This is not a real review, just a few thoughts after finishing the novel.
I struggled with the Clear Island chapter but once I just sat down with it to force-read it, I ended up loving that chapter the most. All through the book, the people and entities touching in the bustle of life, their meetings, the glimpses of them over a crowd was perhaps the least interesting thing. The tracing of paths.
I preferred the intense focus, the zooming in, the details like scraps of papers, the red of the inside of a watermelon, the breath at the nape of the neck...

The Murakami is strong in this one...

Купих книгата от скука и без високи очаквания. Филмът “Облака Атлас” ме помете. Книгата - ами, съжалих, че изобщо я почнах, даже се изумих как може да има нещо общо с филма.

“Написано в сянка” се оказа точно това, което дълбоко ме разтърси във филма, но в книжен вариант. История в история в история. Тривиални, фантастични, езотерични, трилър - всякакви истории. Отначало сякаш несвързани, накрая заплели едно общо дебело кълбо. Борба между спасение и унищожение, Ахурамазда и Ариман се дебн��т и борят от история в история с променлив успех, но с натрупване на нови и нови оръжия.

Тук освен прекрасния избор на истории, основното попадение са героите. Усетих ги близки, разбираеми, крехки... Нещо, което на Мичъл напълно му се изплъзва в Атласа. Тази книга определено си заслужава всеки ред!

“We’re all ghostwriters, my boy, and it’s not just our memories, our actions too. We all think we are in control of our own lives, but really, they are pre-ghostwritten by forces around us.”

This novel consists of a series of nine interrelated stories.

1.tIt opens in Okinawa. Quasar is part of a doomsday cult (led by His Serendipity) that plans to release nerve gas in a Tokyo subway.
2.tSatoru works in a record shop in Tokyo. He falls in love with one of the customers, Tomoyo, who lives in Hong Kong.
3.tNeal Brose is a British expat living in Hong Kong. He is involved in a fraudulent financial transaction related to the Russian mafia. His wife left him, and he is having an affair with a Chinese housekeeper.
4.t In rural China, a woman runs a tea shack on the Holy Mountain and communes with a tree spirit. This story follows the life of the woman and the massive changes in China over the course of her life of 80 years.
5.tIn Mongolia, a disembodied spirit lives in the heads of its hosts and can move from one person to another if they touch each other. It is searching for identity through finding its origin story.
6.tIn Petersburg, Russia, an art heist is planned, executed, and does not go well. The ring of art thieves is led by a man from the Russian mafia.
7.tIn London, Marco is a drummer in a band who also works as a ghostwriter. He gets involved with a bet as to who can win the most money in a casino.
8.tMo is a quantum physicist is in hiding on Clear Island off the coast of Ireland. She is a fugitive working on the future of computing technology. The US military wants to use this new technology and she does not want to cooperate.
9.tBat Segundo is the host of a late-night radio show. He takes calls and plays music. One of the callers, known only as Zookeeper, appears to be a sentient artificial intelligence. Zookeeper calls each year. On air, it destroys a secret US Government project site, saves the world from nuclear war, and tries to decide whether to keep a comet from destroying the earth.

An Epilogue brings the stories together, returning to Quasar in Tokyo as he attempts to escape the nerve gas attack. I will not document all the linkages as it is part of the fun of reading this book to figure them out.

This is not a light read and is the type that would benefit from re-reading. The intricate connections among these stories are sometimes fleeting so it requires close attention to catch them all (and I am sure I missed some). There are many literary and musical references. Themes include the role of coincidence in life, the desire for a meaningful existence, and the human tendency to try to discover meaning amid the chaos. David Mitchell is a brilliant writer. His use of language, variety of topics, and depth of storytelling is among the best. He is one of my favorite authors and this was his impressive debut. Readers of his entire catalogue will notice some characters from other works. I have not yet read them all, but I found connections to Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and Utopia Avenue. This book is both intellectually stimulating and engaging.

