So time and memory are as uncertain as Mitchell says they are. I read this book close in time to its US release - thanks to the QuanCog like memory of Amazon, I see that I ordered the hardcover (how quaint) on September 20, 2000. Prior to rereading this month, I remembered almost every aspect of the Tea Hut woman's chapter, and I could have closely described to you the Mongolian chapter and Okinawa, even if other parts were fuzzier (and Clear Island seemed brand new to me on this reading). My younger self was blown away by the writing and filled with wanderlust for strange places (first reading: A handful of trips to Western Europe; 2nd: nearly 70 countries, the dustier the better - is Mitchell partly to blame?) At the time I was amazed that this was a debut novel, but somehow thought Mitchell was a niche taste and this book a fortuitous find, at least until Cloud Atlas came out and word started spreading. (No Goodreads then to connect me to readers beyond my immediate circle).

But here's the weird part about memory. I have an absolutely clear memory of reading this book in my girlhood bedroom at my parents' home. Visual tactile memory of reading about the train trip to Mongolia under the pink quilt I had on my girlhood bed, while looking out at my neighbor's house. Problem: that room has been an office since 1982 when I moved to the 3rd floor, and by 2000, I was living on the Upper West Side, in a completely different bed, overlooking a dirty courtyard. So this crystal clear memory never happened. Unless I got caught in the kind of time loop that Mitchell loves!

Anyway, on re-read, it was fascinating to see how many of Mitchell's obsessions were already in place- apocalyptic sense of human "progress", focus on time and consciousness and the porousness of both, interconnectedness, the Far East, chance, Ireland as the last resort etc etc. And I loved the first 2/3rds of this book as much as I did the first time around. The last couple of chapters dragged a bit (ooh - did the same thing happen in the Bone Clocks? Maybe he's not good with endings). But still a thrill and a pleasure, even if it seems I read it the first time in an alternate universe!

I feel like any review I make of this novel will be an unfair one, so I heartily recommend that you read some of the absolutely gorgeous reviews already out there, but I will leave you with a single impression:

The Uncertainty principle Thus applied to writing fiction (or Science Fiction): You can know where a story is at any point in time or you can know its velocity (it's pacing), but you can never know both at the same time.

:)

Seriously, this book is pretty damn awesome. Each of the nine viewpoints are grounded so deeply and across wide spaces and cultures across the Orient, and truly fascinating in their own rights, that it'd be easy to read the whole novel from a light-theme touch a-la Cloud Atlas, but instead, we've got a seriously strong SF theme going on here.

It's been out long enough that I'm not going to worry about broad spoilers, and knowing a few facts might actually encourage new readers of Mitchell, especially if you're into SF.

Quantum intelligences, people. Yup. Disincorporated personas. Ghosts. And a bit of a fourth-wall breaking if you read REALLY carefully or just make an interpretation from the damn title of the book. :)

Someone's been doing a bit of backpacking across PoVs, and I think this book might be seriously more fun to read the second time around, knowing what I now know.

Can I trace some newer novels like Touch and The Lives of Tao back to this book? Well, I can try. :) Do I think it might be a great companion piece, just in sheer scope, to The Boat of a Million Years? Yes I do.

Do I think this novel might have made it REALLY huge in the eighties? Um, yes! Do I think it's also way before its time? Sadly, yes, that too. But it doesn't change the fact that it's pretty damn virtuoso and possibly a bit more interesting in some ways than Cloud Atlas. I know people like to go on about how the other novel is all that, but there was something about this one that knocked my socks off a bit more. :)

All I can say is, have fun tracing all the threads! I can almost guarantee that you'll never trace them all without an atlas. There are a ton of easter eggs just popping up between the different stories here, a representation made small when you think about what Mitchell has been doing with the rest of his novels together.

