Reading Challenge: Nobel Prize for Literature

The aim of this challenge is to read at least one book by as many Nobel Prize winners as possible.

2010
Mario Vargas Llosa

2009
Herta Müller

2008
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
The Book of Flights

2007
Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook

2006
Orhan Pamuk

2005
Harold Pinter

2004
Elfriede Jelinek

2003
John M. Coetzee
Boyhood
Diary of a Bad Year
Disgrace
Life and Times of Michael K
Slow Man
Summertime
Waiting for the Barbarians
Youth


2002
Imre Kertész

2001
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

2000
Gao Xingjian

1999
Günter Grass

1998
José Saramago
Blindness
Seeing


1997
Dario Fo

1996
Wislawa Szymborska

1995
Seamus Heaney

1994
Kenzaburo Oe

1993
Toni Morrison
A Mercy


1992
Derek Walcott

1991
Nadine Gordimer

1990
Octavio Paz

1989
Camilo José Cela

1988
Naguib Mahfouz

1987
Joseph Brodsky

1986
Wole Soyinka

1985
Claude Simon

1984
Jaroslav Seifert

1983
William Golding
Lord of the Flies

1982
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera


1981
Elias Canetti

1980
Czeslaw Milosz

1979
Odysseus Elytis

1978
Isaac Bashevis Singer

1977
Vicente Aleixandre

1976
Saul Bellow

1975
Eugenio Montale

1974
Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson

1973
Patrick White

1972
Heinrich Böll

1971
Pablo Neruda

1970
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

1969
Samuel Beckett

1968
Yasunari Kawabata

1967
Miguel Angel Asturias

1966
Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nelly Sachs

1965
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov

1964
Jean-Paul Sartre

1963
Giorgos Seferis

1962
John Steinbeck

1961
Ivo Andric

1960
Saint-John Perse

1959
Salvatore Quasimodo

1958
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago


1957
Albert Camus
The Fall
The Outsider

1956
Juan Ramón Jiménez

1955
Halldór Kiljan Laxness

1954
Ernest Miller Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea


1953
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill

1952
François Mauriac

1951
Pär Fabian Lagerkvist

1950
Earl (Bertrand Arthur William) Russell

1949
William Faulkner

1948
Thomas Stearns Eliot

1947
André Paul Guillaume Gide

1946
Hermann Hesse

1945
Gabriela Mistral

1944
Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

1939
Frans Eemil Sillanpää

1938
Pearl Buck

1937
Roger Martin du Gard

1936
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

1934
Luigi Pirandello

1933
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin

1932
John Galsworthy

1931
Erik Axel Karlfeldt

1930
Sinclair Lewis

1929
Thomas Mann

1928
Sigrid Undset

1927
Henri Bergson

1926
Grazia Deledda

1925
George Bernard Shaw

1924
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

1923
William Butler Yeats

1922
Jacinto Benavente

1921
Anatole France

1920
Knut Pedersen Hamsun

1919
Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler

1917
Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan

1916
Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam

1915
Romain Rolland

1913
Rabindranath Tagore

1912
Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann

1911
Count Maurice (Mooris) Polidore Marie Bernhard Maeterlinck

1910
Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse

1909
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf

1908
Rudolf Christoph Eucken

1907
Rudyard Kipling

1906
Giosuè Carducci

1905
Henryk Sienkiewicz

1904
Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray y Eizaguirre

1903
Bjørnstjerne Martinus Bjørnson

1902
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen

Book Review: The Theory of Clouds - Stephane Audeguy

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. On day one it is The Theory of Clouds by Stephane Audeguy, a book I consider the most fortunate discovery of my life.

Read: December 2007

The Theory of Clouds in one tweet-sized chunk:

The Theory of Clouds is a journey across skies and into lives, quietly building a tapestry of interlocking narratives on life, obsession and memory

Since the dawn of time writers have been drawn to the sea, to its solitude and its silent power. From Homer and William Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, and John Banville, the sea has existed as both a living presence, and metaphorical idea on which novels, poems and plays have floated…and occasionally sunk. Yet despite their equally transient nature, moodiness, and deceptive depth, clouds have been largely overlooked in the annuls of literature. Suddenly, having read The Theory of Clouds this strikes me as a remarkable oversight.