’The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed.’
David Mitchell’s ambitious debut, Ghostwritten, is a world of stories that migrates across the globe like a cloud across the sky, shifting and refiguring between various narrator voices and style. These voices send out ripples into the fabric of reality, which start off small but compound to forever reshape the course of humanity as the reader delves deeper into the novel, placing each puzzle piece together to form a clear, all-encompassing vision of coincidence and chance coming together to turn the cogs of the world as if it were a well oiled, finely tuned machine. Similar to the television show LOST, this novel delivers that same feel of everything having an importance and every life having a meaning in the grand scale of things. Mitchell preforms astounding feats of language manipulation as he takes us along a ride of interconnectivity and chance meetings, crossing many genres and barriers, to show us just how important we all are to one another and the course of history.

Mitchell sets the bar for a debut novel very high. This novel is stunningly inventive and adventurous both with its form and language. Broken up into short passages, each in a different location with a different narrator, Mitchell is able to convincingly alter his voice to create a wide variety of characters unique to the situation almost as if he were a literary ventriloquist. He possesses a keen eye for detail, and each segment is lush with situation-specific vocabulary and flair. However, it is Stories that run this novel. Each character has their own story and history to tell, and as the novel progresses, the reader will watch how each story brushes off onto the others. One characters actions are shown to affect others continents away, repositioning the course of their lives, which in turn affects the lives of those around them. Those familiar to the idea of the ‘butterfly effect’ will see this in action with the harmony of these various stories. Something as minor as a phone call picked up by a stranger can change everything. Some of these collisions will jump out at you and shock your senses, while others are very subtle. This novel benefits greatly from a careful attention to detail while reading.

There is a slight unevenness to some these ‘chapters’, and some felt to me like they trudged on a bit, but then again, not every instrument in a symphony is there to show off and it is the synthesis of all the sounds together that create the magic. For a first novel, much of this unevenness can be forgiven as it surpasses many of his contemporaries and it was interesting to see in his later novels how he grew as an author. There are a few bland moments, but there is so much poetry and blinding beauty in this novel that the stumbles are quickly overlooked.

’For a moment I had an odd sensation of being in a story that someone was writing,’ thinks Satoru in the Tokyo story, as small events seem to combine to place him at an exact time and place for a chance encounter. Mitchell examines the ideas of chance and fate often in this novel, which is seemingly propelled by these forces. ’Does chance of fate control our lives,’ wonders Marco, ’If you’re in you life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book your reading, it’s fate all the way.’ Mitchell provides various opinions for both, often leaving it up to the reader to decide whether fate or chance is the ghostwriter of our lives. He also proposes the idea of quantum cognition, which I would recommend looking into. If all thoughts are matter, then stemming from the quantum theories that all choices open up an every branching, endless array of universes each with their own path of choices, are we fated to follow one reality while infinite others exist beyond the barriers of our own? This novel will leave you with much to ponder. Various metaphors for this query inhabit the novel, from a noncorpum ghost which can inhabit the minds of hosts, an actual ghostwriter, and even the novel itself all show this movement of chance/fate across the map.

There is a strong sense of humanitarianism running through Mitchell’s works. From perspectives such as the Tea Lady, the reader is forced to watch the atrocities of man upon his fellow man. Regimes change, reforms come and go, yet still man continues to oppress those who fall below him. ’Fuck ‘em, they’re all the same. Only the badges and medals change,’ the Tea Lady is told by her father. Margarita shares a similar sentiment in the Russia story saying ’You used to pay off your local Party thug, now you pay off your local mafia thug’. There is a bleak outlook on the state of man, made more and more frightening as time ticks on. Eventually science may attempt to let technology watch and regulate itself, yet, how can we expect technology to do what we humans have failed at? Our own children, the ones we are supposed to keep the most careful watch over, seem to be the ones who suffer the most from the actions of their caregivers in this novel. Fate/chance has the largest say in their lives, as it places them into the world under situations beyond their control. There is some form of a child helpless to the winds of chance in every story, be it the ghost in Neil’s apartment who had to die simply for being a girl born in China, the unborn children that may be aborted, the child taken away out of shame, and even a young girl who must die in a train attack simply because her life lead her to that time and place. The most innocent often must face the harshest realities, all because those who should protect them are often looking after themselves instead of their helpless charges.

