Book review|New Yorker Michael Cunningham won the Pulitzer for his novel The Hours. The new Päivät novel is also about three people and three different times.
Novel
Michael Cunningham: Days (Day). Finnish Markku Päkkilä. 339 pp. Gummerus.
The first ones books and films about the corona pandemic were published during the first months of the pandemic. However, time is an important part of fiction, and more multifaceted depictions of the disease and its effects are beginning to appear now, a few years after the worst of the pandemic waves.
But is the distance still too soon? When reading a novel, do we want to remember face masks, isolation, infections and deaths?
by Michael Cunningham Days– in the novel, the covid-19 virus is not mentioned by name even once. The distancing is cunning: it makes the novel more long-lasting both for the current and future readers.
A New Yorker As a rule, Cunningham’s works are set in his hometown: this is also the case now. The main stage of the days is the apartment of a married couple in their forties in Brooklyn, although when the whole thing breaks up, the landscape expands to Iceland and a house in the country. However, no other place is described by Cunningham with the same love as New York.
It’s New York, and there’s a division of three—a number to which Cunningham is at least as loyal as the president Stubbs.
Cunningham burst onto the scene in 1998 with his fourth novel Hourswhich was awarded the Pulitzer and based on which Stephen Daldry directed Meryl Streep’s, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore starred in the film in 2002.
The theme of the successful novel is by Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway inspired by time and the concept of time, which is transformed in the stories of three women living in different decades. In days Woolf’s brother can also be seen Thoby Stephenwho died young of typhus.
Cunningham has made frequent use of three time levels in his production. For example In sparkling daysin which there are three main characters in each time; at the same time, three characters are in the center, among other things Come evening -in the novel and HC Andersen inspired by a fairy tale In The Snow Queen.
In days the division into three positions itself as an image of the corona pandemic. It is April 5, 2019, just before the pandemic broke out; April 5, 2020, when Corona has turned home into a prison; and April 5, 2021, when the pandemic subsides and its scars are revealed.
Three are also the main characters: married couple Dan and Isabel, and Isabel’s brother Robbie, who lives with them in an increasingly cramped apartment. The name Wolfe of the social media star that Robbie invented for fun is, of course, yet another hint in the direction of Virginia Woolf.
In addition to Kolmijao and New York, Cunningham’s works also feature sibling relationships, a brother moving into the family apartment, a middle-aged man pursuing an artistic career using cocaine, and the desire of a man who considers himself heterosexual to have another man.
Variations on the same themes and topics are of course understandable, but the constant rewriting of the same book inevitably eats up the text’s effectiveness.
Cunningham’s the skill is in the flash-like insights, in stopping at the contradictions of the human psyche. In days these realizations are experienced especially with Robbie, while the other characters suffer from the occasional taste of paper.
Markku Päkkilän the Finnish works beautifully. However, changing the name of the book from singular to plural loses both the randomness of the original name and the joining of three days into one.
Day– name is a random day in the calendar – and at the same time, the time levels are set intermittently, as Cunningham always does. In its plural form Days is certainly closer Hours-hit, but underlining the connection takes more than it gives.
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