If you loathed how Bob Ong drives his readers to reminisce and laugh; if you despised the crazy arguments of Eros Atalia; if you found Chris Martinez’ Last Order sa Penguin too frank and bold; if you’re fed up with Severus Snape and Dumbledore’s magic; maybe you’ll like something too intellectual for the common people. Maybe you’ll like something that will surely make you think, yet opens you to a brighter window of ruminating what life really is about, what happiness is, how to be contented, and what love(in every sense of the word) really has for you. Maybe you’d want something real, something dead serious, yet flowery and literary. Maybe you’d want some Pulitzer and Pen/Faulkner.
Then, the novel The Hours. Written by an award winning novelist, Michael Cunningham, it explores the life of three women from different periods affected by a Virginia Woolf novel. One is Mrs. Laura Brown, an ordinary wife who is not contented with her routine-engrossed life. She hates preparing the house, baking a cake, caring for her son, and conceiving a child. She convinces herself that this is her life and that she must be happy. Second is Clarissa Vaughan, Cunningham’s modern Mrs. Dalloway, who cares for and loves Richard: an old friend who will receive the Carrouther’s and is dying of AIDS. Third is Virginia Woolf herself, who then writes Mrs. Dalloway, and recuperates from the ‘headaches’, her layman’s term for her attacks of insanity.
The novel begins and ends with a surprise. Virginia Woolf’s suicide shocks the readers in the prologue as she carefully puts stones in her coat to drown herself in the river. The feminist astonished herself with the different things she sees as the river pulls her down. Cunningham amazed the readers as he gives the deeply passionate ending, while making the readers catch their breaths, as the revelation happens. The author astounds the readers as the lives of the two women, Laura and Clarissa, merged with Woolf’s as it comes to the end.
“Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed. (…) even if we’re fleshless, blazing with lesions, shitting in the sheets; still, we want desperately to live.”
The novel presented the idea of death in a manner that dazes readers. As Richard, Clarissa’s friend, decides end his life (I will not tell you how he did it, I promise it’s shocking), Cunningham’s words made dying so acceptable. It’s as if people recognize that one time, no matter what circumstance, regardless of who you are, will and surely will die. We may die in different ways, some take pills, some hang themselves, some get hit by a car, some rot with sickness, some die a natural death. What matters are the things we did when we are alive. What matters is how we lived life.
“Here is the world and you live in it and are grateful. You try to be grateful.”
There is discontentment, of course. There are writer-wanna-be’s that end up with cradles and feeding bottles; famous people who become infamous; stars who soon fade. People tend to regret things they could have done. It is implicitly shown on the novel when Woolf yearns for London for she believes that her life is there; Laura wants to enjoy her life by not being a mother and wife.
Obviously, fanatics will say that the book’s title, The Hours is just a copycat of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, for it was its first title. But Cunningham made it more life-like: presenting more lives and how each one tries to exercise prudence, and go on living. He made more importance of the few hours that we have. He emphasized the worth of the hours that we have lived. The hours do really matter.
This is not an easy-reading novel, not that summery-afternoon-sitting-on the porch-with-a-glass-of-orange-juice-with-a-petty-little-book feel. Since it adopts the stream-of-consciousness technique initiated by Woolf and James Joyce, it requires the readers to think, as the author combines meaningful yet poetic words in forming his sentences. It is carefully though of. The manner Cunningham presents ideas will surprise a bookworm for it is highly moving, yet intellectual.
So not like Bob Ong’s, or Eros’, or Martinez’, The Hours will give you a serious butt as you reckon things and pieces of the joints of your life.
