This book is fantastic. I have been meaning to read Mitchell, and a friend recommended I begin with his first novel, and luckily my library has it in the collection. Before picking this up, my only exposure to Mitchell was the movie version of Cloud Atlas, which I enjoyed. I understood going in that this focuses on a series of different stories, a format I like, and which Mitchell apparently uses frequently.

In short, this book was published in 2000, and it is set in the late 90s. Each chapter follows a different character. Each of these people has their own story and their own issues. I was impressed that Mitchell alters his writing style to fit the person and the story, and does so effectively. The stories seem to circle the world, starting in Okinawa and Tokyo, then moving to Hong Kong, rural China, Mongolia, St. Petersberg, London, Ireland and finally New York. The shift from one story to the next can be abrupt, but I am happy to report that each character and set of circumstances is highly engaging. And of course, these stories are connected. The connections are tenuous in some cases, and direct in others, and some of the stories are connected to two or three of the other stories.

Overall, the book is ambitious, but it doesn't read that way. If you are intimidated by Mitchell, don't be. He's actually quite easy to read. The book deals with some very large themes, and it touches on many of the issues that were important in 2000, but are also still relevant today -- religious fanaticism, corporate greed, theft, young love, military and scientific overreach, and struggling to get by. The biggest question the book asks is about agency: how in control of our lives are we really? It is not deterministic. Each of these characters definitely make choices and have to deal with the consequences of those decisions, but in each story there is another power, another force, that has sway over the character's life, one they could not have foreseen or even imagined. So who then is really running our lives? There are no pat answers here, but the novel does a remarkable job of showing the connections our actions can have all over the world.

Highly recommended.

Ghostwritten is one of those books which, halfway through, you know they are right in the 4-star territory and that the ending will be decisive as to whether it will be a 3, 4 or 5-star case. My rating tells a story.

What a ride it was! In Ghostwritten David Mitchell invites us on a journey which starts in Okinawa and takes us to Tokyo, Honk Kong, Holy Mountain of China, Mongolia, Petersburg, London, Clear Island of Ireland and New York before it ends right where it started. Each chapter consists of a different location, a different narrator and is another link in a long chain of events.

If someone asked me what Ghostwritten is about, I'd be having a hard time answering so I'd probably use the following passage which, in my opinion, is pretty informative about the book:


"I feel you're being a little harsh on your more eccentric callers."
"Of the Howardly persuasion?"
"Precisely. You undervalue them. Viruses in cashew nuts, visual organs in trees, subversive bus drivers waving secret messages to one another as they pass, impending collisions with celestial bodies. Citizens like Howard are the dreams and shadows that a city forgets when it awakes. They are purer than I."
"But you're a writer. They are lunatics."
"Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat."
"Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs Ray - 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. You are holding one of these pages where these stories tell themselves, Bat. That's why I tune in. That's everything I wanted to say."


Truth is, though, there are so many meanings between the lines and so many ways to interpret them, that it's ideal for endless discussions and exchange of opinions. I think that five different readers would provide five different opinions on Ghostwritten. The connections between the stories/chapters are so many and so subtle that it begs for a re-read. Seems to me that no matter how many times you read it, there will always be something new to notice.

Reading Ghostwritten is a unique experience that resembles a dream. When I read the last page I felt kind of sad and realized I had become attached to the characters. It was like all the while I was in a trance-like state filled with images and pictures so magically painted, they were almost real. Now that I think about it, Ghostwritten is an extraordinary accomplishment not like any other debut novel I have read.

All in all, my first Mitchell experience was more than satisfying and I'll definitely be coming back for more.

”Clouds began to ink out the stars, one by one.”

To say I’m overawed and overwhelmed is an understatement. This was David Mitchell’s first book??? How is that even possible? Incredible. Provocative. Smart.

On finishing this, I simply felt like my brain had exploded

3 stars - It was good.

