5 Selected Pairings for David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten

1. A Pot of Light/Dark Roast Blend

You’ll want yourself a large pot of coffee to go along with Ghostwritten, one that gives you a boost of caffeine, but doesn’t sacrifice the rich complexity of the best mugs of java. Like the coffee, Ghostwritten is an energetic and complex blend. You’ll want coffee as a companion through the read, but also to help you stay sharp as Mitchell challenges and demands your attention.

2. 22, A Million by Bon Iver

Bon Iver’s new album is a challenging departure from his sophomore effort, Bon Iver, Bon Iver. Where the previous album felt like the soundtrack to a hike through the woods, 22, A Million is a wall of TV screens, each set to a different channel. I had the album on my turntable time and again while I leafed through Mitchell’s debut, and it became hard not to draw comparisons between the two pieces of art. Bon Iver’s album feels disjointed, busy, and confusing on the first listen, but gives way to a really beautiful listening experience on further spins. No song feels like it should follow the track that came before and yet it is impossible not to feel the thread that binds them together as an album.

Much in the same way, Ghostwritten presents a series of stories that are exceptionally different from one another, but are connected enough that the book can just squeeze into the mold of a novel. With Mitchell you never quite know what to expect with each book. Are we getting a straightforward historical novel a la The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet or are we looking down the supernatural barrel of The Bone Clocks? Ghostwritten is the most off the wall of Mitchell’s novels that I’ve read. The stories are extremely varied in genre, theme, and style.

3. Superhero Comic Books

How dare I bring that entirely pedestrian art-form into a discussion of LITERATURE? Well, there’s something to be said for Mitchell’s übernovel and its similarities to shared-universe superhero fiction. For those who are unaware, Mitchell’s characters crop up over all of his work and minor players in one novel can become leads in the next. It goes the other way too: leads can drop into the background of other characters’ tales.

For now, the interconnected nature of the novels are just fun little Easter eggs for the Mitchell fanatics, but damn, they sure make me feel like I’m reading literary comic books. So when Luisa Rey pops up to call into a radio show in Ghostwritten, or the eponymous ghostwriter visits Timothy Cavendish, I can’t help but feel like Mitchell’s world lives beyond its pages.

4. The Rest of the Mitchell Bibliography

I’ve been reading my Mitchell sparingly and in no proper order. With Ghostwritten finished, I just have Black Swan Green to have read the entirety of his übernovel to date. Ghostwritten is Mitchell’s debut and it is really compelling to see the genius that would put together Cloud Atlas in its relative infancy. Where Cloud Atlas feels more tempered in structure and writing style, Ghostwritten is loose and free. Though this makes for some truly fascinating stories, it also means that not each story is as compelling as the last. Some stories--Hong Kong comes to mind-- are so manic that they are a bit exhausting to read, while others—think Clear Island-- are a bit slower and bogged down by a disjointed structure that doesn’t quite work.

But for every story that underwhelmed me there were two that stunned me. The one-two punch of Holy Mountain and Mongolia show Mitchell at his most humanistic and playful. While the first story showed Mitchell’s handle on culture and great female leads, the second story made me reframe the first with a supernatural twist. This kind of thing crops up all over Ghostwritten as Mitchell has the reader look through a filter at a story they thought they were done with.

What’s more, this is a good sampling of Mitchell’s writing chops. You’ve got sci-fi, romance, crime, thriller, mundane life, fantasy, and the compelling characters that make Mitchell’s books soar. It has been fun to come to this first book having read most of what follows. Mitchell has definitely honed his skills since this first book, and I’m happy that I read Ghostwritten to see the first shoots of what has become a sturdy and reliable tree.

5. OPTIONAL: A Hangover

I can't say that I advise this as a pairing for Ghostwritten, but I finished off the novel this morning after a particularly large night. After all's said and done, it is a pretty good companion for the day after a night of excess.

Мичъл действа зарибяващо. Книгата, абсолютен "Облак атлас" - същите мотиви, но по-драматично, по-нерафинирано. Вечни теми: човешката душа, апокалипсисът.