“All children become sad in the late afternoon, for they begin to comprehend the passage of time. The light starts to change. Soon they will have to head home, and to behave, and to pretend.”

From this sumptuous first paragraph, The Theory of Clouds takes you on a journey across the skies and into lives, quietly, gradually, sparsely building a tapestry of interlocking narratives, stories of life, and obsession, and clouds. Stephane Audeguy’s debut novel, already the recipient of the Grand Prize of the French Academy, reveals a rare and delightfully fresh new literary talent.

Legendary couturier Akira Kumo has built his whole life for himself: never questioning the holes in his memory: the absence of a childhood, or family. Now retired, he has devoted himself to amassing the world’s largest collection of books on clouds and meteorology. Requiring someone to catalogue this vast library, he hires Virginie Latour and begins to teach her about the history of clouds, and those who have watched them.

So begins this most gently beautiful of books. As Kumo takes Virginie on a historical tour of clouds, we meet prominent men whose lives have been attracted to those deceptively heavy clouds which float so lightly across the skies.

We meet Luke Howard a devout Quaker who, in 1821 gave clouds the names by which they have been known ever since, Cirrus, Cummulus, Stratus, and Nimbus. Then there is Lewis Fry Richardson, a devout pacifist and mathematician who devised the means of modern weather forecasting years before the technology existed make it a reality.

But though some lives are made by their relationship with clouds, others lose themselves in their deceptive depths.

“Men are destroyed, and destroy each other, over basic things – money or hatred. On the other hand a really complicated riddle never pushed anyone to violence; either you found the answer or gave up looking. Clouds were riddles too, but dangerously simple ones. If you zoomed in on one part of a cloud and took a photograph, then enlarged the image, you would find that a cloud’s edges seemed like another cloud, and those edges yet another, and so on. Every part of a cloud, in other words, reiterates the whole. Therefore each cloud might be called infinite, because its very surface is composed of other clouds, and those clouds of still other clouds, and so forth. Some learn to lean over the abyss of these brainteasers; others lose their balance and tumble into its eternal blackness.”

It is this infinity, this capricious refusal to be defined, that can send people mad. For example, Carmichael, the English painter, whose obsession with painting the true nature of clouds drives him mad. But it is the story of Richard Abercrombie, noted cloud watcher and all round English gentlemen, which holds the key, not only to Kumo’s collection, but to his past, and Virginie’s future.

So when The Abercrombie Protocol becomes available, Kumo dispatches Virginie to London to see if she can lay her hands on the fabled document. Her journey takes her into the heart of the very history Kumo has been teaching her, its locale and its characters, and soon she returns with fresh stories, stories which run to the heart of that most difficult of relationships, between clouds, and the people who watch them.

The Theory of Clouds is about the interconnectedness of nature and humanity. Without a single line of dialogue Audegey builds a novel which is both illuminating and beautiful, understated and yet intensely profound. The narratives verge from the fictional to the literal, each story merging together, reflecting its predecessors in some way or other, be it geographically, emotionally, intellectually or in the events of life and death. And slowly but surely the lives of Kumo and Virginie merge with their forebears, being written into this future history of clouds.

There are touches of Kazuo Ishiguro here, in the Japanese history and the sparse prose, the ability to let events and stories speak for themselves. Subtly, ever so quietly, this novel will creep up upon you until you find yourself thoroughly engrossed, hungry to read at all hours of the day. There are hints of W.G. Sebald too, in the search for memory and historical truth.

“Only the ocean may be more fascinating to watch than clouds, and equally dangerous, for nothing is more useless and more deceptive and generally more stupefying that watching something that is ever changing and ever self-renewing. Yearning to describe or understand, or even control it can cost you everything. What Virginie first perceived as a long and sweetly amorous procession of clouds now contained an element of despair, unrequited love, and dreary solitude.”

Reading this simple tale of clouds is so much more and less than that. It is like watching the clouds pass overhead, like looking at life itself, head on for once. Infinity, infinitely recurring, always changing, never definable. And the clouds are both literal in the history and science behind them, and a metaphor for the transience of thought, of life, and of expectations.

