Reviews for Dias cruciales (Specimen Days)

The average rating for Dias cruciales (Specimen Days) based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-04-15 00:00:00 Kevin Salter 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.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-16 00:00:00 Hector Perez I would guess David Mitchell provided a hefty dose of inspiration for this novel in three parts and different historical settings. All three narratives are set in an alternate New York. In the Hours Cunningham used Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway as the linking common dominator; here he uses Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. All three stories have a young disenfranchised and lost boy at their heart who quotes Whitman. The first story takes us back to the beginnings of the mechanised age. Lucas' brother has just been killed at work by a machine. Lucas is to take his place at the factory. He falls hopelessly in love with his brother's fiancé. Soon he begins to believe it is the aim of all machines to kill their operators and sets out to save his brother's fiancé. The second story, for me the least successful, is about a woman who handles emergency police calls and her relationship with a boy who is part of a cult, known as the children's crusade, brainwashed into becoming suicide bombers. The third story is set in the future and features an android as its hero and an alien as its heroine. Sounds a bit daft but it was actually my favourite narrative of the three. Because it deals so brilliantly with what it means to be human with all our emotional equipment. This isn't as accomplished as The Hours but again there's lots of fabulous writing and I really enjoyed reading it. 4.5 stars.