Specimen Days

by Michael Cunningham (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $4.32

  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 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.

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.25

  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 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.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $7.47

• New

  Paperback
  2011

  $12.53

  From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Hours' and new novel 'The Snow Queen', time, technology and love are the central concerns of a provocative novel that calls to mind David Mitchell's 'Cloud Atlas'. Lucas, Catherine, Simon: three characters meet time and again in the three linked narratives that form 'Specimen Days'. The first, a science fiction of the past, tells of a boy whose brother was 'devoured' by the machine he operated. The second is a noirish thriller set in our century, as a police psychologist attempts to track down a group of terrorists. And the third and final strand accompanies two strange beings into the future. A novel of connecting and reconnecting, inspired by the writings of the great visionary poet Walt Whitman, '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.