50 Books - Book 15
Apr. 2nd, 2003 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sierciaThe Hours by Michael Cunningham
I enjoyed this one a great deal. It was interesting and beautifully written. Particularly interesting is having seen the movie so recently and comparing the two - some of my favorite speeches and dialogues from the movie weren't actually in the book, probably because it's so much easier to get inside a book character's head.
Virginia Wolff's impassioned speech in the train station, gone. Clarissa's puzzling discussion about the "beginning of happiness" largely consigned to an internal dialogue. Laura Brown's heart-breaking conversation with Clarissa at the end ("I wish I could say I regretted it. But what is regret when you have no choice?") Swoon. And largely, entirely missing from the book, and that disappointed me a lot. The book did such a better job of explaining her at the beginning of the book, and then didn't resolve her storyline the way I wanted it to, but that was probably just badly set expectations from the movie.
One thing I thought was weird was that in the movie, when Laura leaves her son with a babysitter and goes off by herself, they portray the boy as hugely panicky and screaming for his mother (and in the movie, we think she is going to kill herself; that's less clear in the book, so it's not as if they needed a way to convey that in the movie). I find myself wondering if they felt they needed to do that to convey the neediness of a small child, which would make just about every mother I know laugh. They're needy just in their essense, they don't need to be screaming and crying for your attention fo you to feel their need curling around your ankles like the tendrils on a vine. Maybe they figured that non-parents wouldn't get it without it being so obvious.
Overall, though it's a wonderful meditation on life and the choices we make about how fully we live our lives. I still haven;t decided if it makes the argument that you should always live on the edge, intensely, hugely, or that sometimes we do make choices that limit ourselves and our experiences and that life should be about accepting and finding happiness in the small things. I suspect it's that first one, which is, of course, why the book made me so sad.
No on to Cold Sassy Tree.
I enjoyed this one a great deal. It was interesting and beautifully written. Particularly interesting is having seen the movie so recently and comparing the two - some of my favorite speeches and dialogues from the movie weren't actually in the book, probably because it's so much easier to get inside a book character's head.
Virginia Wolff's impassioned speech in the train station, gone. Clarissa's puzzling discussion about the "beginning of happiness" largely consigned to an internal dialogue. Laura Brown's heart-breaking conversation with Clarissa at the end ("I wish I could say I regretted it. But what is regret when you have no choice?") Swoon. And largely, entirely missing from the book, and that disappointed me a lot. The book did such a better job of explaining her at the beginning of the book, and then didn't resolve her storyline the way I wanted it to, but that was probably just badly set expectations from the movie.
One thing I thought was weird was that in the movie, when Laura leaves her son with a babysitter and goes off by herself, they portray the boy as hugely panicky and screaming for his mother (and in the movie, we think she is going to kill herself; that's less clear in the book, so it's not as if they needed a way to convey that in the movie). I find myself wondering if they felt they needed to do that to convey the neediness of a small child, which would make just about every mother I know laugh. They're needy just in their essense, they don't need to be screaming and crying for your attention fo you to feel their need curling around your ankles like the tendrils on a vine. Maybe they figured that non-parents wouldn't get it without it being so obvious.
Overall, though it's a wonderful meditation on life and the choices we make about how fully we live our lives. I still haven;t decided if it makes the argument that you should always live on the edge, intensely, hugely, or that sometimes we do make choices that limit ourselves and our experiences and that life should be about accepting and finding happiness in the small things. I suspect it's that first one, which is, of course, why the book made me so sad.
No on to Cold Sassy Tree.