i haven't actually totally finished this but i was listening to it on audiobook and my ipod died just before the end. oh well. i wasn't really into this. his recreation of old-timey nyc in the first story was pretty impressive, although a little plodding in some parts, and the story with the black police woman (i think her name was kat?) was creepy in a pretty great way (especially loved the grotesque description of luke) but the sci-fi story at the end was just dumb. and as john was saying when i talked to him about this book, i didn't really dig the walt whitman theme running throughout. then again i just generally hate walt whitman and his ridiculously bright-eyed bushy-tailed poetry.

I particularly enjoy novels that do more than just tell a story -- they build and populate entire worlds and invite the reader in. In Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham builds not just one world, but three very different ones, and then stacks them one on top of the other.

He begins with an historical novella set in New York City in the 19th century, in the time of Walt Whitman, with a well-meaning but deranged young boy who randomly and uncontrollably quotes Whitman at odd moments.

Then comes a chilling tale of contemporary suicidal child terrorists in New York City, inspired by an old woman they call "Walt Whitman." Abandoned by their families, the old woman collected them and raised them sequestered in an apartment with Whitman's poems pasted to all the walls. The children all randomly quote Whitman.

Last comes a sci-fi story set in a post-apocalyptic America, dealing with the love-like relationship between a lizard-like being from another plantet and a human-like robot who has been programmed to randomly quote Whitman.
Now I have to finally read Whitman's Leaves of Grass cover-to-cover...

Po Cunninghamových Hodinách, ktoré patria k najnudnejším knihám, aké som zvládla prečítať do konca, som na Vzorové dni hľadela s obavami. Neoprávnene.

Kniha je rozdelená na tri novely, ktoré sú vzájomne jemne prepojené. Plus, kniha sama o sebe je poctou asi najväčšiemu americkému básnikovi, Waltovi Whitmanovi (ktorého As I Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life mi pred rokom spôsoboval nočné mory, ale pri učení sa na štátnice som z akéhosi dôvodu začala mať Walta rada. A napokon som z neho aj štátnicovala.)

Všetky tri novely boli veľmi fajn, vďaka množstvu dialógov sa knižka číta rýchlo a je písaná skutočne zaujímavo. Na rozdiel od Hodín ma skutočne potešilo, že nie je o divných ženách, a že jednotlivé dejové línie sa nestriedajú - jedna novela jednoducho skončí a začína sa druhá.

Mňa osobne najviac zaujala prvá novela. Možno to bolo tým, že bola z minulosti, alebo tým, že ma v nej najviac vecí prekvapilo. Už som možno kdesi písala, že ak ma kniha prekvapí, má u mňa obrovské (hoci aj tak bezvýznamné) plus.

This is one of those "collections of short stories that plays at being a novel" things: there are three stories vaguelly connected by the "same" three main protagonists, all of them taking place in NYC and every story has a person quoting/needing to quote Walt Whitman all the time. The first one is a tragic story of poverty and loss during the Industrial Revolution, the second one is crime noir in the 21th century and the last one is set in a vagually post-apocalytical NYC with one of the main characters being an alien refugee and the other one a robot.

I thought some of the elements, especially in the Sci Fi story, were a little try hard, but the writing as wonderfully effective as always, and the stories were uncomfortable but atmospheric. Not my favourite Cunningham, and a little too "weird" for me - I had to skip all the Whitman quotes at some point - but still really good. Not the first of his novels I'd recommend, though.

