About this title: SPECIMEN DAYS was the title of Walt Whitman's autobiography, written in 1882. Michael Cunningham's work of fiction, bearing the same title, consists of three novellas set in Whitman's New York City, all of which evoke the poet in some way. "In the Machine," which takes place during Whitman's time, is about a boy named Lucas who is obsessed with both his dead brother's girlfriend and Whitman's poetry. "The Children's Crusade" is a contemporary thriller involving a group of suicide bombers--one of whom is named Luke--who are terrorizing Manhattan. "Like Beauty" is a sci-fi story about an alien ...
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Date Published: 06/2005
ISBN-13:9780374299620ISBN:0374299625
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Good, In good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 308 p. Ex-Library expected imperfections. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Date Published: 06/2005
ISBN-13:9780374299620ISBN:0374299625
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 308 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Date Published: 06/2005
ISBN-13:9780374299620ISBN:0374299625
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 308 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Date Published: 06/2005
ISBN-13:9780374299620ISBN:0374299625
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 308 p. read more
"I feel as though many of the books I have read lately are clocking in at a four (out of five) star experience. I'm not sure why, entirely. I've enjoyed all the books, and found things to admire about each, but none of been home runs. Is this because I'm reading books for my MFA courses? They have to be good, right? Even if I don't completely adore them? They can't be only three star books, because otherwise I'm paying too much to read them.
Who knows.
But here, again, I've put down Specimen Days and gone to Goodreads and said, yes, four stars.
I like that the book is written in three novellas. Each piece could stand alone, but getting them together creates a multi-layered and more interesting reading experience. Moving through Walt Whitman's time, to "present-day" (post 9/11) New York to an unspecified futuristic time works well when each time period is a distinct story.
What I loved the most about these novellas was the way in which Michael Cunningham used off-rhymes. I don't know, just at this moment, if that is a real term, and if it is totally applicable, but I'm gonna run with it. By that, I mean the ways in which the characters almost overlap. There are essentially three main characters, though each change in their relationships and identity in each story. They match, almost. Just as the space they move around in matches almost, touching only briefly, and always removed by time. It draws the novellas together, but lets each remain a separate entity at once.
Cunningham also has a gift for dropping in a rare, terrific sentence in what are otherwise ordinary paragraphs. As lately I've done most of my reading during work commutes and in down moments while at work, I found his style to be both grounding and encouraging. A really well written sentence makes it easier to dip in and out of a text, when all you have is three or five or fifteen minutes to read. In particular I thought he did this well in the last novella, which includes aliens, spaceships and a bleak idea of what may come. It's a scifi story, but remains literary and accessible for typical non-scifi fans like me.
What keeps me from giving the book that extra, special fifth star, is that I never quite felt at home in the work. I never quite got to the point where I was so caught up in the plot or language that I forgot what I was reading. Specimen Days is a deliberate literary experiment and exercise. It is a book about poetry and it is asking you to draw connections, asking you to think about Whitman, and asking you to consider the role of poetry in the world. Because it is asking you these questions, it's hard to ever feel that moment when you step out of yourself and into the book. This is a consequence of it's unique form. Cunningham does something other writers don't do, playing with the novella form and tying together works- and he does it beautifully. But without a moment when I could forget this, I'm hesitant to award it all five stars."
"ho, hum. his writing is just lovely but i'm not sure how i feel about this. the first part was a bit redundant. the second part is what i found most interesting and kept wishing as i read the third and final part that he had elaborated on that. the third section was placed 150 years into the future. it was interesting but i kept getting annoyed, as well. the people had names like Tomcruise and Katemoss as first and singular names. ugh. no! i mean, i get what he's trying to say with that but i just have a hard time with pop culture references in literature sometimes. besides this point, i'm currently reading the hours and am in love with it. and i have another of his books on my shelf. i think i'm on an author marathon?"
"While Michael Cunningham is such a linguistic genius that he can and has made baking a cake seem like the most exquisite and meaningful experience in the world, in this book he takes crazy-ass risks and writes about ghosts and aliens. And I love him even more for it. This is a book about the triumph of the human spirit, except he sort of explodes the idea of "human." Specimen Days is concerned with what happens after we die, and how thoughts about such affect the way we live-as I imagine many New Yorkers were shortly after terrorists blew up pieces of their city as part of a holy crusade. Weaving in bits of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, the characters in Specimen Days conclude (or so I interpret) not just that we die and become grass, but that life is death is life. Love is so big that it has no time for silly notions about the difference between life and death or man and machine. This is a wild, deep book that affirms why Michael Cunningham is to me as Walt Whitman is to Michael Cunningham."
"Michael Cunningham may be the best prose stylist writing fiction today. Yet the shimmering beauty of his prose is wasted on a world view that borders on nihilistic. Specimen Days, named for a work by Walt Whitman, traces the decline and extinction of humanity from the industrial age, where men and their lives are eaten by machines, through the present where children are turned into monsterous killing machines, to the future where humananity is gone and all that is left on earth is a humanoid cybourg and a dead alien bioform. Man has become machine. Throughout the 3 sections (past, present, and future), Cunningham uses Whitman's celebration of man and nature to contrast with the creeping death of humanity. The writing, the structure of this novel amounts to a tour de force. The message, not so much."
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