Specimen Days Av Michael Cunningham

Features a transformative story that establishes three main characters who <br/> appear, reincarnated, in the other two sections. This is a three-linked <br/> visionary narrative about the relationship between man and machine. It is from <br/> the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Hours'.This is one of the most anticipated paperbacks of 2006, from the Pulitzer <br/> Prize-winning author of 'The Hours'. 'Specimen Days' is a three-linked <br/> visionary narrative about the relationship between man and machine. The first <br/> narrative, a ghost story set at the height of the Industrial Revolution, tells <br/> the story of man-eating machines. An ecstatic boy, barely embodied in the <br/> physical world, speaks in the voice of the great visionary poet Walt Whitman. <br/> He works at an oppressive factory connected to the making of a mysterious <br/> substance with some universal function, and on which the world's economy <br/> somehow depends. The slight boy can barely operate the massive machine which <br/> speaks to him in the voice of his devoured brother. A woman who was to have <br/> married the brother is now the object of obsessive interest by the boy. In a <br/> city in which all are mastered by the machine, the boy is convinced that the <br/> woman must be saved before she too is devoured. This grisly but ultimately <br/> transformative story establishes three main characters who will appear, <br/> reincarnated, in the other two sections of this startling modern novel.; The boy, the man and the woman are each in search of some sort of <br/> transcendence as is made manifest by the recurrence of the words of Whitman <br/> ('It avails not, neither distance nor place! I am with you, and know how it <br/> is'). In part two, a noir thriller set in the early years of our current <br/> century, the city is at threat from maniacal bombers, while the third and last <br/> part plays with the sci-fi genre, taking our characters centuries into the <br/> future. The man who was devoured by a machine in part one is now literally a <br/> machine - a robot who becomes fully human before ou