По възможност книгата трябва да се прочете в оригинал.
Твърде много символика и алегории, за да има шанс за перфектен превод.
Колко различно звучи: "Написано в сянка" от "Ghostwritten" или "Пазачо" от Zookeeper...

Абсурдно е книга на Дейвид Мичъл да няма съдържание! Особено, след като това е, цитирам: "роман в девет части". Да не говорим, че тези "части" можеше поне да са добре отделени и всяка да започва на нова страница, а не като следващ абзац. Книгите на Мичъл се разлистват постоянно и "навига��ията" трябва да е улеснена. Отново "кръгла" книга, непрекъснато я "въртиш" и стиковаш имена и моменти.

Безумието на войните. Възможно ли е изкуственият интелект да бъде този, който ще съумее да ги предотврати и контролира? От друга страна, възможно ли е същият този изкуствен интелект оплетен в комбинации на основните закони на роботиката (дефинирани още от Айзък Азимов) умишлено да "затвори очите" на човечеството към приближаващи трагедии и с това всъщност да наруши основен закон? Възможен ли е синтетичен морал с морални променливи?

Възможно ли е човешката душа да бъде жива извън тялото? Възможно ли е именно тя - човешката душа първа да се сблъска с изкуствения интелект. Какво ще последва от тази среща - синергия или противопоставяне?

Най-вероятно ако книгата се чете на английски ще заслужи пълни 5 звезди.
Това е първият роман на Мичъл и на мен лично ми се видя претоварен. На ръба на онзи момент, в който твореца рискува да "преработи" творбата си.
Концентрация на имена и подробности. Хубавото е, че точките на пресичане на историите са ясни и конкретни. Въпреки това се наложи да препрочета края и все си мисля, че точно там редактора можеше да се е постарал повече.


30 Ноември - Деня на ръба

- Четвърти закон. Посетителите, които пазя, съсипват зоологическата ми градина.

- Ако изхвърлянето на "посетителите" ще ти донесе душевен покой, да се махат. Кога можеш да го направиш?

- След тринайсет дни ще има такава възможност, Бат

...

Първи Декември обещава сияйно небе. ...

Ghostwritten By David Mitchell : Main Characters

Flat out brilliant! I loved each of the nine stories that make up this amazing novel. His best, I think.

As with all of Mitchell's books I am stunned into not knowing what to say. I can write down a bunch of words like 'tour de force' and 'utterly brilliant', which I genuinely mean, but they are nothing compared to what's in Ghostwritten. Now even this sounds like a cliche. But really.

n  "My forehead kissed the tarmac, soft as a sleeping daughter. I keeled over into foetal position. A lurching tide of voices sloshed the hull of my hearing. What the fuck is going on?
Now I understand what this insane fucking day has been about!
Hilarious!
I am fucking dying!"n

("A lurching tide of voices sloshed the hull of my hearing." How wonderful is this!!! And there are so many more great sentences and descriptions!)

Mitchell has a way of making his characters come to life. I was so amazed that I could relate and empathise with an abused girlfriend of a professional criminal in Russia, a Chinese woman who speaks to trees in a mountain, single-minded, overworked, sex-crazed businessmen (yes, two of them) with questionable morals that I am mildly repulsed by.

If you enjoy genre-defying narratives but also unapologetic scifi, imaginative and ambitious plots, too many characters that you have to make an effort to keep track of but also you enjoy every second of it - I actually use a fanmade map on my second read to fully understand the intricacies of each character's connection with each other, good stuff - then this one's for you.

What I truly enjoy is also the many many discussion boards on Reddit and Goodreads, the analyses and reviews that made me flip through pages again to find that one choice of word or one clue slipped in or one dialogue breaking the fourth wall that make me go woah!

If you haven't caught on, let me say it again: I love to read and will always read David Mitchell, and I urge you to, too.

I'm kicking myself for not jumping on the Mitchell bandwagon sooner. I loved the focus on interconnectedness and the debate of fate vs. free will. "We're all ghostwritters, my boy. And it's not just our memories. Our actions, too. We all think we're in control of our own lives, but really they're pre-ghostwritten by forces around us." And this: "The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed."

