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| 1441124128
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| 1441124128
| 3.29
| 7
| May 12, 2011
| Jul 21, 2011
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Mar 05, 2023
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| 1444799428
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| 4.00
| 23,783
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| Jul 14, 2020
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CRITIQUE: [Thanks to Paul Bryant] Band on the Run "Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash As we fell into the sun, And the first one said to the secon CRITIQUE: [Thanks to Paul Bryant] Band on the Run "Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash As we fell into the sun, And the first one said to the second one there I hope you're having fun...." [Paul McCartney and Wings - "Band on the Run"] I'm Just Wild About Harry David Muggle is my new favourite author, and "Utopia Avenue" is my new favourite book, though it's not my favourite of all time. That would still be "Harry Potter", though it's hard to pick one. I love them all, equally. If you held my head underwater until I confessed, I'd probably have to say "Deathly Hallows". Because they just seemed to get better and better as they progressed. It took me a long time to read another novel after I finished reading "Deathly Hallows" for the last time. I read all of JK's books six times, and I watched the movies even more times. They were unreal. Just like I'd imagined the books. I don't know how they did that! Anyway, the first book I read after Harry Potter was David Muggle's "The Bone Clocks". He has a real knack for telling stories. My dad says he writes dialogical action novels, whatever that means, though I think it means that he mixes up talking and action, much better than other writers, just like JK. Psychedelic Avenue I don't like the name of David Muggle's most recent book, "Utopia Avenue". Utopia doesn't sound like the sort of name you'd give a street. Once you start the book, David Muggle tells you it's not a street, it's a group of musicians. They're not like any group I know, but I still like the sound of them, even if I've never heard their music, because they don't exist in real life. They're supposed to be more like a band that would have been around in 1967, when the book happens. That's more like when my dad was alive and my age. He was a big music fan then. She's Not a Girl Who Misses Much [Dad Used to Say This About Me] The reason I like the group is that the singer is a girl, and her name's Elf. It seems weird that somebody would call their daughter Elf, but they didn't really. They called her Elizabeth Frances, and she shortened it to Elf. Good thinking, LOL! It's like Hermione grows up and becomes a singer called Hermie! Except Elf's got blonde hair. The bass player is called Dean Moss, and he's really good-looking. I don't know why he doesn't go out with Elf, maybe she's not good looking enough. Her sister, Bea, is the better looking one. She wants to be an actress. Elf is good at singing and playing piano though. She's a star. She has a relationship with Aussie Bruce, but he's a dick. Dean only goes out with girls who aren't in Utopia Avenue, but are still fans (like Amy Boxer from Melody Maker). Zoet Allures My dad would have liked the guitarist, Jasper De Zoet. David Muggle says he's as good as Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. Dad used to have lots of their records and CD's. I couldn't work out how to say Jasper's last name, until I read that Zoet is pronounced Zoot. Like zoot suit or zoot allures. I've never seen a zoot suit in real life, but they sound great. Dad used to play a song about zoot suits. I don't know what zoot allures means. I just heard dad say it one day. The drummer's called Griff, but he's the least interesting character. There has to be one in every band, I guess. In the middle of the book, two girls, Venus and Mary, like him at the same time. Literally. In bed, even. Shine On, You Crazy Diamond David Muggle tells you how Utopia Avenue got together, and all of the gigs they played, and the venues, and the making of their albums, and what the songs mean, and what inspired them, and what brand of cigarettes they all smoked (yuck! I hate cigarettes). It's a bit like one of those books you can buy about your favourite group, where there's nothing you don't know about them when you finish reading it. You could win a trivia quiz on the topic of Utopia Avenue. Except Utopia Avenue were never a real group. They're made up, but they sound like they were real. From Gravesend to the Grateful Dead (via the Chelsea Hotel) Strangely, there's lots of real life musicians and artists who turn up in the novel and meet the characters and talk to them. I'd never heard of most of them, although dad would have known their names. I've heard him mention Syd Barrett before. He was a genius who took too many drugs (I don't mean dad), and went mad. His old band (I think it was Pink Freud or something) told him to shine on, you crazy diamond. He was a bit like Jasper (except Jasper had a problem with spirits, or were they ghosts or demons, or just voices in his head?). Muggle-Verse But what I like most is how David Muggle links the characters in the book to characters in his other novels, as if they all exist in one big Muggle-verse or they're in one enormous "überbook" that he's supposed to be writing. I wasn't sure whether some of the characters were real or made-up, or ghosts or spirits (like DJ Bat Segundo, Jacob de Zoet, Luisa Rey, Marinus, and the Mongolian). Weird, hey? Still, it's magical and a bit like a Harry Potter book where they all take drugs or mushrooms, and play loud psychedelic music, whatever that is. Dad would have known. I read