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  3. Just when most literary fiction reads like an endless meditation on how many

Just when most literary fiction reads like an endless meditation on how many

游客2023-11-12  23
问题     Just when most literary fiction reads like an endless meditation on how many neurotics can dance on the head of a pin, along comes Michael Cunningham’s wildly ambitious, brave new novel, Specimen Days. Like Cunningham’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Hours, which presents three novellas connected through Virginia Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway. Specimen Days pulls three stories together through the work of Walt Whitman.(Although Cunningham quotes extensively from Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, the book does not require deep knowledge of the poet, but one finishes Specimen Days with a desire to read more Whitman.)
    What makes this such a compelling read is the way Cunningham draws on the past to mirror contemporary concerns. And most frightening are our secret fears about the future on an ecologically damaged planet Earth where science has run amok.
    Courageously, Cunningham includes elements of science fiction in the last novella; lizard-like aliens, raving theocrats and creatures bred in test tubes, their genetic material and behavior fine-tuned to fit more compliantly into society.
    The first novella introduces Lucas. He is a Whitman-quoting 12-year-old boy in 19th-century New York City. His older brother, Simon, has died in a gruesome factory accident, leaving behind his fiancee, Catherine. Lucas fills his brother’s job, manning a brutal machine. Cunningham captures the dehumanizing industrialization in which machines literally devour workers as the natural world celebrated by Whitman vanishes.
    In the second novella, Catherine is now Cat, a black psychologist who mans the police phones in an edgy post—9/11 Manhattan where a multitude of crazies call in to threaten doom and destruction. Involved with a younger, white, rich futures broker named Simon, Cat still grieves for a dead son named Luke and senses that this urban world has become a soul-scouring nightmare.
    The final chapter, set in a post-apocalypse future, is the most ambitious. Simon is a "simulo" , a worker in Old New York, the theme park that Manhattan has become. Tourists from around the world come to experience in safety the thrills that walking in Central Park in the 20th century once offered. The United States has splintered, surveillance is continual, birth deformities multiply, and our worst fears are realized.
    Like Margaret Atwood and her chilling futuristic The Handmaid’s Tale, Cunningham leaps into the realm of imagination. Yet because Whitman remains Cunningham’s inspiration, the novelist offers a form of hope. [br] This book review is about______novel.
选项 A、Walt Whitman’s
B、Virginia Woolfs
C、Margaret Atwood’s
D、Michael Cunningham’s
答案 D
解析 细节题。这篇书评主要是关于卡明翰的小说，所以[D]正确。从第一段中可以看出A和B都是卡明翰小说中所引用作品的作者。[C]可以从最后一段看到，“Like Margaret Atwood and her…”是与卡明翰的作品作对比的，因此[A]、[B]和[C]均可被排除。
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