Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780007156054
ISBN number: 0007156057
Label: Fourth Estate Ltd
Manufacturer: Fourth Estate Ltd
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: August 01, 2005
Publishing house: Fourth Estate Ltd
Sale Popularity Level: 3763395
Studio: Fourth Estate Ltd
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Product Description:
One of the most anticipated novels of 2005 from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours. Specimen Days is three linked visionary narratives about the relationship between man and machine. The very first narrative, a ghost story set at the height of the Industrial Revolution, tells the story of man-eating machines. An ecstatic boy, barely embodied in the physical world, speaks in the voice of the great visionary poet Walt Whitman. He works at an oppressive factory connected to the making of a mysterious substance with some universal function and on which the world's economy somehow depends. The slight boy can barely operate the massive machine which speaks to him in the voice of his devoured brother. A woman who was to have married the brother is now the object of obsessive interest by the boy. In a city in which all are mastered by the machine, the boy is convinced that the woman must be saved before she too is devoured. This grisly but ultimately transformative story establishes three main characters who will appear, re-incarnated, in the other two sections of this startling modern novel. The boy, the man and the woman are each in search of some sort of transcendence as is made manifest by the recurrence of the words of Whitman ('It avails not, neither distance nor place...I am with you, and know how it is'). In part two, a noir thriller set in the early years of our current century, the city is at threat from maniacal bombers, while the third and last part plays with the sci-fi genre, taking our characters centuries into the future. The man who was devoured by a machine in part one is now literally a machine - a robot who becomes fully human before our eyes. The woman is a refugee from another part of the universe, a warrior in her native land but a servant on this planet. The boy leaves the earth at the novel's close in search of a new-found land. Specimen Days is a genre bending, haunting ode to life itself - a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.
Amazon.com Review:
Book Description: In each section of Michael Cunningham's bold new novel, his very first since The Hours, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. 'In the Machine' is a ghost story that takes place at the height of the industrial revolution, as human beings confront the alienating realities of the new machine age. 'The Children's Crusade,' set in the early twenty-first century, plays with the conventions of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band that is detonating bombs, seemingly at random, around the city. The third part, 'Like Beauty,' evokes a New York 150 years into the future, when the city is all but overwhelmed by refugees from the very first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of Earth.
Presiding over each episode of this interrelated whole is the prophetic figure of the poet Walt Whitman, who promised his future readers, 'It avails not, neither time or place ... I am with you, and know how it is.' Specimen Days is a genre-bending, haunting, and transformative ode to life in our greatest city and a meditation on the direction and meaning of America's destiny. It is a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.
More from Michael Cunningham |
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The Hours | 
A Home at the End of the World | 
Flesh and Blood |
|
The Portable Walt Whitman | 
Specimen Days & Collect | 
Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose |
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Rated by buyers 
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I have to preface this review by saying this is the very first Michael Cunningham novel I have read -- I'm not familiar with "The Hours" nor the movie of the same name (although I do have the Philip Glass soundtrack). With that in mind, read on:
I have just finished "Specimen Days - A Novel" by Michael Cunningham. The book is set in three parts, whereas the very first takes place approximately a hundred years in the past, the second in the near present or near future, and the third in the distant future. The three parts are linked by characters which despite sharing names do not share the same attributes; a certain inanimate object; and the poetry of Walt Whitman.
For those who might not know, "Specimen Days" is also the title of a prose-poetry book by Whitman described as "autobiographic"... but it is much more than that; everyone needs to read both "Specimen Days" back to back to appreciate what Cunningham has wrought.
Of the three sections, the very first is the most compelling. I can't say much without revealing plot, so I'll generalize by saying the imagery and symbolism are most vivid in the very first section, perhaps because the author is trying to recreate a world already gone before we were born. The second section, depicting the world we live in now, seems wan in comparison; the effect is similar to placing a grey and white photograph beside an impressionist's painting -- the riot of colour in the painting makes the grey and white photograph seem two-dimensional and less substantial. The third section takes place about four centuries in the future and is still less vivid than the very first section, but does have more imagery than the second section. A key scene in the park, a chase scene, and a swimming scene stand out in my recollection of the final section.
My intuition tells me that the author sees more than the obvious connection between the three sections of this novel. There are themes: the very first that comes to mind is Whitman and his life-celebrating "Leaves of Grass." The second theme is a juxtaposition of the beauty of inanimate things with the often-banal daily existence of living things (or maybe the point I missed is the fragility of all things, living and inanimate, and how this fragility binds us together as we all seek to survive). A third theme is the question of what constitutes a life. A fourth could be related to the colour purple (even the dust jacket and spine are green), although I'm struggling to remember any reference to it in the second section... creative choice or oversight? There's also death, and renewal -- children figure prominently in all three sections. The setting of Gotham/New York City is an obvious thread. Loss and longing are common threads, and the desire to survive. Movement from the familiar into the unknown also binds the sections together.
At the end of the novel I'm left with each of these themes (and perhaps more, subconsciously) as my mind seeks to join the three events together. Its a clever device, similar to placing three seemingly unrelated photographs side by side and leaving them for everyone who follows to endeavor to decipher not only the underlying story that connects them but also the artist's intent for choosing those particular photos and placing them in that particular sequence. The unfinished nature of each section leaves them hovering in the mind's eye like landscapes glimpsed through the window of a speeding train, joined only by the rails and the relativity of the traveler. This would be an excellent book club novel, as it contains so much that is open to interpretation and each reader is going to synthesize the connections differently.