dad's copy of this book and, before he died, he said I could keep it. He was glad that I'd finally found something that I liked. Though he was sick and grumpy when he read it. He said, "It's like comparing Paul McCartney and Wings, to the Beatles on 'Sergeant Pepper's'." Whatever that means. He was always comparing things when he was alive. Conclusion I loved this book. It's perfect. It's fun. I wish I could give it five stars , except it's way too long and detailed. Like "The Bone Clocks", "Utopia Avenue" is a great book to read, if you haven't been able to find anything to read since you finished the "Harry Potter" series. If we're lucky, and enough kids buy it, they might make a movie or a TV series about Utopia Avenue. Somebody already made a film of "Cloud Atlas", and it was pretty good, but not as good as the Harry Potter movies. Nona Graye [Aged 10] SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ Paul McCartney and Wings - "Band on the Run" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjlvd... Paul McCartney and Wings - "Venus and Mars" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGSqo... The Beatles - "Happiness is a Warm Gun" https://youtu.be/vdvnOH060Qg The Who - "Cut My Hair" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fN4p2... "Zoot suit, white jacket with side vents Five inches long. I'm out on the street again and I'm leaping along. I'm dressed right for a beach fight, But I just can't explain Why that uncertain feeling is still Here in my brain." The High Numbers/The Who - "Zoot Suit" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E_R3... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uzsh... Frank Zappa - "Black Napkins" (Live at the Spectrum, Philly, 1976) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfMtY... Pink Floyd - "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWGE9... Pink Floyd - "Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Full Length: Parts I - IX)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UXir... Sam Paglia- "Psychedelic Avenue" https://youtu.be/h9dU0fxf8L8 David Bowie - "Queen Bitch" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5P63... Focus - "Sylvia" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0ly_... Suede - "She's Not Dead" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kDir... Suede - "He's Dead" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21Wgp... Suede - "He's Dead" [Live] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuYSz... Suede - "He's Dead" [Live at Glastonbury, 2015] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOviN... Gravesend - "Dead and Gone" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=065Kv... SPOTIFY PLAYLISTS: David Mitchell - "Utopia Avenue" [Spotify Playlist of Songs Mentioned in the Novel] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/24k... David Mitchell - "Utopia Avenue 1" [Spotify Playlist Compiled by David Mitchell] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/09S... David Mitchell - "Utopia Avenue 2" [Spotify Playlist Suggested by Readers and Compiled by David Mitchell] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/246... (hide spoiler)] [image] El Quijote - Spanish Restaurant that used to be in the Chelsea Hotel (Source: The Real Deal) ...more |
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1
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Nov 23, 2020
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Nov 28, 2020
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Oct 20, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 1449477488
| 9781449477486
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| 0.00
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| Jul 12, 2016
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Dec 19, 2016
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Calendar
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| 5.00
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Jun 02, 2016
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| 0940322161
| 9780940322165
| 0940322161
| 3.71
| 9,697
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Jul 15, 2015
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| 0812998685
| 9780812998689
| 0812998685
| 3.81
| 64,821
| Oct 2015
| Oct 27, 2015
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really liked it
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Tweet! Tweet! "Slade House" grew out of David Mitchell's Oulipean project in which he wrote a short story, "The Right Sort", strictly in compliance Tweet! Tweet! "Slade House" grew out of David Mitchell's Oulipean project in which he wrote a short story, "The Right Sort", strictly in compliance with Twitter conventions that restrict each tweet to 140 characters (approximately 20 words per tweet). The restraints are so commonplace in a non-literary context that it's easy to overlook just how much this exercise constituted a work within the post-modern tradition. Superficially, it seems that the story grew, tweet by tweet, without any overarching design. Thus, apparently, David Mitchell entrusted himself to his sentences and tweets and wherever his story took him. Whatever the constraints, story (and therefore story-telling) prevailed and supplied the skeletal strength of the short story. Fresh from writing "The Bone Clocks" and still committed to the concept of an über-novel, it was perhaps inevitable that the story would intersect with the subject matter of the über-novel. As a result, when Mitchell decided to turn the Twitter project into a fully-fledged novel, he remained in the realm of "The Bone Clocks". Is This the Right Start? Is This Just Fantasy? For readers who are new to David Mitchell or who have read him only selectively, you could ask whether this short work is an appropriate