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One of the most anticipated novels of 2005 from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours. Specimen Days is three linked visionary narratives about the relationship between man and machine. The first narrative, a ghost story set at the height of the Industrial Revolution, tells the storyline of man-eating machines. An ecstatic boy, barely embodied in the physical world, speaks in the voice of the great visionary poet Walt Whitman. He works at an oppressive factory connected to the making of any mysterious substance with some universal function and which the world's economy somehow depends. The slight boy can barely operate the massive machine which speaks to him in the voice of his devoured brother. A woman who was to acquire married the brother is now the thing of obsessive interest by the boy. In the city where all are mastered by the machine, the boy is convinced that the girl must be saved before she too is devoured. This grisly but in the end transformative story establishes three main characters who'll appear, re-incarnated, in the other two sections of this startling modern novel. The boy, the man and the girl are each searching for some kind of transcendence as is manufactured manifest by the recurrence of what of Whitman ('It avails not, neither distance nor place...I am along, and understand how it is'). In part two, a noir thriller occur the early years of our current century, the town reaches threat from maniacal bombers, as the third and last part plays with the sci-fi genre, taking our characters centuries into the future. The person who was devoured by way of a machine partly one is now literally a machine - a robot who becomes fully human before our eyes. The woman is a refugee from another part of the universe, a warrior in her native land but a servant upon this planet. The boy leaves the earth at the novel's close searching for a new-found land. Specimen Days is a genre bending, haunting ode to life itself - a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the very most original and daring writers at work today.