I finished The Theory of Clouds on a Friday afternoon and started re-reading it immediately. I had never done that before and it was as good the second time as it was the first. I can offer no greater recommendation than that.

10 out of 10

Challenge: Booker Prize

The aim of this challenge is continue progressing through the annuls of Booker history until I have read every winner and as many of the shortlisted books as possible.

Those books I've read are in bold and those I've reviewed linked through. 

1969
Winner

Something to Answer For - P H Newby
Shortlist 

Figures in a Landscape – Barry England

The Impossible Object – Nicholas Mosley

The Nice and the Good – Iris Murdoch

The Public Image – Muriel Spark

From Scenes Like These – G M Williams

197O
Winner

The Elected Member - Bernice Rubens
Shortlist 

John Brown’s Body - A L Barker

Eva Trout - Elizabeth Bowen

Bruno’s Dream - Iris Murdoch

Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel - William Trevor

The Conjunction - T W Wheeler

The Lost Booker
Winner
Troubles - JG Farrell
Shortlist
The Birds on the Trees by Nina Bawden
The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard
Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault
The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark
The Vivisector by Patrick White

1971
Winner

In a Free State - V S Naipaul
Shortlist

The Big Chapel - Thomas Kilroy

Briefing for a Descent into Hell - Doris Lessing

St Urbain’s Horseman - Mordecai Richler

Goshawk Squadron - Derek Robinson

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor

1972
Winner

G - John Berger
Shortlist

Bird of Night - Susan Hill

The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith - Thomas Keneally

Pasmore - David Storey

1973
Winner

The Siege of Krishnapur - J G Farrell
Shortlist

The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge

The Green Equinox - Elizabeth Mavor

The Black Prince - Iris Murdoch

1974
Winners

The Conservationist - Nadine Gordimer  
Holiday - Stanley Middleton
Shortlist

Ending Up - Kingsley Amis

The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge

In Their Wisdom - C P Snow

1975
Winner

Heat and Dust - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Shortlist

Gossip from the Forest - Thomas Keneally

1976
Winner

Saville - David Storey
Shortlist

An Instant in the Wind - André Brink

Rising - R C Hutchinson

The Doctor’s Wife - Brian Moore

King Fisher Lives - Julian Rathbone

The Children of Dynmouth - William Trevor

1977
Winner

Staying On - Paul Scott
Shortlist

Peter Smart’s Confessions - Paul Bailey

Great Granny Webster - Caroline Blackwood

Shadows on our Skin - Jennifer Johnston

The Road to Lichfield - Penelope Lively

Quartet in Autumn - Barbara Pym

1978
Winner

The Sea, the Sea - Iris Murdoch
Shortlist

Jake’s Thing - Kingsley Amis

Rumours of Rain - André Brink

The Bookshop - Penelope Fitzgerald

God on the Rocks - Jane Gardam

A Five-Year Sentence - Bernice Rubens

1979
Winner

Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald
Shortlist

Confederates - Thomas Keneally

A Bend in the River - V S Naipaul

Joseph - Julian Rathbone

Praxis - Fay Weldon

198O
Winner

Rites of Passage - William Golding
Shortlist

Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess

Clear Light of Day - Anita Desai

The Beggar Maid - Alice Munro

No Country for Young Men - Julia O’Faolain

Pascali’s Island - Barry Unsworth

A Month in the Country - J L Carr

1981
Winner

Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
Shortlisted

Good Behaviour - Molly Keane

The Sirian Experiments - Doris Lessing

The Comfort of Strangers - Ian McEwan

Rhine Journey - Ann Schlee

Loitering with Intent - Muriel Spark

The White Hotel - D M Thomas

1982
Winner

Schindler’s Ark - Thomas Keneally
Shortlist

Silence among the Weapons - John Arden

An Ice-Cream War - William Boyd

Constance or Solitary Practices - Lawrence Durrell

The 27th Kingdom - Alice Thomas Ellis

Sour Sweet - Timothy Mo

1983
Winner

Life and Times of Michael K - J M Coetzee
Shortlist

Rates of Exchange - Malcolm Bradbury

Flying to Nowhere - John Fuller

The Illusionist - Anita Mason

Shame - Salman Rushdie

Waterland - Graham Swift

1984
Winner

Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner
Shortlist

Empire of the Sun - J G Ballard