I will say that as a stand-alone opening of a science fiction novel the third section was fantastic, and I would have enjoyed a book length treatment of the issues brought up in the last section to see where the author would take them. Michael Cunningham, if you're reading this, change the ending of the third section and make it the opening third of a novel and answer the questions you honed in "Specimen Days." Actually, each of these sections could have been expanded into deeply insightful and probing novels, which might explain why I've come away from this book feeling as if I've dined at the table but I'm not sated.
Perhaps, if we're very lucky, the author will publish a sequel with three more sections equally intertwined whereby we pick up the stories of these carefully crafted characters and delve even more deeply into the themes outlined above while learning where their destinies take them. Having tasted the power of what was offered, I would leap at the chance to enjoy more.
Thank you Michael Cunningham!
Now that I've discovered that this isn't the very first book of three juxtaposed sections Mr. Cunningham has written, it becomes obvious that he's experimenting with the "collage as literary ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
All the time I was reading this, I was under the impression that SPECIMEN DAYS was an earlier work than Cunningham's Pultizer Prize novel, THE HOURS (1998). It has the same basic structure: three separate stories set in different time periods, linked by parallel characters and themes, and tied together by reference to a celebrated author. In SPECIMEN DAYS, that author is Walt Whitman, who appears as a minor character in one of the stories and is extensively quoted in the others. But apart from such links, the three tales here are separate novellas. You could see -- or I thought you could see -- Cunningham reaching towards the effortless synthesis of the interwoven tales that spread like ripples from the life of Virginia Woolf in THE HOURS. Although SPECIMEN DAYS does not fully work, I could honor it as the intriguing precursor to a masterpiece. But now I discover that this is the later book, written in 2005; so I have to ask why the author repeats himself to such reduced effect.
Considered on its own, however, SPECIMEN DAYS has much to recommend it. Much as David Mitchell had done in his CLOUD ATLAS, Cunningham writes each of his stories in a different genre, handling the shifts in style with effortless virtuosity. The very first novella, "In the Machine," set in a ninteenth-century industrialized New York, is a kind of historical romance with supernatural overtones. When his elder brother Simon is killed in an industrial accident, his younger brother Lucas takes his job at the iron foundry. Lucas is a misshapen child with a head like a goblin, but also some kind of a savant who appears to have memorized large swaths of Whitman. He has a crush on Simon's former fiancée Catherine, who works as a seamstress in a sweat-shop, and tries to protect her when he becomes convinced that she is in danger. It is a touching story, full of period detail, and strengthened rather than weakened by the fact that the love interest is so unconventional and unequal.
The second novella, "The Children's Crusade," moves to post-9/11 New York, and borrows the genre of the police procedural. The female character, here called Cat, is in African American psychologist working for the NYPD fielding phone calls related to terrorist threats. In this story, her lover Simon is very much alive, though ultimately peripheral to the plot which brings her into contact once more with another precocious but deformed child, in a situation where Walt Whitman is quoted with much more sinister intent.
So far, Cunningham's juggling of different periods in the New York setting has reminded me of Pete Hamill's similar time travels in FOREVER. But in the final novella, "Like Beauty," Cunningham moves into quite different territory, that of post-apocalyptic science fiction. Space travel has been perfected and then abandoned; America now has a population of green-hued Nadians who do the work of cleaners and nannies. Catareen, the female figure here, is one of these, working in a New York that has been turned into a theme park where tourists may enjoy such thrills as being mugged by authentic-looking street people; Simon, the principal character, is one of the actors performing such services. It is a tribute to Cunningham's skill that he could keep me engrossed in a genre that normally leaves me cold, and make cogent comments about human nature, politics, and class relations along the way. But the ending was an anticlimax. All three stories leave the narrative hanging; in the very first two this seemed appropriate, but here I expected something that would tie the three novellas together and make clear the essential unity of the whole. In this, I was disappointed.
Rated by buyers -
Anyone who claims this novel to be "too deep" or "hard to follow" is obviously delusional, and does not recognize a work of art when he or she sees it. Never in my life have I had the pleasure of reading such a novel that created a world so meaningful, and so ornamented with layer upon layer of tremendous passion.
To top that off, the author's interwoven use of Whitman's poetry is exceptional. Once again, Cunningham proves that he is a literary genius worthy of immense praise. I cannot wait for his subsequent work to be released.
Rated by buyers -
This is a very interesting book if you can get past some of the science-fiction that he has in his version of the future. If you're expecting something like The Hours... then read The Hours again. This is an entirely different book. His juxtaposition of similar people and elements in the past, present, and future make it feel almost like you're reading a puzzle put together in three different ways, all, in my opinion, asking the same question: what does it take to be alive, and what does it mean? I loved it.
Rated by buyers 
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Wow.
What a weird and disappointing book!
I LOVED The Hours- but this is on par with The Mermaid's Chair, in terms of its failure to measure up. TMChair is no "Bees" and THIS is no "THours"!
If you enjoy historical fiction AND SciFi, you will like the way Cunningham bridges the two genre; otherwise: forget it.
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