Features a transformative story that establishes three main characters who
appear, reincarnated, in the other two sections. This is a three-linked
visionary narrative about the relationship between man and machine. It is from
the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Hours'.This is one of the most anticipated paperbacks of 2006, from the Pulitzer
Prize-winning author of 'The Hours'. 'Specimen Days' is a three-linked
visionary narrative about the relationship between man and machine. The first
narrative, a ghost story set at the height of the Industrial Revolution, tells
the story 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 a mysterious
substance with some universal function, and on 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 have
married the brother is now the object of obsessive interest by the boy. In a
city in which all are mastered by the machine, the boy is convinced that the
woman must be saved before she too is devoured. This grisly but ultimately
transformative story establishes three main characters who will appear,
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
transcendence as is made manifest by the recurrence of the words of Whitman
('It avails not, neither distance nor place! I am with you, and know how it
is'). In part two, a noir thriller set in the early years of our current
century, the city is at threat from maniacal bombers, while the third and last
part plays with the sci-fi genre, taking our characters centuries into the
future. The man who was devoured by a machine in part one is now literally a
machine - a robot who becomes fully human before ou
