The Hours: Critical Comments

Reviews of "The Hours

"A smashing literary tour de force and an utterly invigorating reading experience. If his book does not make you jump up from the sofa, looking at life and literature in new ways, check to see if you have a pulse." --USA Today

"An exquisitely written, kaleidoscopic work that anchors a floating postmodern world on premodern caissons of love, grief, and transcendent longing." --Los Angeles Times

"Cunningham has created something original, a trio of richly interwoven tales... his most mature and masterful work." --The Washington Post Book World

"It takes courage to emulate a revered and brilliant writer, not to mention transforming her into a character." --Booklist

"...shimmering, perfectly-observed prose. Hardly a false note in an extraordinary carrying on of a true greatness that doubted itself." --Kirkus Reviews

"The Hours is in fact a lovely triumph. Cunningham honors both Mrs. Dalloway and its creator with unerring sensitivity, thanks to his modesty of intention and his sovereignly affecting prose.... With his elliptical evocation of Mrs. Dalloway, he has managed to pay great but quiet tribute -- reminding us of the gorgeous, ferocious beauty of what endures." --Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

"In his smart and playful new novel, Michael Cunningham has revisited, and masterfully reinvented, Virginia Woolf's great--and greatest--novel, Mrs. Dalloway.... The triumph of The Hours is that it somehow manages to be both artful and sincere, striking nary a false note..." --Justin Cronin, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Cunningham writes beautifully about relationships, living and dying, and love... it's hard not to audibly gasp with both pleasure and shock." --Detroit Free Press

"Luxurious.... The Hours tells three interwoven stories; Woolf's novel echoes through all of them in interesting and uncanny ways.... Cunningham writes with an empathy that approaches Woolf's." --Lisa Cohen, Newsday

"The Hours is one of the most ambitious, tightly conceived, and beautifully written of this season's fiction offerings.... Cunningham has written lyrically, and has inhabited Woolf's prose magnificently." --Amy Blair, The Boston Book Review

"Cunningham dazzles in his inspired novel The Hours." --Vanity Fair

"[A] fine novel... bringing to light the buried connection his three characters share, capturing in each the illuminating and transforming moment." --Dallas Morning News

"[The Hours] is both a clever tribute to the life and work of Virginia Woolf, and a brilliant examination of the quietly desperate lives of three women." --Seattle Times

"His language is always on key, unfailing and measured, rich without sating, and haunting in the way Woolf's is." --Alyce Miller, Chicago Tribune

"Intricate... richly imagined... a profoundly compassionate meditation on life and death."--Elle

"What, [Cunningham] essentially asks in The Hours, is it like to grow up and older, to succeed and fail, to have friends and lovers and children and parents who delight and disappoint, provide joy and sorrow?" --Charles Ganee, Vogue

"[An] ambitious and largely successful attempt to weave the life and sensibility of Virginia Woolf into a story of his own characters." --New York

"[A] brilliant tour de force... This is a skillfully wrought novel thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Virginia Woolf and crafted in keeping with her rare excellence." --The Miami Herald

"Brilliant... haunting--winding skeins of words that, as they unspool, render vividly the three heroines' complex interior lives." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Rich and beautifully nuanced scenes follow one upon the other... [a] gargantuan accomplishment." --Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)

"[Al remarkable new novel... A concise, brilliant rendering of three eras." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Clever and beautifully rendered.... In meshing the women's inner lives with Woolf's insights and themes, Cunningham creates a richly layered whole that suggests what we can reasonably ask of life." --The Roanoke Times

"Cunningham here undertakes perhaps one of the most daunting literary projects imaginable.... Cunningham's portrait of Woolf is heartbreaking.... With The Hours, Cunningham has done the impossible: he has taken a canonical work of literature and, in reworking it, made it his own." --Yale Book Review

"A novel so mesmerizing and true that it echoes not only in the mind but also in the heart long after it has had its final say.... Triumphant... In paying homage to one visionary writer, Cunningham has proved himself to be another." --New York Daily News

"Brilliant... It's the work of a talented writer taking an adventurous plunge below the obvious surface of things. The Hours has the heft of flesh and blood, the subtlety of art." --The Hartford Courant

"At its best, and that is a lyrical, crystalline best, The Hours embodies a balance between lethal, life-changing vision and the daily, mundane work of caring, writing, and actually changing one's world." --City Pages