The Bone Clocks was easily my favorite book from the ones that I read in 2014, which made me an instant David Mitchell fan with the desire to read all of his books. I am SO very thankful I started with that book, because I feel many reviewers are doing other readers a great disservice by recommending that you read his books in order. Malarkey.

While technically a novel, this reads much more like a collection of loosely connected short stories, which is not my favorite format style. It is still unique with great passages scattered throughout, but as a whole I found it to only be slightly above average in rating.
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Favorite Quote: Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

First Sentence: Who was blowing on the nape of my neck?

Hmn. Maybe going in reverse in this case wasn't ideal. This novel, like Cloud Atlas, which I quite enjoyed, spans the globe and puzzle-pieces different narratives that somehow interlock in the end. Patented Mitchell, right? Only here I don't think it worked as well as his more mature books (and this one may be his first, or if not at least a very early work).

I did enjoy certain segments and characters more, especially the old Buddhist women who ran a tea shop in China, but overall, not so much as the Cloud and certainly not as much as The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Entertaining, just not page-turning good.

This book left me gasping, groaning, holding my exploding head. I have no idea how to review it. Here's a quote:

"Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat."

"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. You are holding one of the pages where these stories tell themselves . . ." (311)

Who are we? Who or what makes life happen? Are we really in charge or even immutably moored to the personality and body we appear to inhabit? If not, who or what creates our lives? What and where is consciousness? These are some of the themes of this indescribable series of chapters that don't seem related for quite some time, and are so free-wheeling that you often don't know what is happening . . . yet you can't put it down. You read on.

Who or what is author David Mitchell? I cannot comprehend the mind with this kind of imagination and massive reach. And the discipline to use it to write this symphony. I'm in awe.

Loved revisiting this first foray into the Mitchellverse. As snappy and ambitious as always, with some added crassness and rougher edges owing to being a debut. Still definitely an outstanding work!
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 honour this contract. This inner self is our own responsibility.

Glad to return to the warm bath of David Mitchell his writing.
Hadn’t noticed before how we move from East to West in each of the parts of Ghostwritten. And how more cynical stories in terms of narrator are interspersed by more uplifting narrators, in nearly neatly repeating cycles.
The style of this 1999 book is much more frequently used nowadays, with various short, seemingly unrelated parts, turning out to be interconnected.
Each section of the book is called after a location. For full immersion and surprise I would recommend not to read further than this since the below gives short summaries of the various parts, to better discuss how they work together and what the larger theme of Mitchell already in this debut seemingly is.

Okinawa
They need shinier myths that will never be soiled by becoming true.
Murderous cult member fleeing Sarin metro attacks. A daring choice of an unlikeable narrator.
The awareness of collapse of fish stock and far off rural places feeling abandoned by the modern world is still relevant. The conspiracy theories and cults feel a lot less outlandish nowadays than 15 years ago when I first read this.
In general the main character comes across as unhinged but observant, keeping one low key wondering about the truthfulness of the alpha wave mumbo jumbo and end of the world faith, even as it crumbles.

The concept of transmigration already coming back in this first chapter, years before Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks.

Tokyo
Starting off with a inversion of “all Asians look the same”, in respect to an American, Australian or European client, we follow Satoru, a high school graduate working in a record store.
The prevalence of TV (instead of smartphones) to convey news is definitely something that has changed in the two decades since Ghostwritten was authored. As are teenage girls looking for “the newest hit by the latest teen dwoob” in a physical store.

Japanese orphans as a subject feel familiar and a precursor to Number9Dream that followed this book. The link to Hong Kong and its islands is made (the next story) and Quasar from Okinawa also makes a call cameo.
The whole cherry blossom theme as sign of Japaneseness is a bit too obvious and cliche and this is quite a sweet section, not in my view necessarily one of the best of the book.

Hong Kong
Neal Brose the fraudulent banker meets the protagonist from the previous story, while having a meltdown during his morning commute to work.
I remember I didn’t much enjoy reading this one last time around, but now being a white collar worker I actually found this commute from hell to a meeting with lawyers quite funny.