I'm not surprised, of course. This is a first novel and all first novels like to set up a promise to the readers that will be continuing on a later journey with the author. :)

I'm pleased! I will be continuing this ride, later, and perhaps I'll go backpacking! :)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Although I haven't brought up the subject here in awhile, the fact is that as a book critic and a lover of underground literature, it's important to me to become a "completist" of certain artists out there, or in other words to have consumed every single artistic project they've ever done. After all, I'm behind on a lot of this stuff compared to other critics my age -- I spent my twenties and early thirties as a working author myself, concentrating much more on writing my own books than reading other people's; and that leaves me near the age of forty with just these sometimes giant holes in my underground-arts education, embarrassing holes that as a critic I absolutely shouldn't have.

Take, oh, say, David Mitchell for example, who over the course of a decade now and four celebrated novels (three of them nominated for the freaking Booker) has become widely acknowledged as one of the best living surrealist authors on the planet; but before this week I hadn't ever read a single word by him, which should be some sort of crime against the underground arts if it isn't already. And it just so happens that one of the Chicago library branches up here by my place owns all four of Mitchell's books (I'm looking at you, cute nerdy acquisitions manager with the clunky glasses), so I've decided to finally start tackling them all myself, starting with the oldest, 1999's Ghostwritten. And that of course brings up one of the interesting things sometimes about reading the early work of someone who's now famous for their mature work; because many times, although not out-and-out terrible, such novels simply won't hold up to the "early masterpiece" hype of later years, or will contain diamonds in the rough that the author ends up polishing in later work, or sometimes are just so influential that they become blasé later in history, simply for all the ripoffs that came afterwards.

That's something you can honestly say about Ghostwritten too, although I found it more interesting than disappointing; that when all is said and done, the novel is essentially a British guy writing like Haruki Murakami, back in the late '90s before most English-speakers had heard of Murakami, making it not nearly the revelation anymore that I'm sure it was to Western audiences when it first came out. It's essentially what filmmaker Richard Linklater calls "vertical storytelling," a collection of tales that are mostly unrelated but with a series of fascinating synchronicity-style details, small decisions within some stories that will sometimes have devastating major consequences in others, with the chapters set around the world but especially in many Asian countries, and examining among other things the various stereotypical ways that Asians think of other Asians when white people aren't looking. All of these stories, though, have some sort of metaphysical or poetic element to them, and are written with an engaging mix of Asian minimalism and British fascination with language; one for example concerns a poltergeist in a yuppie apartment in Hong Kong, one a subway-bombing cult member hiding out from the cops in Okinawa, one a jazz-loving hipster teen in the middle of downtown Tokyo.

Ten years later, we've gotten a lot more used to these things -- metaphysical elements in our mainstream fiction, the influence of Asian minimalism on Western literature -- but when it first came out, seeing it in Ghostwritten I'm sure made a lot of people freak out in a pleasantly positive way, which I'm sure is how Mitchell gained his intense cult following to begin with, and what allowed him to go on and kick out three Booker nominees in a row after this one. And let's face it, even this novel isn't bad, even ten years later when many of its tropes have become a lot more common; even with this very first book of his, Mitchell displays a confidence in his material usually only seen in veteran authors, a relaxed assuredness with what is already experimental work, being written at a time when there were literally no precedents for it in English-language literature. Granted, I suspect at this point that his later books are going to be even better, and that readers not purposely trying to become Mitchell completists might want to actually skip this first one; then again, you might not, especially if your interest in weird lit is only a passing one, and if you mostly prefer the narrative feet of your stories planted firmly on realistic ground. I can definitely say, though, that I'm glad I read Ghostwritten; and I can also definitely say that I'm eagerly looking forward to his next, 2001's big breakthough hit number9dream, which hopefully I'll be tackling before too terribly long.

[9/10]

Like the great Russians, Mitchell makes us feel that more is at stake than individual lives, although it's by individual lives that pain and loss are measured.

I don't usually start my reviews with cover blurbs, but this one from 'Los Angeles Times' seems appropriate for describing in a very concise form the scope of the project and the underlying humanism of the intellectual exercise.