place to start. It's certainly capable of being read as a stand-alone novel. However, I wouldn't recommend this, unless you don't really intend to read any earlier books, particularly "The Bone Clocks". If you're curious about the fantasy world that Mitchell is constructing, then this is a way to dip your toes into it, without making the investment of time that the longer "The Bone Clocks" would require (even though both books are very easy to read). If you've already read "The Bone Clocks" and didn't like the fantasy elements, then I'm tempted to recommend that you avoid "Slade House". [image] David Mitchell in David Bowie make-up at the Brisbane Writers' Festival, May 20, 2015 Wholly Unapologetic Submersion Mitchell is aware that many readers don't relate to the genre aspects of his über-verse. This novel, as the next in the sequence, might have been an opportunity to attract or placate such readers. However, instead, Mitchell wholly and unapologetically submerges himself and his readers in the same environment that worried some readers of "The Bone Clocks". If "The Bone Clocks" disappointed your expectations, then this novel confronts readers with the choice of changing their expectations, suspending disbelief, or jumping off the Mitchell train at this station. This is Mitchell's statement to us that he knows what he is doing and that he intends to do it that way. So what is it exactly that he is doing? Five Times Nine Once again, we get the juxtaposition of diverse chapters or stories. This time, there are five first person narratives, each separated from the next by nine years. Whereas sometimes it's been difficult to work out what links the stories, this time they're linked by Slade House itself. The five stories give us five perspectives on the significance of Slade House in the über-verse over a period of time. Atypically, one perspective belongs to an Atemporal - someone who has a limited capacity to free themselves from the dictates of time and achieve immortality by periodically killing engifted humans for spiritual sustenance (as opposed to Horologists, who are naturally immortal - get it?). Return to Psychosoterica Needless to say, we have to get our heads around Mitchell's psychosoteric framework. It includes Lacunas (small spaces that are immune from time), Transversion (a form of astral projection that allows Atemporals to get a long way away from their body for a long time), Suasioning (which allows their soul to occupy another person's body for an extended period of time), and Orisons (reality bubbles in which the souls and psychovoltage of engifted humans can be removed immediately before their death, so that the modus operandi of Atemporals can be recharged). So, you can see we're squarely in the time and space of "The Bone Clocks"! I don't want to give anything away, except to say that we encounter one favoured Horologist, no Anchorites and two or three presumably evil Atemporals (who have eschewed the Shaded Way). By the end of the novel, the numbers have reduced a little (if not the diversity), but in a way that is clearly designed to permit a sequel, if not a prequel! A Portrait by the Artist of an Adventure From a literary point of view, this is not one of Mitchell's overtly lyrical novels. The language is economical, functional (including mandatory info-dumps - chill, sceptic!) and fun, apart from the last page, which sets the scene for the future in an evilly, eerily-romanticised style. Like "The Bone Clocks", the novel is an out and out adventure. The pace is rapid. You don't have to stop to think. All dialogue is plot-driven. It's in the tradition of boy's and girl's own adventures. In parts, it reminded me of a mash-up of Harry Potter and Enid Blyton. It comes complete with an "X-Files Six" composed of student science society nerds, one of whom is truly engifted. As with "The Bone Clocks", it's not intended to be taken too seriously. It's meant to be enjoyed with childish or teenaged enthusiasm. No sooner are you finished than you're ready for the next episode or instalment. We have the opportunity to read the über-novel chronologically according to the date of composition, not knowing where it's going. One day, when it's all finished and some of us have shuffled off this mortal coil, readers will be able to jump into the completed work, not caring about the order in which they read it. To them, it won't matter where the artist started their painting. Their eyes will be able to roam the completed canvas with delight. If you're open-minded enough, you can read like this now! Enjoy! SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ The Who - "The Real Me" (from the album "Quadrophenia") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pohhM... New Seekers - "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjtEY... Tchaikovsky - "Chant de l' alouette" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxKEK... Guns N' Roses - "Sweet Child o' Mine" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w7Og... Luna - "Sweet Child o' Mine" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xemNs... Pink Floyd - "Another Brick In The Wall" (from the album "The Wall") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5Ap... "Which one's Pink?" Queen - "Bohemian Rhapsody" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ9rU... "Time Warp" (from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkplP... Eels - "Novocaine For The Soul" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2yy1... Supergrass - "Caught By The Fuzz" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNIMu... Björk - "Hyperballad" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26sP2... Massive Attack - "Safe From Harm" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKtTm... The Orb - "Little Fluffy