This was a very intriguing work; I am not totally certain how I felt about all the disparate elements. This novel is built of three novellas/long short stories titled "In the Machine", "The Children's Crusade", and "Like Beauty" each of which had a distinct tone and "genre" and featured a cast of three main characters: a man named Simon, a woman with a name that is a variant of Catherine, and a boy with a variant of Luke. The characters are not really the same individuals, but are clearly meant to be connected by the repetition of names and the presence of Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, a mysterious junk-seller named Gaya, and an odd white porcelain or bone bowl. Each story is engaging, telling of the exploration of turn of the century Industrial New York and the nature of machines (this story contains some very interesting passages about the relationship between people and machines), a post-9/11 semi-terrorist movement to "start over", and a world far in the future where relationships can grow and die between aliens and artificial humans, people pay to be threatened in the Central Park of "Old New York", and more. Honestly, the real triumph of the book is its use of Whitman and his ecstatic poetics of encompassing, his rapturous inclusion, his prophetic (in the oldest sense)tone. I find Whitman's poetry to actually be very variable in quality, ranging from sheer brilliance to the rambling of a mad old man who can't stop talking, but this book really highlights the best of his work by showing how it could contribute to different elements of a person, a movement, an understanding of self. Whitman's descriptions of death and of grass and of interconnectedness, "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" become anthems and definitions to these characters, not simply lines of poetry. Cunningham seems to be really aiming to hit home the importance of life, of being, and yet also validating that Whitman is right when he says "to die is different from what anyone supposes, and luckier". These characters are at once fervently alive, desperately needing to hold off the inevitable transition into the fabric of the universe, but they are also often strangely glad that that is the eventual outcome. Specimen Days is a hymn to life and to its end, to the fact that each life adds and will continue to add until the moment it becomes bigger than its owner--a sort of death-as-transformation, but not one to be hastened, only appreciated. In this way it actually resonates with Mrs. Dalloway nearly as much as, but in a completely different way from The Hours. This makes Specimen Days at once intuitive and hard to swallow--the characters are at once totally human and preternaturally wise, there is a great deal of sudden understanding, but it doesn't feel contrived. More than anything, this is a book about learning to accept life as it comes, about finding a place in the universe that you can and will pass from in peace and contentment. This is not a novel that avoids death or pain, but one that refuses to define those "negative" experiences as things that must, inevitably, be unbearable or ruinous. The use of the three stories with their shifting, yet similar, casts of characters works to underscore the transitory elements of life and of death that Cunningham wants to highlight in this novel; he creates a world where the same people can appear again and again, always different, always with complete identities, and with shifting relationships with one another, and still be recognizable. A world where people really do seem to go into the grass and then come back out of it, as if identity were something we breathed out of the atmosphere, taken from the endless expansion of other people's lives.
Stylistically, the novel is amazing. Each section is distinct and clear--all clearly coming from the same pen, but the shifts in genre are carried out effectively and easily. Each story focuses, at its heart, at a different member of the central trio and by doing this, enables readers to see the characteristics that each name carries forward from story to story. In single words, the 'Catherine" has strength, the "Simon" a kind of kindness, the "Luke" a sort of desperation, but each incarnation is distinct from the others. Additionally, the influence of Whitman always falls most directly on the story's actual protagonist, although it can touch the other characters as well. As an example of the shifting style, I have a passage from each story. From "In the Machine": (probably the most "Whitman-esque")

[Lucas] could imagine it easily enough, the machines murmuring in the darkened rooms, singing the songs of their men, praising their men, dreaming of them, singing each to the others, He is mine, he is my only love, how I love for the day when he allows me to have him completely. Lucas thought he should warn Dan, he should warn Tom and Will.

From "The Children's Crusade":(a sort of police thriller)

The queenly bearing and the schoolmarm diction, the smiling ultraformality. You did what you had to do
"Absolutely," the hostess chimed, and led Cat to the second booth.
As Cat settled in, she locked eyes with Fred. Fred was one of the legion of New York actors who impersonated waiters while they hoped things would break for them. He wasn't young anymore, though. He was becoming what he'd once pretended to be: a wisecracking waiter, brusque and charmingly irreverent, knowledgeable about wines.

and from the futuristic "Like Beauty"

It might have been the tree and only the tree Simon had brought her to see, though of course neither he nor Catareen had thought anything of it, one ordinary tree spreading over a standard-issue patch of dirt. It was only now, at this window with the dying Catareen in his arms and the tree so perfectly centered in the view, that Simon understood it to be in any way singular or mysterious.

Three novellas set in New York in different centuries, linked by three similar characters (a woman, a man and a disfigured kid), the poetry of Walt Whitman and, why not, a small white bowl. It took me about a year to get through this book, so I can't guarantee that the presence of the bowl doesn't have a deeper signification. If it does, I missed it. Must be a pretty special bowl though, to get through the industrial revolution, present day America, post-apocalyptic alien populated world, and then be flown into space to some distant planet. In any case, the stories are good.

In The Machine is my favorite and, taking the shape of a ghost story, a great metaphor of the industrial revolution. The narrator assumes a depressing tone to covey the threatening nature of the machines in a world afraid and overwhelmed by rapid change. The lower class characters fill every page with palpable sadness and hopelessness and with the fear that an increased use of the machines will lower their worth. Walt Whitman appears as a character.

The Children's Crusade is a crime thriller revolving around a forensic psychologist who fields calls from potential terrorists. When one of her callers, an orphaned young boy, is involved in a suicide bombing, a police investigation is launched. Not a genre I favor, I consider the police story to be the low point of the book (albeit good).

