This is a novel in which its author enters the minds of the characters and shows step by step how they go through a day in their lives. Possibly, it is the author's going back and forth in time and going from one woman to another or his jumping from inside one head to another that give this novel its troubles.

The story opens with a prologue, showing the suicide of Virginia Woolf.

The next chapter in in New York City, at the end of the twentieth century, and it continues with Clarissa Vaughn, getting ready to give a party for Richard Worthington Brown the noted author who is dying of Aids and who Clarissa loves. Richard has nicknamed Clarissa, Mrs. Dalloway.

In the rest of the book the novel goes back and forth in time between three women: Virginia Woolf, while she is writing Mrs. Dalloway during the 1920s; the pregnant Laura Brown who is bored with her life and her sons, one of them Dicky, and escapes to a hotel room just to read Mrs. Dalloway, during 1949; the fifty-two year-old literary agent Clarissa Vaughn toward the end of the twentieth century.

All three women have deep insights into things around themselves and are greatly introspective. They are also connected by the novel Mrs. Dalloway, in some way. Richard the author is a troubled man, despite the award waiting for him and he, too, is connected to all three women in some way. Throughout the novel, the details in the scenes and of a character are used to show the specific aspects of another character.

Although this book has won 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning 2002 movie, it is a difficult book to enjoy. I first listened to it from its audio version. Thinking I missed something, I borrowed it in hardcover from the library. Granted, I liked the printed version better, but I still think it is a dark, difficult story, regardless of the perfectly wonderful prose, exquisitely written scenes, and the multifaceted plot.

feeling bad why I decided to listen to it and then to read it.

the dark, although not necessarily negative, view of the author where women are concerned.

find out why this book won any award. I still can't believe it did.

is Michael Cunningham, a noted, award-winning writer. His books are: Golden States, A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, The Snow Queen

I neither recommend or not recommend this book.

In addition, I am not going to sing praises to any book difficult to like because it has won the Pulitzer or any other award, and I am not put off by slow-moving or dark stories either. I rather like them, in general, because the literary genre is my favorite genre.

Still, it could be my lack of understanding or appreciation, but I found this book very difficult to like, maybe because it had to do with Virginia Woolf whose writing is so much better than this novel, which tries to pay homage to it.

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Created Mar 29, 2015 at 7:10pm • Submit your own review...