Michael Cunningham is the author of The Hours, a novel I really enjoyed, so I was expecting great things of this story. As The Hours was inspired by Virginia Woolf, Cunningham's muse for Speciman Days was Walt Whitman, whose poetry is quoted by characters, often involuntarily, throughout the book.
Speciman Days is three separate but interlinked stories in different time periods - the first during the industrial revolution, the second in the present day, and the third at sometime in the future. They all contain a boy, Luke, a woman, Catherine, and a man, Simon, but they all play different roles in each story and in each time.
Speciman Days is quite different to anything I've read before - reviews desribe it with words such as "different", "bold", and "daring", and so it is. I also found it to be a rather chilling story, despite its emphasis on beauty and humanity. The stories have a sense of immensity and foreboding, and I was rather alarmed to find myself in a house alone after dark after finishing the second story, The Children's Crusade.
Cunningham's writing is immensely beautiful, and I think he captures Whiteman's sense of ecstasy in life well. After breathlessly finishing reading it on the train this morning, the imagery of the stories remain in my mind, and I think they'll do so for some time. This is a wonderful book - a 5/5.
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