Specimen Days

by Michael Cunningham | Literature & Fiction |
ISBN: 0374299625 Global Overview for this book
Registered by ichigochi of Vila Nova de Gaia, Porto Portugal on 10/3/2005
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1 journaler for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by ichigochi from Vila Nova de Gaia, Porto Portugal on Monday, October 3, 2005
This book contains three stories: one that takes place in the past, one in the present, and one in the future.
All the stories take place in New York City and present 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 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."

Journal Entry 2 by ichigochi at Vila Nova de Gaia, Porto Portugal on Monday, February 18, 2013
After reading, and enjoying, three previous books by Cunningham, I just couldn't wait to have its newly-published one, and that's why this is a first edition, in english and hardcover nonetheless (I hate hardcovers :)).
And then, the book sat in the shelf, changed home with me, and sat a bit more in another shelf, untill finally, more than 7 years later, I picked it up and decided to read it. (Life has misterious ways and sometimes actions are difficult to explain with simple reasons, but I guess that I was satisfied with the fact that it was there, available for me to read whenever I felt like it, much like receiving a present that you know you're going to love and deciding to postpone the nice feeling you will experience of unwrapping the package and taking a look at it, and experiencing that feeling everytime you see the present or think about it... Also, the fact that it is a heavy edition didn't help in choosing it as the next public transport reading, which is my usual place to read... :))

Anyway, it paid the waiting. Seven years after my last Cunningham, I rediscovered that I love his writing.
The structure of this book is different, although it parallels "The Hours" in the fact that there are three different stories in three different settings, and in the fact that there's a literary reference (Virginia Woolf there, Walt Whitman here). However, while the three stories in "The Hours" are told in intercalated chapters, and Virginia Woolf is the main character of one of them, here the three stories are told independently, in chronological sequence, and they have things in common that echo from one story to the other - one of those things being Walt Whitman, the poet or his quotes.
I really enjoyed the way Cunningham constructed these three stories, playing with different versions of the same characters. It was like an exercice of reinventing everything given two or three common things, an exercice that the author challenged himself with and achieved with distinction.
It was also the first time that I followed the author in an incursion to Science Fiction but the change of genre didn't lead to a different personal writing imprint. In fact, one thing that I appreciated in that third part of the book, when the action is set 150 years from now, was the fact that the author didn't try to explain "the setting"... the characters went about their lives, used their gadgets or the transports available, were themselves aliens, androids or had malformations due to still-to-be-invented drugs, but everything was simply put as if those were only accessories to the real important thing: the characters, their story, their interactions, their questions and their cruzade to find some answers...

Now, there are other books by Cunningham to look forward to, and I'm happy to know that, and to expect that I will read those eventually, even if they are not yet in my shelves... :)

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