Also appropriate, in retrospect, is the use of a quote from Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" as the opening gambit for Mitchell's literary debut. Like the much shorter but equally ambitious novel by Wilder, David Mitchell explores here the relationship between chance and fate by looking at the isolated yet interconnected lives of several people. Instead of bringing all his characters to the focal point of a collapsing bridge, Mitchell plays his game of 'six degrees of separation' across the whole globe : from Okinawa to Tokyo, Hong Kong to mainland China, Mongolia to Saint-Petersburg, London to a tiny island off the Ireland coast, across the Atlantic to New York then closing the circle all the way back to Japan.

Tempting as it is to write a synopsis for each separate episode, to honor the talent that brought to life and got this reader firmly involved in the outcome of each story, I find it more rewarding for now to track down and capture the hidden ropes that Mitchell uses to make these people dance.

Why do things happen the way they do? Since the gas attack on the subway, watching those pictures on TV, watching the police investigate like a crack squad of blind tortoises, I've been trying to understand ... Why do things happen at all? What is it that stops the world simply ... seizing up? [...]
I don't know the answer, no. Sometimes I think it's the only question, and that all other questions are tributaries that flow into it. [...]
Might the answer be 'love'?

The remark comes from a Mr Fujimoto, publisher in Tokyo, in the aftermath of the infamous Sarin Gas attack that also features in the opening segment of the novel. It's also a reiteration of the opening blurb, about the Big Questions from the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. (as an Easter egg, one of the characters on the TransSiberian train later in the plot is reading "War and Peace" and remarks that it's about chance and fate, the same focus Mitchell declares in his debut novel.)

In the context of the present multilayered novel, love is indeed the focus, but Mitchell already sees Love as a larger marker for human motivation. Having already read "Cloud Atlas", it strikes me that "Ghostwritten" is basically the same novel, like a final draft or general theatrical rehearsal before the big opening - an attempt to map the constantly shifting territories of human desire, to find the balance between freedom and power, civilization and barbarism. The next quote is from the Russian episode, as Margarita Latunsky is a willing prisoner in an abusive relationship:

History is made of people's desires. But that's why I smile when people get sentimental about this mysterious force of pure 'love' which they think they are steering. 'Loving somebody' means 'wanting something'. Love makes people do selfish, moronic, cruel and inhumane things.

As in Okinawa, where a young terrorist is devoted to his guru and willing to abdicate reason in exchange for a sense of belonging.

Society is an 'outer' abdication. We abdicate certain freedoms, and in return we get civilization. We get protection from death by starvation, bandits, and cholera. It's a fair deal. Signed on our behalf by our educational system on the day we are born. However, we all have an 'inner' self that decides to what degree we honor this contract. This inner self is our own responsibility.

The theme is revisited much later in the novel as an artificial intelligence tries to interpret the rigid laws written in its initial programming in order to solve ethical dilemmas.

Two principles are contradicting each other: preserve life, and acquire wealth. How do you know what to do?

also,
I meant only to demonstrate the subjective nature of laws

In a Tokyo music store, the answer to the riddle seems simple enough when Love comes knocking on the door, to the tune of a classic jazz melody. Satoru and Tomoyo are both young and ready to receive its message:

The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.

Yet even they cannot exist in a vacuum, and must face pressure from a xenophobic culture and from mass consumerism. Truth is easier to find in a bordello than in a high rent neighborhood

But these magazine girls have nothing real about them. They have magazine expressions, speak magazine words, and carry magazine fashion accessories. They've chosen to become this. I don't know whether or not to blame them. Getting scarred isn't nice. But look! as shallow, and glossy, and identical, and throw-away, as magazines.

In Hong Honk, a high-flying business lawyer has his whole life shattered by the absence of love (left by his childless wife) and by his own lax morality. Neal Brose thought he could ride the wave of greed, but his shady deals are catching up with him. To make matters worse, he is also seeing ghosts, another recurrent theme in the novel.tt

Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.

Ghosts, paranormal activities and abuses of power are the mainstay of the next two episodes in China and Mongolia. Frankly, this has been the lowpoint of the novel for me, as I thought the author was more interested in repeating anti-leftist propaganda than in forwarding the Big Question. Still, there is a very interesting point Mitchell makes about the use of magic in storytelling. I misplaced the relevant quote, but the argument appears several times in the novel: we make sense of reality by imposing structure on chaos / chance, by reinventing our past and our present through stories, conspiracy theories, self-deception, religion, political dogma, etc

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

also,
Therefore, does chance or fate control our lives? Well, the answer is as relative as time. If you're in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you're reading, it's fate all the way.

