Aš nežinau, kodėl, tačiau ši knyga man visai nepatiko. Istorijos neužkabino, o pasikartojimai erzino. Iš kitų atsiliepimų matau, kad knyga turėjo (galėjo?) sukelti minčių apie žmoniją, empatiją, ekologiją, matomas ir nematomas kastas, tačiau man kėlė tik nuobodulį. Gal aš per mažai turiu supratimo apie kontekstą, gal kitaip viskas atrodytų, jei nebūčiau skaičiusi Debesų atlasas, ar šią knygą būčiau pasiėmusi kitu metu. Nes nėra jausmo, kad čia kažkoks prastas vertimas ar visai ne kažką kūrinys. Greičiau mes tiesiog viena kitai netikom

The first story was one of the most intense pieces of literature I’ve ever read. Tragic, desperate and odd. The other two were good but didn’t have that same sanguine quality.

Ein Dreizehnjähriger Stahlarbeiter im 19. Jahrhundert, ein verkrüppelter Junge kurz nach dem 11. September mit Mordplänen, ein künstlicher Mensch der Zukunft: Sie sind die Protagonsiten der drei Teile des Romans von Cunningham und sie alle zitieren unkontrolliert Verse Walt Whitmans, die jeweils für ihre Zeit sehr hellsichtig erscheinen. Darüberhinaus entsteht jedes mal eine dichte Atmosphäre der Stadt New York, der Sehnsüchte der Menschen, die in ihr leben und sterben. Auch wenn mich der futuristische Teil nicht allzu sehr interessiert hat, ist auch der sehr lesenswert.

Specimen Days is divided into three sections -- each set in a different time period in New York. A man named Simon, a woman named some variation of Catherine, and a boy named Lucas/Luke appear in each section (rotating who takes the lead in each), and a couple of settings, as well as a minor character or two, also repeat. The poetry of Walt Whitman also threads through the whole book, with Whitman himself actually making a cameo at one point, in the kind of gratuitous appearance that you expect from a bad television show (or from the Simpsons), rather than from a book that has this kind of literary pedigree.

In the first section, we're in New York in the 19th century. There are lots of exciting changes afoot -- it's the Industrial Revolution after all. The star of this section is Lucas, who works in a factory, but has no idea what exactly he's making (I love that part). Lucas spouts Whitman poetry in the midst of normal conversations, something that grows old pretty quick (I can only imagine how quickly it'd grow old if you were actually talking to the kid). I'm torn between whether this section should have been longer or shorter. As it is, it reads like one of Stephen King's lesser short stories.

The second section zooms us forward to a more modern New York. This time we've gone from Stephen King to a crime show -- not a Law & Order type, but one of those ones where we get to follow the detectives home after work and realize that they're human too. There's a glimmer of something interesting in this section (I admit it, I'm a sucker for those crime shows), and I think it's overall the strongest of the three, but on the last page, Cunningham manages to suck all life and hope right out of the story in a matter of a couple of sentences. That's fine -- I was an English major, I can handle that kind of thing -- but it was a disappointing end to a fairly promising set-up.

The final section is where Cunningham tests how many readers can give up on a book after reading 2/3 of it. I, for one, can't, so I followed him from crime show to science fiction -- fearfully, because science fiction is a genre that should be attempted by precious few "serious" writers. Unfortunately, Cunningham is a weak science fiction writer, and seems to have nothing to offer here other than a pasted-together version of half a dozen other books and movies (and don't get me started on his choice to name a character Tomcruise).

What's going to save this book for me, I think, is trying to connect the three stories. The repeated themes of love, sacrifice, and discrimination are all relevant, important themes, and maybe this book will go down as capturing some sort of post-9/11 zeitgeist. I have not read The Hours, so I came to this book with some uncertainty about what to expect. I can appreciate an author's foray into genre fiction (Michael Chabon has demonstrated both the good and the bad sides of this), but there was something about this one that read a little bit like a writer's workshop exercise (I imagine the as-yet-unpublished fourth section takes us to the world of fantasy, where Simon is a gallant knight, Lucas a gnome abandoned by his parents, and Catherine a talking unicorn). All in all, it just felt a little too slight for an author of this supposed caliber.