There is also one of the sicker burns of the whole book in this section:
He’s not begging for money.
What’s he begging for?
He’s begging for time.
Why does he do that?
He thinks you’re wasting yours, so you must have plenty to spare.

Neal is kind of described as Voldemort, in terms of his compartimentalisation and his end is in similar spirit not positive, setting of a chain reaction of financial mayhem.

Holy mountain
My father was dying as he had lived. With the minimum effort possible.
The account of a Chinese woman growing up from the warlord era to the Kuomintang and the Communists, all the while guided by a benign tree spirit. She is the great grandmother to the maid from the Hong Kong story.

Her grumpy aphorisms are gold:
Nothing often poses in men as wisdom.
or
Make no mistake, I think my father was Emperor Chickenshit. Finding virtue in him was harder than finding a needle in the Yangtze river.
and:
I added ‘writers’ to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.

Mongolia
When she showed us the room she gave me a look like I’d run over her baby with a bulldozer.
A non-corporeal being hailing from the previously visited Holy Mountain travels to Mongolia in a backpackers mind. The search is for connection and meaning:
The USA is even crazier than the rest of humanity. I followed up each of the nineteen replies I received: mystics, lunatics or writers, every one.

In the end there is a resolution on what’s of importance, showing Mitchell to be a deeply human and in a sense optimistic writer. Even though there is Subhataar, the Mongolian KGB agent and contact to Neal in Hong Kong.

The penchant of weaving stories into stories is interesting, this chapter reminds me both of Number9Dream’s chapter which features a play on a children’s book and the chapter in the Bone Clocks that also focusses on a non-corporeal narrator.

Petersburg
Margot/Margarita Latunsky works in the Hermitage, thinking of her glorious affairs from the past and plotting art heists in the meantime. She is an unreliable narrator and uses dismissiveness and aggrandizement to protect herself from the reality of her abusive relationship with a druglord.

Tatyana the Polish art expert sounds rather like a predatory version of the non-corporeal from Mongolia, and Subhataar makes an appearance as well. People lying to themselves, like Quasar and Neal did before in this book, also definitely form a recurring theme in Ghostwritten.

London
The world runs on strangers coping.
Katy Forbes, the wife from Hong Kong (who incidentally has a birthmark shaped as comet, very familiar from Cloud Atlas) ends up besides the main character of this section.
Marco is an adopted man, drummer, who attributes a lot to chance and luck, which helps him save someone we'll be encountering in the next story as well.
Besides music he is a ghostwritter to someone who knew someone killed in St Petersburg. He also visits a publisher of books (who will have his own chapter in Cloud Atlas) that just printed a book about the now disreputable guru of the first chapter.

Lots of love for London without much content here. Despite Marco being an actually ghostwriter, and hence the expectation he'd have the most insights in the nature of the wider book, he is rather bland, boring and aimless in my view. Again connection is a theme, but Mongolia did this better in my view, if on an a different scale.

Clear Island
Technology is repeatable miracles.
Mo Muntervary, saved in the last chapter by Marco, is a scientist on the run.
Arriving in Ireland after moral objections to how her technology is used, on her trip she ends up visiting Hong Kong and uses the Trans Siberia express where she meets a character from the Mongolia chapter.
The foreshadowing of a Middle Eastern “just” war is an interesting part of this pre-9/11 novel.

Ethics and civilization in the face of growing technological prowess comes into focus, another main theme of Mitchell.
In my world enemies and friends are defined by context.

Night train
Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat.
Bat Segundo, a late night radio host in New York who ends up launching Utopia Avenue gets acquainted with the invention from Mo of the precious story.
Also Luisa Rey from Cloud Atlas and Utopia Avenue makes an appearance, as does Quasar from part 1.
He is not necessarily the nicest of characters, his assistent tells him: No wonder your only friends are revenge fantasies.