There's an actual ghostwriter featured about halfway down the journey across the globe. Marco is also a drummer in a band, a libertine and a gambler. I wonder if he is somehow an avatar of the author?

I really am a drummer. My band's called 'The Music of Chance'. I named it after a novel by that New York bloke.

That's an Easter Egg about Paul Auster, and now I probably have to add his novel to my ever growing pile to-be-read. Interesting juxtaposition here between architecture / design in musical composition and chaos theory. The solution to Marco's quandary is in the best tradition I have come to associate with Mitchell: personal responsibility and a touch of kindness / true love.

I have noticed a critical attitude from Mitchell in the China, Mongolia episodes, but that may be my own bias speaking. The novel is just as strongly critical of institutional greed in business and of military opportunism, especially in the stories of scientist Mo Muntervary and of disk-jockey Bat Segundo. Mo is hunted by the CIA for refusing to work on military applications of her 'quantum cognition' theory. Bat Segundo hosts a late night radio show as the world around him burns.

My, it's a sick zoo we've turned the world into.

also,
Quantum physics speaks in chance, with the syntax of uncertainty.

also,
Have you noticed how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents', but call other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?

This part of the novel once again reminds me strongly of "Cloud Atlas" and of its futuristic post-apocalyptic vibe. After the bombs are launched and the animals escape from the zoo, all he have left are the stories we tell in order to make sense of the world and our tattered , feeble humanity.

"Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey – believe me."
"But most writers are lunatics, Bat – believe me. The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed."

—«»—«»—«»—

Highly recommended, although I believe it is better to read "Ghostwritten" before "Cloud Atlas" in order to avoid a more critical approach to this early draft. I would also recommend a re-read, eventually after going through the whole output from Mitchell, both to find thematic similarities and to spot some of the numerous Easter Eggs. I mentioned Auster and Tolstoy, but there is also Nabokov in here, and Yeats, and Asimov, Timothy Leary and, for me quite strongly, some Murakami influence – in the use of paranormal elements and jazz music as key elements of storytelling.

She'd had a birthmark shaped like a comet is first mentioned here , as are the names Tim Cavendish and Louisa Rey. The fascination with words and different styles of storytelling is also present in this debut novel. I liked Mitchell's enthusiasm for London and for Oxford Street in particular from the Marco episode.

London is a language. I guess all places are.

Finally, for my own bookmark and later reference, here's a tentative, abridged soundtrack listing from Satoru, the Tokyo saxophone player:

Mal Waldron – "Left Alone",
Duke Pearson – "After the Rain",
Tony Williams – "In a Silent Way";
Johnny Hartman;
Duke Jordan – "After the Rain"

Brilliantly entertaining although uneven book – sparking with ideas and connections (not just within the book but also forwards to other of Mitchell’s books) – the idea has much of the germination of Mitchell’s ideas of interlinking stories and overarching themes (which culminated in “Cloud Atlas”), his sub-Murakami writing (which was much more expanded in “Number 9 dream”), his interest in spiritual/ghost/pseudo-science ideas (covered much more in “Bone Clocks” and in “Slade House”).

#DavidMitchell be jokių abejonių yra vienas geriausių rašytojų ever. Bet jį labai teisingai apibūdino žmona. Tai geriausias rašytojas neturintis apie ką rašyti. Ir čia yra to neapsakomai talentingo žmogaus prakeiksmas, neleisiantis jam tapti mega legenda apie kurią dainas ringuos ateities pionieriai. Jam reikia nuvažiuot sudalyvaut kokiam teisybę ginančiam kare. Arba nelaimingai įsimylėt be proto. Patirt kažką tokio nepaprasto, kad įspūdžiai, perleisti per rašytojo magijos organą, virstų neapsakomu turiniu. Kuris būtų ne tik nuostabiai aprašytas, bet ir jaudintų labiau nei dabar. Kad tas sugebėjimas austi kelių sluoksnių audinius, būtų pritaikytas pasakot istorijas, kurių alpha spinduliuotė siektų šamano, o ne taro kortas metančios čigonės lygį. Kad finaliniai knygos akordai nebūtų tokie panašūs į Dan Brown.
Tas kraupus gabumų ir turinio neatitikimas buvo taip užknisęs, kad jau galvojau duot 4/5 tačiau čia parėjo Airių salos kaimo aprašymas ir man teko pasiduot. Talentas yra per didelis, kad išsikalinėčiau. #Recom #LEBooks #Ghostwritten