Flaubert’s Parrot - Julian Barnes

In Custody - Anita Desai

According to Mark - Penelope Lively

Small World - David Lodge

1985
Winner

The Bone People - Keri Hulme
Shortlist

Illywhacker - Peter Carey

The Battle of Pollocks Crossing - J L Carr

The Good Terrorist - Doris Lessing

Last Letters from Hav - Jan Morris

The Good Apprentice - Iris Murdoch

1986
Winner

The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis
Shortlist

The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

Gabriel’s Lament - Paul Bailey

What’s Bred in the Bone - Robertson Davies

An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro

An Insular Possession - Timothy Mo

1987
Winner

Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively
Shortlist

Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe

Chatterton - Peter Ackroyd

Circles of Deceit - Nina Bawden

The Colour of Blood - Brian Moore

The Book and the Brotherhood - Iris Murdoch

1988
Winner

Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey 
Shortlist

Utz - Bruce Chatwin

The Beginning of Spring - Penelope Fitzgerald

Nice Work - David Lodge

The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie

The Lost Father - Marina Warner

1989
Winner

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Shortlist

Cat’s Eye - Margaret Atwood

The Book of Evidence - John Banville

Jigsaw - Sybille Bedford

A Disaffection - James Kelman

Restoration - Rose Tremain

199O
Winner

Possession - A S Byatt
Shortlist

An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge

The Gate of Angels - Penelope Fitzgerald

Amongst Women - John McGahern

Lies of Silence - Brian Moore

Gursky Was Here - Mordecai Richler Solomon

1991
Winner

The Famished Road - Ben Okri
Shortlist

Time’s Arrow - Martin Amis

The Van - Roddy Doyle

Such a Long Journey - Rohinton Mistry

The Redundancy of Courage - Timothy Mo

Reading Turgenev (from Two Lives) - William Trevor

1992
Winners

The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje 

Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth
Shortlist

Serenity House - Christopher Hope

The Butcher Boy - Patrick McCabe

Black Dogs - Ian McEwan

Daughters of the House - Michèle Roberts

1993
Winner

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha - Roddy Doyle
Shortlist

Under the Frog - Tibor Fischer

Scar Tissue - Michael Ignatieff

Remembering Babylon - David Malouf

Crossing the River - Caryl Phillips

The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields

1994
Winner

How Late It Was, How Late - James Kelman
Shortlist

Reef - Romesh Gunesekera

Paradise - Abdulrazak Gurnah

The Folding Star - Alan Hollinghurst

Beside the Ocean of Time - George Mackay Brown

Knowledge of Angels - Jill Paton Walsh

1995
Winner

The Ghost Road - Pat Barker
Shortlist

In Every Face I Meet - Justin Cartwright

The Moor’s Last Sigh - Salman Rushdie

Morality Play - Barry Unsworth

The Riders - Tim Winton

1996
Winner

Last Orders - Graham Swift
Shortlist

Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood

Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge

Reading in the Dark - Seamus Deane

The Orchard on Fire - Shena Mackay

A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

1997
Winner

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Shortlist

Quarantine - Jim Crace

The Underground Man - Mick Jackson

Grace Notes - Bernard MacLaverty

Europa - Tim Parks

The Essence of the Thing - Madeleine St John

1998
Winner

Amsterdam - Ian McEwan
Shortlist

Master Georgie - Beryl Bainbridge

England England - Julian Barnes

The Industry of Souls - Martin Booth

Breakfast on Pluto - Patrick McCabe

The Restraint of Beasts - Magnus Mills

1999
Winner

Disgrace - J M Coetzee
Shortlist

Fasting, Feasting - Anita Desai

Headlong - Michael Frayn
Our Fathers - Andrew O’Hagan

The Map of Love - Ahdaf Soueif

The Blackwater Lightship - Colm Tóibín

2OOO
Winner

The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
Shortlist

The Hiding Place - Trezza Azzopardi

The Keepers of Truth - Michael Collins

When we were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro

English Passengers - Matthew Kneale

The Deposition of Father McGreevy - Brian O’Doherty

2OO1
Winner

True History of the Kelly Gang - Peter Carey
Shortlist

Atonement - Ian McEwan

Oxygen - Andrew Miller