Mitchell utilizes a wide array of characters for each of the stories within this novel, and it was cool to see how he tied all of those unique stories together. Characters re-emerge several stories later, or there are subtle hints at the connectedness between different stories. It became a game of sorts to jot down notes on how this story related to that story and piece together the web that makes 'Ghostwritten' a unified novel. I also appreciated the diverse lenses with which individuals view the world. No characters share the exact same mindset, which I think a lot of authors will tell you is harder to accomplish than one might think.

This is a wholly original work. Mitchell's prose is clean but the story is complex. The language is diverse and the tones for one chapter can differ greatly from the next. The Night Train chapter is funny and terrifying at the same time. The Mongolia story is creepy and uplifting. It's just a lot of fun to read. Four to five star range, I'll go with a high four for now.

Ghostwritten, and ghostridden and by a ghost, ridden.

This is my second David Mitchell, and I like it almost as much as the first one I read, which was Cloud Atlas, and absolutely blew my socks off. I think Cloud Atlas is a more masterful and audacious use of the same technique that you can see developing in Ghostwritten, but I enjoyed it in its developing stages here quite a lot.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

The idea of crossed paths has always fascinated me. The randomness of it, of chance encounters and all the serendipitous circumstances that bring two people together, if only for a few seconds.
Whenever I sit next to a complete stranger, my imagination is set on fire. I can’t help wondering all kind of things about him or her. Where is that person going? From where? Is he or she happy with life, with his/her circumstances? My mind starts creating a story, almost involuntarily, tying up the knots of the past that brought that person to this very moment, next to me.

What Mitchell does in this novel goes several steps beyond. He delves deeper into the unknown alleys of the big mysteries that escape us. Can we control fate? Or does chance rule the laws of the universe? Does evolution work against what is morally correct? What about technology? Are we more connected now than we were in the past without the cyberspace that brings geography and time to a minimal expression?

Unanswerable questions, of which alienation is the ever-present protagonist. Mitchell draws a gossamer of apparently unrelated stories set in different parts of the world: Hong Kong, London, Ireland, Tokyo, China, Mongolia, New York, Okinawa, Petersburg.
Vastly dissimilar people give voice to their stories with the common trait of seeking a mental place to anchor their forsaken identity: An old woman who witnesses the violent history of her country from a tea shack at the bottom of the Holy Mountain, an English artist who drowns his fears and inadequacies in casual sex, a young boy who tones down the caos of hectic Tokyo with Jazz, a prominent scientist who returns to her native Ireland to choose what is right. Even a disembodied spirit that transmigrates from host body to host body to find its origins.
Quite a menagerie, right? And what could be the centerpiece of the book, but also its weakness, at least for this reader.t

Even though each chapter is titled by the name of the city where the narration will take place, Mitchell does with narrative what Calvino did with cities; create a character of his style, which varies, almost abruptly, from chapter to chapter, according to the scenario at hand. I applaud the orginiality of the idea and the imaginative layout of the stories, but I couldn’t help comparing Mitchell’s easy-going prose to Calvino’s refined sense of aesthetics. Some dialogues came through as flippant, some plotlines a bit dragging.
Also, in spite of the eclectic details that connect the characters in butterfly effect, I felt the narrative lacked cohesion. The resulting impact of Mitchell’s stories was uneven. I was totally bemused by four of them, in particular “Holy Mountain” and “Mongolia” , but was unimpressed with the rest.

Nevertheless, I know that certain images will stay with me for a long, long time.
A newborn as ancient as life.
An old woman visiting her younger self in a tragic moment.
A child staring at the eyes of a terrorist, understanding everything that can go wrong with the world.
Maybe I wasn’t prepared for the heavy load of this novel, for all the things that can, and have gone wrong throughout history. Aren’t we all accountable?
Maybe I am too much of a chicken for this story, after all.

These interlocking stories are quite well written, if not as good as Cloud Atlas. In Cloud Atlas souls are reborn and reborn into new eras and societies, but in Ghostwritten, it's the butterfly effect that connects the stories. Coincidences and chance meetings creates a string of cause and effect from one story to the next, and it was always exciting to see how the main character of one story would have an impact on the others, although none of them really meets and gets to know each other.

