In The Hours (1998) Michael Cunningham conjured Virginia Woolf to tell the story of three women. The hugely successful novel won both the PEN/Faulkner and the Pulitzer Prize before being made into an Academy Award-winning film. In Specimen Days (2005), the ghost is Walt Whitman’s and this time the story is about the "glittering blighted city" of New York. In his earlier novels, A Home at the End of the World (1990) and Flesh and Blood (1995), Cunningham was preoccupied with the implications of social roles, the idea of ‘family’, and the desire to flee, often set within the frame of homosexuality. While these themes continue in The Hours they are rendered more poignant by the promise of creativity and the spectre of suicide. Somehow grander in scope, Specimen Days is a beautiful and disturbing novel, a meditation on life and death that, Whitman style, celebrates the human spirit. Cunningham has been described as a master stylist, a gifted storyteller and an ambitious thinker.

 

 

Also appears in:

Writers International

Tue 14 Mar, 8pm

Embassy Theatre

Thu 16 Mar, 11am

Embassy Theatre

 

Concession Pass to 15 Writers Upfront sessions of your choice: $150 [FR $140]

 

17 Mar, 9:30am