Cunningham has written three wildly different genres in Specimen Days, each chaotic and bittersweet in their own way, knit together by the poetry of Walt Whitman. Specimen Days reflects Whitman's celebration of humanity, the awful and the grand, and explores that same subject - the protagonist in the last third of the book is an android, who to me at least seemed the most accessible character out of all of them.

I mean, I'm not going to lie. It's a grim book. There aren't a lot of moments of true happiness, and when there are, it's generally right before something horrible happens. At the same time, though, it's not depressing - it's a little hard to explain; it's grim, sure, just like life is, but it makes the happier parts that much more meaningful. So if you're looking for some relaxing summer reading or anything, I'd stay away from this one. If, however, you want a book that you can chew on for a while, here you go. You'll mull over a lot of the symbolism in the story, compare the characters' counterparts of each other in each time period, wonder if there's something you missed. It's a very rewarding book in that sense.

Alguien que me conozca al menos tres rayitas sabe que mi autor favorito es el señor Cunningham desde que vi la adaptación fílmica de "Las Horas". En este "Dìas Memorables", tres pequeñas novelas o cuentos largos componen un vitral donde el tiempo en sus tres modalidades (el ayer, el hoy y el mañana) son la maquinaría que mueve el espíritu humano: un adolescente empieza a trabajar en una Nueva York industrializada mientras sobrevive a la muerte de su hermano mayor; una detective persigue después de los atentados a las Torres a una banda de terroristas que usa niños para destruir y al final, un robot semihumano escapa de la La Gran Manzana en busca de redención. Relato intenso, con aromas intensos y emociones traslúcidas, esta novela es recomendada para quien quiera iniciarse en leer a uno de los nombres más importantes de las letras en EU. Y para quienes el tiempo apremia a no malgastarlo...

Here, Michael Cunningham brings his storytelling prowess to the fore. I have to admit I initially assumed he had nicked the idea of this book from Cloud Atlas. But research shows Cloud Atlas was only published a year earlier so given how much time a publishing house needs to package and prepare marketing for a finished manuscript it's impossible he knew anything about Mitchell's book while writing this. And, one assumes, he must have been mightily miffed when he read reviews of Cloud Atlas and discovered his idea had been cloned while his ms was still sitting on some editor's desk because the similarities are uncanny. Like Mitchell, though more loosely, he uses an idea of reincarnation to fuse together stories set in different times and like Mitchell he pitches into two imaginary futures and like Mitchell he changes genre for every narrative. I think Cunningham is a better sentence writer than Mitchell. He's also more grown up - no trace of that adolescent silliness that can sometimes spoil Mitchell. But I think Cloud Atlas is a finer overall achievement. Mitchell's ideas run deeper. Cunningham seems a little fixated on the theme of life not meeting expectation, a skeleton which shapes all his books.

The first part (playful historical fiction) is set in New York at the height of the industrial revolution. It features a deformed young boy whose brother is eaten by a machine and who inadvertently quotes Walt Whitman whenever at a loss for words. He forms the idea that all the machines in the city are intent on eating their operators and sets himself the task of saving the girl to whom his brother was engaged. It's beautifully written and compelling.

The second part (crime thriller) is set in the near future and features a criminal psychologist who answers phone calls from people claiming to have information about a child suicide bomber. One particular caller, a child who quotes Walt Whitman, and refers to the bomber as his brother, lets it be known there is a family of child bombers, each with a specific individual target. It becomes clear she is this child's target. I was less keen on this part with its less than convincing portrayal of criminal psychologist. Maybe it was his aim to ridicule the profession? Whatever, I was never quite fully engaged.

The third part (dystopian science fiction) is set in the far future and features an android who is employed in role playing fantasies for tourists in a New York that has become a kind of theme park/virtual world. He too spouts Whitman when his circuits come up short. Governments and laws change from one day to the next in this New York and when androids are outlawed he has to flee. His only option seems to be to meet his maker. He secures unexpected help from a Nadian, one of the many migrant aliens from another planet. Not sure sci-fi buffs will love it with its lapses of cohering detail - aliens from another planet who haven't got beyond living in huts and are yet to evolve a written language somehow becoming technicians in a space program. But I loved this story. How it made androids of us all with our debilitating unrealised dreams and struggles to find lasting meaning.