But several of the stories failed to captivate me, I just didn't care about all of the main characters and I kept comparing it to Cloud Atlas, which is better written and better put together. The stories I liked the best in Ghostwritten was "Holy Mountain" and "Mongolia", these two I really enjoyed. The rest went from "ok" to "meh".

It always takes you a few pages (sometimes many pages) to get into a story, to get to now the characters and setting. That's why reading short story collections, or books like Ghostwritten, often gives me the repeated experience of stopping and starting, again and again having to leave something you were enjoying, and start over again somewhere else. Its a bit of an effort, and since Mitchell's stories often takes a long time to get into, at least for me, this stopping and starting took up quite a large part of the reading experience. Therefore no more than three stars from me.

Dominoes. I was always fascinated by dominoes. Our world seems to be comprised of unrelated events and people, but is it really so? We go by metro or by bus daily with a bunch of unknown people and we never think of the connection we might have with them: the person from our left might be the sibling of a friend of one of our colleagues from work or the ex-ex boyfriend or girlfriend of a friend from college and we might never find this out. We encounter people with whom we have no idea we’re somehow connected and we fail to understand events and meanings. What if we switch our human abilities and capabilities of understanding with the ones of an omniscient watcher of the show of life on Earth? Wouldn’t it be like connecting dots with lines

  

and wouldn't we be able to establish causes, effects and connections between events and people? And just like with dominoes, wouldn’t a simple push be able to impact a big number of pawns?

David Mitchell’s book seems from close-up to be a series of unrelated short-stories. But, since the reader is somehow omniscient and gets to find out the details of the other stories, he can unite the dots and establish the connections and therefore see the book as a novel. And in his world, everything seems to be connected. Just like in the real world, although we are not omniscient and we cannot see the bigger picture. Actually, the whole picture. It’s interesting that the very idea of “dots united by lines” (explaining how everything in the world is connected and determining events) seems very much alike with a

stars map


or

our brain circuitry



Is there a pattern in the Universe and do we fail to see it because of our lack of omniscience? This is one of the many questions this book made me think about. There are many others and the stories contain such plastic images and such great manifestations of talent and exploration of questions of physics, psychology, philosophy, history that even if you fail to see the bigger picture, it’s impossible not to appreciate the flowing of Mitchell’s words. I loved the stories; I loved the style and the genius you can discover between the lines. Mind-blowing book which is a rollercoaster through the hills and plains of existential knowledge, understanding and dreaming!

And, as a bonus, Mitchell argues throughout the book for and against fate versus chance and deals with the concept of time as a non-chronological notion, but rather a coexistent one. The following quotation is the quintessence of the metaphysical ideas richly supplied in this book:
n  

“It goes like this: when the players are out there the game is a sealed arena of interbombarding chance. But when the game is on video then every tiniest action already exists. The past, present and future exist at the same time: all the tape is there, in your hand. There can be no chance, for every human decision and random fall of the ball is already fated. 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.”

n
If you’re a fan of metaphors, this book is one big metaphor comprising smaller metaphors, it’s like a diamond: carve it by pondering and its value becomes visible and it reflects many revelations. It is brilliant every step of the way.

n  "I wonder what happened to him, I wonder what happened to all of them, this wondering is the nature of matter, each of us a loose particle, an infinity of paths through the park, probable ones, improbable ones, none of them real until observed whatever real means, and for something so solid matter contains terrible, terrible, terrible expanses of nothing, nothing, nothing..."n

Ordinary human lives, sometimes crisscrossing, sometimes briefly touching, sometimes swiftly passing each other by through the fabric of space and time, creating imperceptible ripples on the surface of some invisible lake of our collective consciousness that eventually lead up to an event of cataclysmic significance....

Everything considered, Ghostwritten is an imperfect masterpiece. In the sense it makes its far-reaching ambitions of being viewed as a tour de force of its generation apparent at the onset but when one sets about to allow oneself keener examination of all its narrative intricacies, it smacks of amateurishness. If, at its best, Ghostwritten is a fascinating meditation on the hollowness of human lives, human fallacies, urban alienation, intertwined fates and our unslakable thirst for validation in the 21st century then at its worst it is a rather complicated mess of styles and themes usually identified with two masters of the craft - Calvino and Murakami. I'd, thus, refrain from calling it masterful and call it the work of a master in the making instead.