number9dream - David Mitchell

The Dark Room - Rachel Seiffert

Hotel World - Ali Smith

2OO2
Winner

Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Shortlist

Family Matters - Rohinton Mistry

Unless - Carol Shields

The Story of Lucy Gault - William Trevor

Fingersmith - Sarah Waters

Dirt Music - Tim Winton

2OO3
Winner

Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre
Shortlist

Brick Lane - Monica Ali

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

The Good Doctor - Damon Galgut

Notes on a Scandal - Zoë Heller

Astonishing Splashes of Colour - Clare Morrall

2OO4
Winner

The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst
Shortlist

Bitter Fruit - Achmat Dangor

The Electric Michelangelo - Sarah Hall

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

The Master - Colm Toibin

I’ll go to Bed at Noon - Gerard Woodward

2OO5
Winner

The Sea - John Banville
Shortlist

Arthur and George - Julian Barnes

A Long, Long Way - Sebastian Barry

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

The Accidental - Ali Smith

On Beauty - Zadie Smith

2OO6
Winner

The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai
Shortlist

The Secret River - Kate Grenville

Carry Me Down - M J Hyland

In the Country of Men - Hisham Matar 

Mother’s Milk - Edward St Aubyn

The Night Watch - Sarah Waters

2OO7
Winner

The Gathering - Anne Enright
Shortlist

Darkmans - Nicola Barker

The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid

Mister Pip - Lloyd Jones

On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan

Animal’s People - Indra Sinha

2OO8
Winner

The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
Shortlist

The Secret Scripture - Sebastian Barry

Sea of Poppies - Amitav Ghosh

The Clothes on Their Backs - Linda Grant

The Northern Clemency - Philip Hensher

A Fraction of the Whole - Steve Toltz

2009

Winner

Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel

Shortlist

The Children's Book – A S Byatt

Summertime – J M Coetzee

The Quickening Maze – Adam Foulds

The Glass Room – Simon Mawer

The Little Stranger – Sarah Waters

2010

Winner

The Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson

Shortlist

Parrot and Oliver in America - Peter Carey

Room - Emma Donoghue

In a Strange Room - Damon Galgut

The Long Song - Andrea Levy

C - Tom McCarthy

2011

Winner

The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

Shortlist

Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch

The Sisters Brothers - Patrick deWitt

Half Blood Blues - Esi Edugyan

Pigeon English - Stephen Kelman

Snowdrops - AD Miller

2012

Winner

Bring up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

Shortlist 

The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

Swimming Home - Deborah Levy

The Lighthouse - Alison Moore

Umbrella - Will Self

Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil

2013

Winner

The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton

Shortlist 

We Need New Names - NoViolet Bulawayo

Harvest - Jim Crace
The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri
A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki

The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin

The Hours - Michael Cunningham

If Mrs Dalloway were a diamond it would be almost as big as the Ritz, priceless, and kept under lock and key in a national museum. Visitors would gape at it, experts celebrate it, soothsayers develop all sorts of legends around it. Most of all it would inspire awe in those who looked upon it, for no one could quite conceive of the gargantuan forces needed to bring about its creation. And yet, for all this immense beauty it would remain shut up in its case, impractical, and with grains of carbon imperfection at its core.

What Michael Cunningham does in The Hours is akin to the master jeweller who takes this unwieldy diamond and from it creates a series of smaller, perfectly crafted gems which sparkle in the light and can be placed within rings and pendants and worn in public for all to enjoy. His skill is in knowing exactly where to cut and where to shave so that none of the original beauty is lost. The result is a precious reworking of a great novel, simplified, purified, and with an engaging plot which augments, comments upon, and replies to the themes of Woolf’s original text.