I always love the obvious pleasure Michael Cunningham takes in writing descriptive passages - "Only at these subdued moments could you truly comprehend that this glittering, blighted city was part of a slumbering continent; a vastness where headlights answered the constellations; a fertile black roll of field and woods dotted by the arctic brightness of gas stations and all-night diners, town after shuttered town strung with streetlights, sparsely attended by the members of the night shifts, the wanderers who scavenged in the dark, the insomniacs with their reading lights, the mothers trying to console colicky babies, the waitresses and gas-pump guys, the bakers and the lunatics."

And I love the homage he always pays to Woolf in his novels. How often he uses the Wolf refrain, it rises and falls and rises again! But, of course, this book is a testament not to Woolf (he'd already done that) but of his love for Walt Whitman.
4.5 stars.

I loved loved the first section but the other two really fell flat for me.

I really had no idea, about Michael Cunningham or Walt Whitman. Now I do. Each of these three linked novellas is beautiful. Together, they're transcendant. The prose is arresting. The use of Whitman's verse in the story is deft. The playful links throughout, from story to story, character to character, Whitman's world to Cunningham's, evoke the interconnectedness of, well, everything, the way Whitman himself seems to. Bold stuff, amazingly well done.

3 love stories, strangely linked, a satisfying ending

I didn't really like this book. I thought that it was boring (especially the last section). The only reason I read this was because I had to for school. This book was REALLY weird too, not in a good way either. I didn't like the characters and I didn't like the stories.

They say Walt Whitman's beard drew butterflies. This book, I think, would probably draw something far stranger if left out in a field.

A triptych of tightly-wound exercises in genre--a Machine Age ghost story, a whodunnit set in the Patriot Act hysteria of the mid 00s, and a scifi roadtrip through a blighted America featuring lizard people--Specimen Days baffled the hell out of me. Is it an extended meditation on the machinations and strangeness of our bodies? A sly, Marx-friendly comment on how we dissolve into our occupations, often without a peep? A hallucinatory glimpse of the humanity behind "terror"? Is Cunningham just outing a long-dormant Blade Runner geekdom?

All these things?

I dunno. The title makes me think that Cunningham's aware of the Frankenstein nature of the book.

But, as other reviews note, Walt Whitman is the glue holding together the cobbled-together pieces of the book. Cunningham, I think, is jostling elbows rather uneasily with Whitman and his legacy of heavenly and bodily affinities. "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you," once sang Whitman, and Cunningham finds not only solace and empathy in this declaration of our common lot, but also horror. In the novel's second act, orphaned boys become suicide bombers in New York City, quoting Whitman as they fatally embrace random strangers. Joining together the disparate, and "doing something" about the specialized, fragmented mess of our everyday lives, is both the theme and craft of Specimen Days. But Whitman's organic, circular nature of existence, and his view of death as something "different from what any one supposed, and luckier" seems to give Cunningham the willies. Death may really only be birth disguised, but Cunningham skews this revelation in interesting, not-entirely-comfortable ways: when people die in Specimen Days they return not as benign lyrical grass, but as oily ghosts, haunting phone calls, and alien corpses that must be buried.

In its uneasy relationship with its literary patron, Specimen Days is an interesting departure from the glowing, perhaps uncritical relationship Cunningham fostered with Woolf in The Hours. Cunningham's craft, too, has expanded here: he writes with abandon about a wide swath of humanity (and nonhumanity), and the result is dizzyingly pleasing. His characters are compelling, especially in the final two stories, I think. And his ability to shuttle between philosophical musing and plot advancement is inspiring, not ham-handed as some reviewers have complained. (Most fiction, I think, engages in existential inquiry and some degree of navel-gazing... it's just that Cunningham lets himself do it aloud, rather than letting the story's machinery do it for him, and occasionally I *like* to have little pithy axioms thrown out at me.)

While I think other books do a more complete job of teasing out the thematic threads present in Specimen Days (Evan Dara's The Lost Scrapbook comes to mind, especially, and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas does a better job juggling multiple genres, from what I've heard), few so honestly portray the odd weather of our interior lives. And few writers so incisively take the scalpel to specific moments in time and how events unfold before characters in slow, Brownian motion--the novel's title again comes to mind. And few writers have Cunningham's gift for pacing and pleasurable images. Highly recommended.