a journey to buy flowers while reflecting on the minutiae of the day around her and later prepares to throw a party. Clarissa Dalloway and Clarissa Vaughan also both contrast their histories and past loves with their current lives, which they both perceive as trivial. Several other characters in Clarissa Vaughan's story also parallel characters in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Cunningham's novel mirrors Mrs. Dalloway's stream-of-consciousness narrative style, which was pioneered by Woolf and James Joyce, in which the flowing thoughts and perceptions of protagonists are depicted as they would occur in real life. This means that characters interact not only with the present, but also with memories; this contextualizes personal history and backstory, which otherwise might appear quite trivial—buying flowers, baking a cake, and such things.

Similarly to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham's novel places the entire story within one day. Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is one day in the life of the central character Clarissa Dalloway. Cunningham's novel contains one day in the life of each of the three central characters; Clarissa Vaughan, Laura Brown, and Virginia Woolf herself. Through these three women, Cunningham attempts, as did Woolf, to show the beauty and profundity of every day a person's life and, conversely, how a person's whole life can be examined through the lens of one single day.

Cunningham took the novel's title, The Hours, from the original working title that Virginia Woolf used for Mrs. Dalloway.