The story unfolds through the interweaving narratives of three women whose lives are linked by and constantly refer back to Mrs Dalloway. It is the 1920s and having been forced to retreat from literary London after a breakdown, Mrs Woolf is tentatively beginning to write her new novel. Occasionally she catches a glimpse of inspiration, but fears it will fade like a dream the moment she wakes up. It is the 1940s and Mrs Brown is pregnant with her second child, savouring a few extra minutes in bed with her book before she has to go downstairs and play the role of wife and mother. And it is the end of the twentieth century and Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her New York apartment to buy flowers for the party she is throwing in honour of her friend Richard Brown, a celebrated poet who is dying of aids.

It is all of these three times at once, for life, like great literature, is timeless. The characters experience similar hopes and fears, similar passions and constraints, and, just occasionally, those moments of exquisite happiness which makes each of these books such a rare treat. What changes is the world around them: the material freedoms of different ages and the social mores which govern what one can and can’t be. As in Mrs Dalloway, the focus is on the beauty and wonder of individual moments, but more fundamentally than its predecessor, The Hours is about their transience, the irrevocable march of time which ensures that everything will ultimately fade and decay. On top of this Cunningham takes many of the sub-plots from Mrs Dalloway – privilege, parenting, homosexuality and mental illness – and looks at them through the lenses of different decades. What is impossible, almost unthinkable, in Virginia Woolf’s 1920s and hidden behind suburban façades in the 1940s is gloriously possible in the 1990s. This is most clearly the case when it comes to homosexuality. In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa cherishes one moment in her life above all else, the kiss she shared with her friend Sally Seton. Here the inspiration for this passage comes from Woolf’s own life, and a simple sisterly kiss shared with her sister. This moment is developed through Mrs Brown stolen moment of solidarity with a sick neighbour, and then fully achieved in the New York of the 1990s, where instead of marrying Richard Dalloway, Clarissa is living happily with Sally.

“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…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.”

The Hours is packed with these sorts of triptych moments, where biographical fact and classic fiction blur together to create something new. Special moments from Mrs Dalloway are revisited and updated; reflected upon in an atmosphere of nostalgic illumination which only serves to heighten their poignancy. By portraying Virginia Woolf, meticulously researched and brought to life, Cunningham is able to add to the mix an investigation on the nature of writing. Through his elegant, haunting prose, he explores the pain and trauma of creativity and the immutable relationship between writer and reader. While Mrs Woolf is shocked to discover that she can still think clearly and write capably, Mrs Brown is overwhelmed by the clarity of her expression and ascribes almost mythical significance to her words. And while Richard Brown is preparing to be honoured as one of the greatest living poets, he muses repeatedly on the impossibility of it all:

“What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted to create something live and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.”

These moments of heartbreaking honesty are what make The Hours such a great read. For all the beauty of Woolf’s prose, it remains an acquired – and even then challenging – taste. Not so Michael Cunningham. He has a clarity of expression which is dreamy, emotive, and a joy to read. Where Mrs Dalloway is hard work, dense and over punctuated, The Hours is understated and with a beautifully lilting flow. What Michael Cunningham understands is that spectacular prose cannot be overdone. For a passage to shine with its full power it cannot be crowded with dense prose on all sides. Great art is about knowing where to stop – not layering the paint too thick, repeating the motif too often, or attacking the notes with too much bravado – and letting what is already created speak for itself. The Hours may owe its most powerful passages and images to Virginia Woolf’s literary genius, but in taking them out of the Mrs Dalloway context and making them the centrepiece of all which takes place, they become even more beautiful to the eye, like a single flower blossoming in the middle of a lawn.

It is impossible to say which I prefer: the elegant and rewarding Mrs Dalloway which can be peered at in awe through a microscope for hours on end, or The Hours, masterly crafted and perfectly paced. It all comes down to personal preference and I cannot recommend them each highly enough. Ultimately they are each better for the existence of the other. Each captures the beauty in individual moments and the fragility of time. There is one moment near the end of The Hours which sums it all up and captures perfectly that very human experience which they are each about.

“Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. 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. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep – it’s as simple and ordinary as that. 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’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.”

9 out of 10