People concern themselves only with what they know around them that directly affects them. Mitchell shows how this shortsightedness can lead to apocalyptical proportions of failure as many of the brushes between stories occur due to thinking only of ones immediate surroundings. Neil’s personal crisis lead down a path that touches nearly every character throughout the novel. Margarita was looking out only for herself and Rudi, not knowing how her actions would affect a couple in London. Mitchell begs people to look beyond their own personal borders (much like how this novel crosses many borders) and at the larger picture of a universal society. If one could be more conscious of how their actions affected strangers lives thousands of miles away, maybe, just maybe, the world could be a brighter place.

My favorite aspect of David Mitchell is his nods to other literature and it’s metafictional capabilities. In the Tokyo story, a story that seems lush with Haruki Murakami inspiration beyond just the setting, Mitchell quotes directly from Madame Bovary, ’One should be wary of touching one’s idols, for the gilt comes off on one’s fingers.’ Mitchell, who has a strong college backing in literature, seems to enjoy letting this gilt on his fingers show. He makes a few blunt references to authors who influence this novel, such as Vladimir Nabokov, of whom Tim Cavendish (fans of Cloud Atlas rejoice, that foul mouthed son of a bitch you loved has a nice cameo) warns ’anyone who’s trying to get a book finished – steer clear of Nabokov. Nabokov makes anyone feel like a clodhopper.’ It has been told to me that Mitchell based the jaw-dropping ending of this novel off of Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility series, whom he calls out as a great author in the Tokyo story. The Petersburg story seemed to give a nod to The Master and Margarita, with the character name, the cat and all the talk about the devil. Perhaps the most critical moment of displaying his inspiration comes in the Tokyo story when Satoru receives Murakami’s translation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories because he loved The Great Gatsby so much. Fitzgerald, especially in Gatsby has a fixation on the past and trying to rectify it. Interestingly enough, a vast majority of the narrators spend most of their sections looking backwards and the choices and chances that brought them to where they are at the present. Margarita has a hope for the future, yet a large part is to rectify her somber past. Only Quasar seems to look toward the future, which is mainly from a complete rejection of his past, yet he spends half his segment telling how he came to be as well. Music also plays a large roll in this novel, which in a way gives it a bit of a soundtrack. I must say that Bat Segundo has an excellent taste in music.

The Mongolia segment displays some wonderful use of metafiction. This segment has the narrator, a ‘ghost’ who inhabits the minds of others and reads their life stories, travel from person to person in search of stories, much like what the novel itself is doing. There are several wonderful, authentic Mongolian folk tales within this segment. The most striking of these involves a young boy who is fated to roam the world blind telling stories. Getting the picture? Mitchell is incredible with his playfulness of literature. Much of the negative remarks about him stem from this playfulness, criticizing him of just writing ‘masturbatory novels’ and showing off his literary muscle like one of those creepy guys at a beach. I, however, find that to be a great charm of his, although I like writers who write about writing.

Ghostwritten is a powerful novel, and a powerful display of writing. This would be a perfect introduction into the world of Mitchell, although I did not find it to be as strong as Cloud Atlas. The two are good companion novels however, as major narrators in Cloud Atlas make minor appearances here, and they are both composed of seemingly unrelated, yet harmonizing stories. This novel rewards a careful reading. Almost nothing in this poignant novel is superfluous and there are countless connections and parallels to be found. The world will never be the same after reading this, I found myself analyzing every action of mine wondering how it would echo across the globe, which makes you feel even more guilty when you accidentally cut someone off in morning traffic. The horrors of humanity are all on display here, yet somehow we are all connected and the world keeps turning. Is it because of fate or chance? Is it for power or want? Or, maybe, is it because of love?
4/5