The last novella, Like Beauty, is set in a future where humans have made contact with lizard-like aliens, some of whom were shipped to earth to do menial jobs. It's a story of friendship, which could also be read as a love story, between a male android and a female alien lizard, who are on the run from the authorities. Tomcruise and Katemoss make an appearance as little brats.

An enjoyable book overall, I only wish I'd stuck with it for a few days instead of dragging it out for months.

الموتى يستحيلون عشبا.
صاحب رواية الساعات الشهيرة طلع مجنون كبير.
أعظم رواية عن امريكا.
تلت عصور والتغيير واختفاء الهوية ومعالم الحضارة والإنسانية. واوراق العشب تتحرك.
من عصور قديمة لأليين.
فنتازيا خارقة القوة خيال مرعب جدا.
اسلوب عذب. استخدم والت ويتمان بشكل رهيب علشان يبين أفكاره الكتير.
غيره الحداثة ما بعدها الحب اقصى درجات التقدم.
صراع الإنسان والتقدم..الحب القوى.
الرواية استحالت عشبا. اسقاطات دين.
الطاس وشعر ويتمان وصورته تلاحقنا
مبهرة فشخ.
الحب والشعر هما اللي باقيين.

Quem me conhece, sabe que nutro alguma animosidade em relação aos romancistas americanos. Ressalvando algumas exceções, como por exemplo, Philip Roth, a literatura americana, pelo menos aquela que tenho tido acesso, enquadrado no género contemporâneo, entedia-me sobremaneira.

A minha primeira abordagem à obra de Michael Cunningham deveu-se “Ao Cair da Noite”, narrativa que abandonei, já ia eu na pág. 130 - num total de 306 -, levando a minha paciência ao limite ... bocejando em cada página, parágrafo ou linha, desisti ... e, como sabemos, ao iniciarão-nos na obra de qualquer escritor, se a primeira leitura não nos agrada, consideramos autor banido para o resto do nosso tempo.

Nas tertúlias literárias que mantenho com algumas amigas, foi-me sugerido “Dias Exemplares” ... não, obrigada, vade retro MC. Mas a minha amiga garantiu-me que iria gostar e, assim sendo, tão bem recomendado, lá me lancei na aventura ...

E, meu amigos, surpresas das surpresas .... “Dias Exemplares” encantou-me muito por força da magnífica originalidade da estruturação literária utilizada por MC. A narrativa divide-se em três partes todas passadas nos EUA:

1. Século 19, com a Revolução Industrial aflorando os modelos da taylorização que caracterizou a mecanicidade do trabalho laboral em fábricas que, por trás do enorme desenvolvimento que trouxeram ao mundo ocidental, escondia, invariavelmente, autênticos horrores no manuseamento das máquinas;

2. A segunda parte, leva-nos à atualidade ... a ação decorre no primeiro quinquénio do séc.21 ... Nova York, ainda traumatizada da tragédia do 9/11, procura a salvação da humanidade com ainda mais atentados perpetrados por locais, eles próprios fundamentalistas que incitam crianças ao ódio e à violência:

3. Q último capítulo, cuja ação decorre 300 anos depois, trata-se de uma distopia .... seres alienígenas que convivem com humanos biológicos, uma abordagem da inteligência artificial, muitas vezes seres híbridos, vivendo numa Nova York hiper vigiada por drones que tudo sabem sobre a nossa existência. Fala de seres provenientes do planeta Nardia e que desempenham funções menores na sociedade terráquea, num mundo afetado pelas catástrofes ambientais.

E qual é a linha que une esses três capítulos? Para além do nome das personagens principais, Simon em todos os três momentos e Katherine, Cat e Cateleen, a angústia, a ansiedade, o medo, o extermínio, a tragédia, a convicção de que em algum momento, a civilização terá um momento d paz e felicidade, conceitos esses completamente distorcidos neste livro.

Mas ainda assim, pese embora a carga extraordinariamente negativa que perpassa toda a narrativa, sempre temos a intervenção do poeta americano Walt Whitman, nomeadamente com varias citações do seu trabalho mais significativo “Folhas de Relva” e que, de alguma forma, suaviza a loucura inerente a todos os momentos desta estranha estória.

I have always been a fan of Cunningham, and the 2 occasions I saw him in Chicago I am also a bit lustful of the man! I really love the ease of each section of the book and the ties between them. Walt Whitman is a ghost in the machine of each story. I love the historical vs futuristic timelines. I loved picking this up when I was neatly tucked into bed and catching up with the plotlines, so smooth and easy.
Why hasn't this been made into a TV series or a movie...is Walt Whitman that scary of a subject???

