Book Reader’s Blog

Mixed emotions. I don’t want to write a lot about this book, but I have to say that I found it depressing. I was not also expecting the story to revolve around men who love men. It is so sad when two guys are left all alone one with the other when their youth is gone, and they aren’t really happy.

I don’t recommend this book.

This was the first Cunningham book I read. I saw The Hours, and therefore decided to skip the book. Actually, I forgot about The Hours, and when I started Specimen Days I did not realize it was the same author.

The start of the book was strange. I was confused by the dialog, I did not realize who was who, why there was the book, but I immediately was taken by the poetry of the language. The first part, In the Machine, was the most beautiful piece of writing I have recently read. Somehow it always grabs my attention when the main character in the story is a kid, and it was the case here. Lucas… tragic, heroic, poetic, lost, loving, scared, courageous…

The Children’s Crusade was speaking to me less powerfully, despite of its current setting. It was crafty, but not that unique, not that poetic and mysterious. Like Beauty was even less powerful, perhaps because of its Sci-Fi convention.

I would like to commend Cunningham for his courage of choosing popular genres when presenting such poetic writing. It is quite seldom for serious literary works to be presented as crime or terrorist fiction, and even rarer as Science-Fiction. It is uncommon to depend so much in a contemporary novel to present so much poetry, verbatim, put into words of the novel’s characters. And the poetry was so powerful. I never read Whitman, but Specimen Days made me want to do that. I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Isn’t that simply beautiful???

Oh, and the matter of using the form of a triptych again. So what? If it works, I don’t mind. There is enough minor items connecting the parts into a single whole (names, locations, artifacts, Whitman, humanity). Instead of having three novellas, we have a triptych. Accept it, and be grateful to the author for the book.

Having finished Specimen Days I will go back to A Home at the End of the World. I have to give it another try–I put it away just after a couple of pages.