About this title: Michael Cunningham's critically acclaimed novel, which is inspired by Virginia Woolf's MRS. DALLOWAY, tells three simultaneous stories. One is about Virginia Woolf while she is writing the novel in the mid-1920s. In another, a woman reading MRS. DALLOWAY in 1949 fights off despair. In the third, a woman named Clarissa (whose nickname is "Mrs. Dalloway") prepares a party for a friend in the late 1990s. The main action of each part of the novel takes place over the course of one day--as MRS. DALLOWAY does. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Date Published: 11/1998
ISBN-13:9780374172893ISBN:0374172897
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 230 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Date Published: 11/1998
ISBN-13:9780374172893ISBN:0374172897
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 230 p. read more
"Mrs Dalloway is a masterpiece. This book is nothing more than middling fan fiction. The fact that my copy of Mrs Dalloway has printed on it, emblazoned in a little star on the cover, the words "the book that inspired The Hours!"... yeah, it makes me want to barf down my shirt a little bit.
I give this two stars instead of one because I'm sure it's turned many readers on to one of the best novels ever written. Michael Cunningham at least has good taste, even if his book is boring and derivative."
"A gripping story about 3 woman in different time periods each unhappy with their lives. This is easily my all time favorite book for the beauty, the prose, the connections and the storylines. Simply wonderful. A novel to aspire towards."
"I'm not usually crazy about book characters to whom I can't relate, but MY GOD! the prose is magnificent. Sometimes I felt like Cunningham was just showing off, but I would too if I could write like this:
"It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers; and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was ardent but awkward, unsatisfying, more kindly than passionate. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.""
"Well at first I made it to "sluttish widow" and then I threw the book down. I picked it up again and made it the part about a woman agreeing to be harmless so her husband will provide for her and then I just decided to skip Clarissa's entire first chapter and move on to the next chapter on Woolf. Thus far I am wondering why this book won the Pulitzer Prize . . . So I have been reading the Woolf and Brown chapters and skimming the Clarissa chapters (I absolutely loathe these; the author is so crass in his depiction of sexuality and the tiresome Oedipal alusions seem so dated and unoriginal) and I find I am enjoying the Woolf chapters but these chapters aren't necessarily new material since Cunningham had volumes of Woolf's writing to build upon for his story.
I finally finished and although I did enjoy the Woolf chapters at first they quickly went downhill. It really galls me that Cunningham basically stole Woolf's novel (uses the same characters, names, etc.), badly imitates her writing style, and makes a mess of her life and wins a Pulitzer Prize for it. I'm not a Woolf fan--I can take or leave her--but she was an incredibly writer who was not recognized in her lifetime because she was a woman. Cunningham's book is less homage and more thievery."
We guarantee every item's condition, as described on Alibris. If you are not satisfied that an item is as described, return your purchase for a refund.
rating