There is something so blatantly Murakami-esque about this book, that I am tempted to label Mitchell as Murakami Lite and this is supposed to serve more as a mild chiding rather than approbation of any form. It is like Murakami's ghost (excuse the unintended pun) continuously haunts Mitchell's characters and their lives, his voice reverberating in their unvoiced musings, innermost stream of thoughts, conversations and his invisible presence subtly influencing the magical-realist aspects of the book. So much so there's even a minor character who fleetingly mentions spotting his own doppelganger on the streets of London one day. I almost began anticipating the appearance of talking cats or strange sheep men after this point, although thankfully none were found in the end.
But regrettably enough, this book failed to give me any of those goosebumps-inducing moments of pure intrigue which I have often come to categorize along with the effects produced by Murakami's surrealistic vignettes.

It is also quite obvious Mitchell has distilled the essence of Calvino's Invisible Cities into his own deconstruction of modern day cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, St Petersburg, London and New York in a 20th-21st century set up. The concept of islets of human existence huddled together in their own miniature niches, disparate yet suffering from similar fates, their ideas of the city they dwell in coalescing clumsily to impart the city its true identity, comes into play here but not under the guise of Calvino's beautifully rendered symbolism.

Prior to picking up this book, I had heard so much about Mitchell and the widespread adoration he enjoys especially among my Goodreads friends, I was expecting something life-altering and unforgettable. And despite the narrative sweep and all-encompassing nature of the subjects Mitchell touches upon here, Ghostwritten seems to be neither of the aforementioned. At least not in my opinion. And as the novelty of the interconnection among the short story length snippets wears off with the gradual progress of the narrative, the lack of finesse in Mitchell's writing becomes all the more prominent.

n  "God knows darn well that dabbling in realpolitik would coat his reputation with flicked boogers."n

Inclusion of quite a few crude metaphors like the one above just felt jarring to the overall tone of the novel.

I am hoping Cloud Atlas is more accomplished.

”There is truth, and then there is Being Truthful.

Being Truthful is just one more human activity, along with chatting up women, ghostwriting, selling drugs, running a country, designing radiotelescopes, parenting, drumming, and shoplifting. All are susceptible to adverbs. You can be truthful well or badly, frankly or slyly, and you can choose to do it and not to do it….

Truth’s indifference is immutable.”

Have you ever had anyone say to you...Just tell me the truth?

So I ponder what someone wants when they ask that. Do they want the truth as it was last week, as it is today, or what I think it will be tomorrow? Truth mutates like a gecko lizard changing to fit each new environment, each new question. Truth evolves, devolves, with each added experience. The new hemorrhages into the old. Memories fade and are overlaid by new recollections of old events. The good or the bad are enhanced, magnified so large that they hide the very elements that kept a memory anchored near the site of “truth”.

As long as we all agree that a memory is only a version of many truths we will get along just fine.

”The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.”

I don’t know if David Mitchell pulled the wool over a publisher’s eyes or he simply convinced them that they could publish these short stories and call them a novel. I was into the third section (short story) when I realized exactly what this young Brit had accomplished. Sure all the stories interweave by way of these sometimes very tenuous crossovers, they are the gossamer that drapes around the “truth” and can convince the reader that...yes, this truly is a novel.

After all short story collections are what successful writers publish when their next novel is proving to be rather tricky. Generally, publishers don’t publish short story collections for a writer’s first book. There is a good reason for that because the taste of the public has moved away from short stories. Short story collections without a readership established by a writer’s novels tend to go unloved, unread, ignored, and are quickly pulped/remaindered. If the writer rallies back from the uppercut to the jaw and the flurry of punches to his stomach the public handed him on his first book and writes a novel to great acclaim, that orphaned short story collection becomes a much sought after collectible.

”The strong force that stops the protons of a nucleus hurtling away from one another; the weak force that keeps the electrons from crashing into the protons; electromagnetism, which lights the planet and cooks dinner; and gravity, which is the most down-to-earth. From before the time the universe was the size of a walnut to its present diameter, these four forces have been the statute book of matter, be it the core of Sirius or the electrochemical ducts of the brains of students in the lecture theater of Belfast. Bored, intent, asleep, dreaming, in receding tiers. Chewing pencils or following me.

