The Uncertain Hour

The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Being Dead by Jim Crace are two of my all time favorite books. When I saw that both Cunningham and Crace endorsed a new book, I bought it immediately.

The Uncertain Hour by Jesse Browner is a masterpiece and it is impossible to put down. Based on the basic description (a “vivid portrait of life in Rome” and “a gripping entrée into the mind of a great man during his final hours”), I thought there might be parts of it that would be like Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (not in terms of the narrative, but in the sense that the main character in both books are confronting their own death).

It is not. In general, I liked Never Let Me Go (I wrote about it here), but the narrator in The Uncertain Hour is far more philosophical and his anguish more palpable and so the book forces the reader more fully into the story.

I generally require narrative first and writing second (I learned that from Only Revolutions which I wrote about here), but in this book the reader gets both. Plus, it is filled with numerous excellent quotes so these are just a few of my favorites.

On living and death:

We owe so little time to life, and all eternity to death, so let’s pay off our small debts first, Petronius. (32)

On reputation:

A man’s reputation is a delicate vase, vulnerable in equal measure to the malice of enemies, the prurience of strangers, and the clumsiness of friends. (44)

On civilization:

“When it comes down to it, he thought, isn’t all civilization just an exercise in measuring time, in pacing off the foundations on which to build a model of the universe of oneself?” (138)

On love and empire:

“I believe in love just as I believe in empire. They’re both transactions between partners of unequal strength, dressed up in heroic rhetoric.” (170)

It is not often that I read a book and have no complaints, but, in this case, I am unable to think of even one.

As A General Rule

As a general rule, I don’t think that The Hours by Michael Cunningham has much in common with Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. But, the following quotes have a similar feel and message.

From Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart contemplating while she is waiting for Hank Rearden:

The hours ahead, like all her nights with him, would be added, she thought, to the savings account of one’s life where moments of time are stored in the pride of having been lived. The only pride of her workday was not that it had been lived, but that it had been survived. It was wrong, she thought, it was viciously wrong that one should ever be forced to say that about any hour of one’s life. (343)

From The Hours, Clarissa’s thoughts towards the end of the book:

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. (225)