But he serves as a conduit to a fascinating character, the Zookeeper and manages to imbue some wisdom upon them: The human world is made of stories, not people.

I love the daring in this chapter, bringing a lot together and taking it to its extreme, leading questions of reality, and reflections on fundamental but basic truths as:
Procreation entails difficulties. or
Are you what you believe yourself to be?

Страхотно произведение в стила на Мичъл, с който, изглежда, е най-известен. Роман в части, героите на който са напълно различни и уникални, но се свързват един с друг по най-чудни начини. Или някак "преливат" в следващия или предишния, което е доста интересен феномен.
Книгата ме впечатли повече от "Облакът Атлас" (при която филмовата версия ми допада в пъти повече), само дето последните двама герои ми се видяха по-слабо представени, а бяха най-важните. Някак ненужно хаотично ми стана светоусещането там. Може би и на редактора/коректора (или който е изпълнил длъжността) му е доскучало, защото се натъкнах на доста предизвикателни технически грешки за графа "Ама... Какво иска да каже с това изречение..."

How dare I write yet another review of Ghostwritten, when most of my GR friends have read, loved, and written fantastic reviews on this book already? I have LIKED Kris’s, and S.Penkevich’s.

So, I will refer my reader to those reviews and here I will only record some loose thoughts.

As with any thing that is openly praised by most, I was a bit apprehensive to approach David Mitchell. Satisfaction is the difference between Attainment and Expectations.

But I have liked the book even though I had to wait until close to 40% (can you tell I read it in e-format?) to get a sense of whether I was enjoying it or not.

I loathe the word “connectivity”. It is a buzz word in my office and a colleague-friend and I always make side jokes whenever it is used. At work it is supposed to mean that we have all our activities well engrained with each other to form a smooth, efficient and international business. In reality it means that very little is defined in how the various processes should be working with each other, and also that responsibilities should remain unassigned. For us this word is a code for BS.

So, it is very hard for me to say that it is the connections between the people, the stories, and the literary references (see S.Penkevich’s list of them) that have appealed to me the most in this book. Yes, the odious “connectivity” is what I single out as the best part of this novel.

I should add that it was during reading it that a long lost friend managed to contact me. This happened thanks to an unexpected series of connections that took place between London - Paris – New York – Bristol – Delhi - New Haven and Madrid.

This made my reading all the more spooky. I felt in my skin Mitchell’s depiction of the way our contemporary lives are affected by transport and telecommunications. His reminding us that we are mistaken in understanding our lives are a single line while forgetting that other points in that line do actually form other single lines that can eventually, decades later, cross our lines again, certainly hit home with me.

But the missing star is because I felt that David Mitchell does not differentiate sufficiently the various narrator voices, in spite of what most critics say. Some characters, in particular the HK lawyer and the London ghostwriter rang too close to each other. And although the Petersburg story is one of my favorites, the voice of the narrator seemed too dumb and a bit fake.

This book merits a second reading, which should also happen for me soon.

Ghostwritten is a collection of 10 short interconnected stories that borders on sheer Genius hiding behind a facade of Insanity & ramblings

YOU have been warned!


Ratings: ★★★★ 1/2
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Ghostwritten is definitely NOT for everyone.
David Mitchell, in his debut novel manages to create a network of interweaving characters and placing them strategically in 10 different stories in Ghostwritten.
The very first thing you'd notice is the style of writing differs so vividly in each and every story. A different setting altogether and with that changes the style of writing as if someone else has written it.

Some of the stories don't make sense the first time you read it. (Yes!! You will find yourself flipping the pages of this book back and forth as you progress! )
The way a story starts, sometimes it's difficult to understand the context since David doesn't waste precious time in providing unnecessary descriptions about natural habitat or even characters.
Love it the way he just drops you in the middle of a scene, Go figure!

The are distinct elements of Sci-Fi, Crime, Paranormal, Mafia, Romance, Treachery all throughout the chapters and it seems like a complete package!