Brilliantly conceived and executed. This is a clever work by a gifted writer that maintains a strong running thread throughout and will stay with you for a long time afterwards.

شخصيا فاجئتني هذة الرواية بشدة ، فاجئني دسامتها و عمق الفكرة و براعة السرد و التشويق الممتد لطول الرواية .
الرواية تطرح بصورة مفصلة لرؤية الإنسان في مواجهة الألة و كيف يتأكل الإنسان و يبتعد عن نفسه و إنسانيته لصالح الميكنة كما يطرح الكاتب رؤية للأرهاب الناتج عن الضغط و الابتعاد عن الظروف الطبيعية الانسانية ثم يختم الكاتب برؤية متشائمة لمستقبل الارض و هو اضعف جزء في الرواية .
الكاتب استخدم اسلوب سردي مختلف حيث قسم الرواية ل ٣ اجزاء لا يبدا كل جزء من حيث انتهي السابق بل يضعك في عالم جديد بشكل مختلف تماما و تفاجئ انك التقطت خيط سير الاحداث مرة اخري
النجمة الناقصة بسبب الترجمةالتي و ان كانت جيدة الا انها لم تكن بمستوى جودة الرواية.

I generally LOVE Michael Cunningham, but I felt he was copying his "literature borrowing" idea from The Hours. He was experimenting with form, but it didn't work for me. Three stories linked to one work - the author shows up in the earliest story - that's what he borrowed from The Hours.

In Specimen Days, Cunningham offers three novels based on Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. In the first novella, set in Victorian NYC, a mentally-challenged factory worker has taken his dead brother's job even as the boy obsesses about the poet. The boy starts to hear his brother's ghost in the machines. In the second, a modern, NYC police woman investigates a gang of terrorist children motivated by Whitman's work. The third is about an android and an alien trying to escape future NYC; the android has a Whitman app built into his brain...

The first story is Grand Guignol, like Sweeney Todd - melodrama. The second is a modern urban terrorist plot with child gangs, with a little VC Andrews thrown in. The third is speculative science fiction. Weird combo.

It doesn't jibe as well as The Hours; the disparate styles create distance instead of unity. I felt like he was experimenting, like what Michael Chabon does more successfully, but Cunningham is more interested in prose than plot, so the drive wasn't as there to captivate the readers. These stories are pretty, just not gripping. There was no party to anticipate, like in The Hours. In the third story of Specimen Days, the big climactic moment happens halfway through the tale. In the second novella, the overlap of themes of terrorism and child-rearing seems odd. I liked the first tale the most (even though I generally ain't a fan of melodramatic ghost stories), and I like that each of the three tales explored forms of resistance and terrorism - though I wish, again, they'd been more unified. And I'm not sure what this sort of defiance has to do with Whitman.

MC is a gorgeous writer. And I love that he went out on a limb. It's a nice, interesting read - just not emotionally or intellectually gripping.

BTW, I met Cunningham in 2007, and he signed all my books at the time, filling them with personal notes. We both went through the Iowa Writer's Workshop, so we had that...and other stuff...in common. He's extraordinarily intelligent and witty; if you hear of a speaking engagement, go.

UPON FURTHER THOUGHT:

I should add that Whitman was very much an admirer of the common man and the disenfranchised. With the characters in all three books (minus the maternal detective of he second), Cunningham tries to cpture this.

Whitman opposed slavery, and he was the “American poet” at a time of great upheaval in our country. He worked through the Civil War, the influx of immigrants into the West for riches, that same influx into the Midwest for farmland, the changing of the Northeast by pogrom immigration, the birth of unions, and the start of American anarchy and communist sentiment.

The idea of the need for uprising and anarchy run through all three stories, but I don’t feel Whitman wrote about those political ideas specifically. Whitman was interested in true equality of all people, including the slaves. Maybe Cunningham is saying something about how respect of the common person and the disenfranchised is the start of them respecting themselves, leading to their unionizing, their uprising. Maybe Cunningham is showing how Whitman’s peaceful work can be turns to revolution and violence. Maybe Cunningham is showing that there will always be a disenfranchised, the handicapped, children and – in the future – aliens and androids, possibly.

Whitman was gay, and Cunningham is. Cunningham seems to shy from pulling in this aspect. Again, perhaps that’s on purpose.

In short, I love leaving a book asking questions. I could’ve asked questions about the common people, the disenfranchised, and how great works inspire and goad them throughout time. I don’t, though. The only question I don’t like asking at the end of a book is, “What the heck was the author intending?” With the disparate styles, the unstated disunity of theme and subject, I’m asking it here.