#459
Title: Specimen Days
Author: Michael Cunningham
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Year: 2005
318 pages
Out of order, but I'm sure nobody cares but me. Read as an unabridged audiobook. Cunningham is an author who makes me wish I were taking a class on the novel so I'd have reason to engage with his work more critically. I hardly know what to say about this, except that although the structural play was sometimes a hammer when a feather was called for, this is one of the most engaging and pleasing novels I've read recently. The novel is composed of three related stories (a quick perusal of Cunningham's oeuvre shows that he likes to work in threes). Unlike The Hours, these three stories are not interwoven but presented chronologically. They are related by characters of the same name, several objects, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which serves both to advance the plot and as a chorus to comment on the action and characters. The first story is a bleak tragedy of the early industrial era, with ghosts; the second is a contemporary cop story, with terrorists; the third is a post-lapsarian dystopian tale, with androids (or possible cyborgs, though androids seems technically more correct) and aliens. Throw in some Whitman and you've got a very interesting novel about identity, ecstasy, and what it is to be human. The audiobook, ably narrated by Alan Cumming, is available at http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9781593
No comments:
Post a Comment