GHOSTWRITTEN, BY DAVID MITCHELL

This is my last David Mitchell book until he writes a new one, so you’d think I should go slow. But I can’t do that. Spent most of my flight across the continent buried deep in this thing, surfacing now and then to register passed hours and bodily demands. Yay. But boo for the American cover. My UK edition is much nicer (though probably printed on worse paper).

Done

Another wonderful book, very similar to Cloud Atlas. Debate between fate and chance runs throughout, with the Biblical Serpect spelling it out, “Why do things happen the way they do?” Like Cloud Atlas, certain things recur almost irrelevantly, with even less structure than CA, like the presence of camphor trees, coffee spilling out of an over-filtered perc, mentions of comets and the phrase “New Earth.” It’s weird that DM not only reused some of these symbols in Cloud Atlas (the comet, for example), but he even reuses whole characters, like Tim Cavendish and Louisa Rey. Within a book these echos generate an impression of interwoven connection that is almost supernatural, an arcane logic behind the novel’s microcosm, but I’m not sure what effect it has or is supposed to have between books. Given that Ghostwritten is so similar to Cloud Atlas, should they be considered as a pair? As warm-up and performance? As performance and encore? Hard to say.

It is easy to say that reading Mitchell is a joy, filling you with sensation, facts, admiration, maybe even inadequacy. I obsessed, laughed, thought, disagreed, even shed a tear or two. I can’t recommend his books enough.

Oh, and here’s an interesting essay he wrote on how living in Japan influenced his writing.

Words

febrile (adj.) feverish