It's quite surprising to know that David managed to create this HUGE network of interconnected characters in his debut novel and that too isn't straight as a stick.
I found myself googling about a few things towards the end to get a hang on what exactly happened!
My favourite characters were: Grandma from Holy Mountain, Non-Corpa from Mongolia and ofcourse Mrs. Mo M!
Loved reading: Mongolia, Holy Mountain, Clear Island in that order

All in all, it's a very brilliant book and i loved reading it!!


This book is for: David Mitchel lovers and people who love reading cryptic books!


This book is NOT for: People who'd want their dinner served on a platter should stay away from this book.
Impatient readers should also not pursue this book and they might get tempted to abandon it in the second story itself or over multiple instances.

Ps. David Mitchell is known to carry forward characters as well as some plot in all of his published books and hence Gorab, Manju and I had decided to embank on this journey with a BR.
The thread is full of rants, rambles and insane logics :P
Here's the link incase you are tempted and agree to the verbal torture : https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Powerful
Scintillating
Travelled the whole world through a handful of characters, ghostly and otherwise .

GHOSTWRITTEN
Written by a ghost?
These interconnecting stories take place in different parts of the earth. We see collapsing civilization, powerful governments bent upon nuclear war, brave human being a, odd human beings and lots of ghosts.
These ghosts come in various shapes and sizes, and even as a figment of our imagination or as ghostly thoughts living within characters.
We see a ghostly mind that transmigrates, a ghostly girl that coexist with a married couple who are having their regular squabbles, ghostly children who are in the fringes of human digs, and ghosts that write.
I was so taken up by the concept of a ghost in my mind. Spend minutes thinking whether it is these impish ghosts that make me behave more like a child than an adult at times. I even talked out to the "ghost" to manifest.
I also enjoyed each and every character- the old lady who tells us her story, Casper who do traveling to no folks and meets up with a girl an route, Night train FM player , No, the conscientious scientist and various other characters, including the ghosts.
Definitely a candidate book for a repeat read.

Why I chose this?
I got the beautiful paperback as a gift from my sis in law last birthday .
My good friend and reading buddy Manju decided she will read this foe her debut novel challenge, Gorab, another good friend suggested a weekend read theme of debut writers.. And Girish and Kru, a couple more good friends joined in to add their own zing to the group read.
(P.S - all my friends are good

After finishing Mitchell's latest (Utopia Avenue), I thought I would go back to his first and see how it all begins. I am SO glad I did! All of his books are set in his "multiverse" with the same characters or characters with the same names populating all of his books. So cool to experience the first iteration of them here. I was swept up by the audio book. I couldn't get enough.

Each section is named after the location/setting of the main action. Each section is somewhat connected, some more than others. I felt connected and caught up in the lives of all the characters in each section sub-story. That is rare for me. I loved how the text reflected current and possible future events. The first story is of an end of the world/new beginning cult. The author, who spent years living in Japan, tried to get inside the head of the group responsible for the gas attacks on the subway system. This event has had a profound impact in Japan and on its literature.

My favorite two stories were of the young couple who have their "meet cute" in a cd shop and the owner of the tea shop on the mountain below the Buddhist temple. Both of these stories reminded me of other novels I enjoyed reading. The first reminded me of Murakami with the role of jazz and music in the story. The second recaps the events that happened in China that were prominent in Rachel Khong's novel, Real Americans. There is something for every reader-a love story, story of family, an art heist, money laundering, a ghost story, technological arms race, and possible Armageddon.

The ending does a wonderful job of bringing the entire novel together. The penultimate section was was experienced through a late night radio program and was very well done. The final section was brief, but brought the novel full circle.

I loved this quote and it captures the essence of the novel and explains the title. "We're all ghostwriters, 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."

I have always been impressed with Mitchell, but I am blown away by his debut. I will read at least one more of his novels this year, and hopefully the rest of his work next year.