3.5

The ghost of reading haunted me as I traveled earlier this month: I'd started A Journal of the Plague Year with my destination being Amsterdam and that city is mentioned in Defoe's first paragraph; I switched to this book rather quickly and as I was flying into Copenhagen, I met the Danish character Caspar; I was in the city when the Irishwoman Mo mentions "Custard from Copenhagen."

The theme of the interconnectedness of the many inhabitants of our planet hit me hard when we kept running into the same people on our trip, from an Amsterdam museum to an Oslo hotel to a Copenhagen ferry to a city shuttle and onto the streets themselves. Sure, we were all tourists, but we were bescarved wives; a young family with a huge stroller; a sharp-nosed, iron-haired woman with a nondescript companion; and a solitary distracted orange-haired woman from the States. As if it were Mitchell's human-blood-carrying mosquito, the ghost buzzed in my ear, mocking me for what I said in my review of Atwood's The Year of the Flood, showing me that coincidences don't work just in Dickens' novels.

Mitchell has been accused of great writing that has no meaning, but I think the opposite is true of this, his first work: much meaning can be found here, but the prose is perhaps overly ambitious, despite lucid, perceptive paragraphs scattered throughout.

The things David Mitchell does best are the things I like most in fiction.

Somehow every Mitchell Novel must be measured up against Cloud Atlas,
Ghostwritten is written 5 years before "Atlas" and shares a lot of the structure and themes.
But where Atlas was structure and format to the extreme, maybe even overshadowing the story,
Ghostwritten is more loosely coupled and each of the nine story lines stands crisply clear on it's own.

There are of course, this is Mitchell after all, elements that links the stories together,
both directly by meetings and references and on a more symbolic level, like for instance comets.
There are also quite a few of the characters and themes that are reoccurring in Atlas.

Most of the nine stories encounter people (or entities) at a turning point in their existence and evolves around how they handles it, but there also a clear theme of coincidence and chance.

It's a story that can be enjoyed on many levels and like Atlas it will probably stay with me for a long time.

I’m speechless. Down the rabbit hole I go.

Because I took so long to read this, I want to reread parts before I write. Short version of my review: Outstanding first novel, brilliantly written. Highest recommendation. Read it and learn how Mitchell managed to write Cloud Atlas.

I’ve been on a David Mitchell reading binge that may be interrupted only because of the arrival of John Irving’s new book.

If I had only discovered Mitchell back in the day, I wouldn’t have so much catching up to do, and I would have enjoyed the pleasure of seeing the characters from his earlier books, like “ghostwritten,” reappear in later ones, like “Cloud Atlas.” How in the world did I manage to not know about this amazing writer?

*** Spoiler Alert for “ghostwritten” begins here ***

It’s going to sound hokey coming from me, but I promise it isn’t hokey when written by Mitchell. In chapter 5, the narrator turns out to be an entity that doesn’t have a body of its own and so takes over the bodies of regular people, moving from one person to another when they touch, as it searches for its origins in the hope of finding others like itself. This twist in the story links together the eight individual narrators of the first four chapters and the ensuing four chapters. But Mitchell isn’t pulling a sneaky authorial fast one on readers by waiting to introduce this entity in chapter 5. Instead, he is allowing us to experience the earlier stories just as their narrators do, oblivious to the existence of this entity that has occasionally controlled their thoughts and actions. Then holy moly batman, things get really interesting in the concluding chapter, but I’m not giving out any spoilers there.