Matter is thought, and thought is matter. Nothing exists that cannot be synthesized.”

So, really that is what Mitchell has done. He has combined these stories into a coherent whole. He has synthesized a short story collection into a novel. My tendency is to review this novel like I would a short story collection by talking about each tale separately or highlighting a few of my favorites, but then that would really be “letting the cat out of the bag” wouldn’t it?

I liked all the sections of this novel, some I liked immediately, and some grew on me as Mitchell spun out the elements of manipulation. My favorite is the one set in Tokyo set around a tenor saxophonist named Satoru who works in a record store. We like it when a writer writes about us or more precisely about someone we identify with. We appreciate meeting characters that are very different from us, but if “truth” be known we like the characters that are most like us the best. I don’t think it is possible to work in a record store or a bookstore without being a romantic. How else could someone work for such low pay without believing what they are doing is larger than what it seems? These professions are redolent with mythology as they provide opportunity for something truly grand to happen at any moment.

Like a girl, THE girl walking into the shop.

”She was so real, the others were cardboard cutouts beside her. Real things had happened to her to make her how she was, and I wanted to know them, and read them, like a book.”

But she left, evaporated, sucked back into the universe.

”I couldn’t remember accurately what she looked like. Smooth skin, highish cheekbones, narrowish eyes. Like a Chinese empress. I didn’t really think of her face when I thought of her. She was just there, a color that didn't have a name yet. The idea of her.”

She becomes so mystical, so constructed out of straw, that his own existence becomes contingent on her returning. He can’t be who he is suppose to be until the moment she walks back into the shop.

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

His clock winds back up.

There is a terrorist in this book, a man that hates the world, wants to change it, but in reality he is so angry, so disassociated, that he really wants to crack it in half and let the sun eat the pieces. There is a ghost that haunts a stockbroker, a man proud of his ability to compartmentalize, but as his life destabilizes he discovers that logic is illogical. There is a woman living on the Holy Mountain in China who watches her life diverge because of the cowardice of people who should be mandated to protect her.

In Mongolia we spend time seeing the world through the eyes of a disembodied spirit with no memories of it’s own to help guide the present or the future.

”Why am I the way I am? I have no genetic blueprint. I have had no parents to teach me right from wrong. I have had no teachers. I had no nurture, and I possess no nature. But I am discreet and conscientious, a nonhuman humanist.”

A spirit that becomes more human than the humans he inhabits when it is faced with the ultimate sacrifice.

In St. Petersburg we get to hang out with an art curator at the Hermitage Museum. A concubine, a manipulator of men:

”Margarita Latunsky plays men like a master violinist. When I want something from a woman I get angry. When I want something from a man I pout.”

Despite those natural god given abilities or maybe because of them she falls in love and hangs her dreams on the wrong man.

In London we meet a womanizer named Marco who is a ghostwriter or whatever he needs to be if it will get a woman to fall in bed with him. He is the member of a band called The Music of Chance, a nod to the New York author Paul Auster. He is in love with a woman named Poppy, but he can’t give up the randomness of his life to form an even number with her. He wants the roulette wheel to spin every day giving him a chance for something bigger.

We meet a physicist who has escaped to her homeland on Cape Clear Island. She finds it ironic that like a criminal she can’t help but go where she will be found. She quit being a member of a think tank when she discovered her research was being used to make weapons. She hopes they will let her go after all she is in her forties.

”Nobody’s going to kidnap me. Look at me. I’m middle-aged. Only Einstein, Dirac and Feynman made major contributions in their forties.” And now Muntervary.

There is also The Zookeeper, an artificial intelligence who escaped his military caretakers, and instead of trying to destroy the world as we have been lead to believe any rogue IA will attempt to do by the blockbuster movies out of Hollywood, is actually determined to do the opposite. The Zookeeper is trying to live up to his name by keeping the animals with animus separated. The stones they wish to throw must never be allowed to launch.

So if each story is a pearl we could fashion them into earrings, bracelets or rings and they will be beautiful, but if we want them to dazzle we should string them on a necklace where each will enhance the rest.

