Orele

Michael Cunningham’s Orele traces one day in three women’s lives. In 1923, Virginia Woolf starts to write Doamna Dalloway. She lives in Richmond, near London. She also deals with mental illness. In 1949, Laura Brown reads Woolf’s novel in Los Angeles. She must stop to plan her husband’s birthday party. Their young son helps her. Her husband is a war veteran. In 1999, Clarissa Vaughan plans a party in New York. It is for Richard, her close friend and former lover. He has AIDS and has won a major poetry prize.

Woolf’s book links the three women in this literary novel. It suits readers who like inner lives and tales across time. Cunningham joins their lives through a flow of thoughts called stream of consciousness. They seek to break free from marriage and strict sexual roles. They also want freedom from set tasks at home. He asks what life demands of women and mothers. Ideal views of the past can trap them. So can false hopes.

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. A film based on it stars Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep. Julianne Moore also stars in the film. It won a Berlin Silver Bear and a Golden Globe. It earned two BAFTAs and an Oscar for best actress. An opera based on the novel first opened in 2022. The venue was Metropolitan Opera.

Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1952. He studied literature and painting at Stanford. He then took courses in how to write fiction. His stories ran in The Atlantic Monthly and Redbook. They also ran in Esquire and The Paris Review. His novels made him more widely known. Magda Teodorescu translated this edition from English. It forms part of the Actual series.