Maybe, if that is the case, we should call this a novel.

In the future when some linguist/scientist/reader is trying to piece together who we were before we evolved into more perfect beings, the histories will give them a body, but it will be the novels that will put blood in our veins, send electrical impulses to our nerves, and bring air in to our lungs. Our “lies” will tell our story the best.

”Who is blowing on the nape of my neck?”

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Ghostwritten is a beautiful novel about human beings, their experiences and how we all effect each other. The novel is split up into different stories which each take up a different genre and a different tone and story. The first story of the novel is about a terrorist involved in a strange cult that's goal is to "cleanse" the world. This story sets the scene of the novel and ends up being extremely important as the novel goes on. After reading this one I was wondering where this novel would go and I knew I was in for an amazing joy ride of a book. Which it was. The ending was astonishing and blew me away if I wasn't already going to give it a 5 star rating the last 70 or so pages definitely convinced me to.

Another one of the stories that stood out to me was the story about the tea lady and the story of her life. That story really showed the extent of human suffering. Regimes change and are overthrown and new ones take their place. When people rise up to destroy the current people in power it is usually because they are tired of the hardships and the suffering that they had to undergo. Yet as soon as those people gain power they again make those below them suffer until those rise up and replace them. “Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.” It is a vicious cycle that every nation has and is undergoing.

This book reminds me very much of the show LOST how everyone is important in their own ways and how everything that happens can lead to bigger events. It also reminds the science geek in me of the transfer theory used in forensic science of how things can rub off on another person and have lasting impressions. A simple thing such as a handshake or saying hello to someone, or answering the phone call of a complete stranger can affect the course of people's lives and cause a rippling effect that can be felt around the globe. We all create these ripples which randomly bounce of each other causing bigger ripples the effects even more people until a simple thing can lead to a chain reaction that in some way affects the entire world. Think about that the next time you cut someone off in traffic or really do anything. Could this be the first incident that leads humanity to the end of the world?

Again this makes you think of what actually is the probability of things occurring in your life. Take for example a car crash. What was the chance that the other car was at that spot at that exact moment. What was the chance of YOU being at that exact spot. Was it because you were speeding and running late because of something that happened at home? Probably if you looked at the exact numbers of the probability of the event occurring at that time when taking in all the elements the chance would be pretty small. But that's what it all really is… chance. Everything that we do and everything that happens in our lives boils all down to chance encounters and chance events.

I really love thinking about life like that, as a series of chance. Chance is what brings you to what you are today. Life isn't planned out for us all because anyone/anything that somehow diverges from that plan causes the ripples which effect us all. It is amazing really. Life is made up of these chances that can really be described almost as miracles because the chance of things happening is so small it is basically a miracle that it happened at all.

Fun Fact: Probability of your being born: one in 102,685,000

Chance that is what it all boils down to. “If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.”

Sorry I have pretty much diverged from the plot of the book but all that is what this book made me think of even long after I finished.

What I really what I loved most about the story, Mitchell's attention to detail and the subtle ways he connects the stories together bringing an "OMG thats the character from the other story!" moment. I love how Mitchell can craft such unique stories and stitch them together in amazing ways. My favorite stories was the musician and the noncorpum. I loved the musician stories for the way it got me thinking about chance and really showed the whole theme of the novel. The noncorpum was also amazing because of how it showed it going from multiple characters and looking for meaning. At first I couldn't see how this story related to the others but then realized it was all about chance again. I'm mad that I left this book at home cause there was a quote about accidents that I loved that really helped me understand this story. The noncorpum in the story I believe was an accident made by the Irish physicist [spoilers removed]. Also a note on the Irish, they know how to party and stall CIA agents!

This is overall an extremely powerful novel with a mind-blowing ending. I enjoyed Cloud Atlas better but this book was amazing for a first novel better than most author's first novels. Having read Cloud Atlas before this one it made me wonder if Mitchell had all his books planned out because of how he has his characters appear in multiple books and especially the comet-shaped tattoo. This is why I gave it all 5 stars because of how powerful and moving it was and I love when a book keeps me thinking long after I finish it.

My hermano also wrote a review for this book as well which I think is amazing and a lot better than mine :)