Clouds" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te4xe... Philip Glass - "Truman Sleeps" (from "The Truman Show") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4-W4... Bonus Tracks (Slade is in the House!): Slade - "Goodbye to Jane (Gudbuy T'Jane)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFAd-... Slade - "Hear Me Calling (Live)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-E2G... Slade - "Darlin Be Home Soon" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxFFB... Luna (with Lou Reed) - "Ride Into The Sun" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVkEM... The Who - "Baba O'Riley (Teenage Wasteland)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH60O... "Sally, take my hand We'll travel south cross land Put out the fire And don't look past my shoulder. "The exodus is here The happy ones are near Let's get together Before we get much older." (hide spoiler)] Netgalley Disclosure This is a review of an eBook that I accessed through Netgalley before publication. ...more |
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1
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Aug 17, 2015
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Aug 19, 2015
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Jan 14, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 144115728X
| 9781441157287
| 144115728X
| 3.92
| 25
| Nov 13, 2014
| Jan 29, 2015
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None
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0
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not set
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Jan 14, 2015
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Paperback
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| unknown
| 3.74
| 134
| Jul 18, 2014
| Jul 18, 2014
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liked it
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These Tweets are Writ Petite (Making the Most of Your 140 Twitter Characters) Run! Now is not the time to explain the Right Sort or the Shaded Way to a These Tweets are Writ Petite (Making the Most of Your 140 Twitter Characters) Run! Now is not the time to explain the Right Sort or the Shaded Way to an ill-bred child like Nathan Bland. Time was. Time is. Time is not. ...more |
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1
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Jan 16, 2015
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Jan 16, 2015
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Nov 02, 2014
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ebook
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| 0312427808
| 9780312427801
| 0312427808
| 4.05
| 75,801
| Aug 29, 2003
| Feb 03, 2009
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None
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0
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Oct 05, 2014
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Paperback
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| 4770029748
| 9784770029744
| 4770029748
| 3.80
| 783
| 1966
| Feb 06, 2004
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None
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0
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not set
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Oct 05, 2014
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Paperback
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| 0800871863
| 9780800871864
| 0800871863
| 4.09
| 34,449
| 1966
| Feb 15, 1980
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None
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0
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not set
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Oct 05, 2014
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0679761640
| 9780679761648
| 0679761640
| 4.03
| 10,167
| 1948
| Sep 26, 1995
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Oct 05, 2014
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Paperback
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| 1400065674
| 9781400065677
| 1400065674
| 3.84
| 96,037
| Sep 02, 2014
| Sep 02, 2014
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it was amazing
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Meanwhile...at the Frankfurt Book Fair 8 to 12 October, 2014 [image] David Mitchell caught trying to sneak into the Frankfurt Book Fair for free. Why wo Meanwhile...at the Frankfurt Book Fair 8 to 12 October, 2014 [image] David Mitchell caught trying to sneak into the Frankfurt Book Fair for free. Why would he even try? David: [On the red carpet outside the auditorium] Haruki, would you mind autographing my book for me? Haruki: [Looks only briefly at the book, before opening it to the title page] Hey, this isn't my book! What's going on? David: It's my book. I told you it was my book. Haruki: [Recognising David Mitchell] But you keep plagiarising my novels. David: Come on. They're homages. Haruki: It's a breach of copyright. I should sue you. You've stolen my identity. Even the covers look the same! David: Would you settle for a pastiche? Haruki: Stop it. I've had enough. I can't put up with it anymore. David: Listen to me. This is your last chance. Just sign my book! Haruki: I'm going to get the police. Why do you keep following me around? David: Life is an eternally recurring cycle. Haruki: Look, enough of this Western crypto-Nietzschean-Buddhist shit you carry on with. David: But, Haruki, it's my way of saying I love and admire you...we're connected... Haruki: There's only one way I'd ever want to connect with you. [Murakami punches Mitchell on the side of his jaw.] David: [Lying semi-conscious on his back, looking at the sky. There are tears in his eyes.] Wow, I can see two moons! [image] David Mitchell waiting outside the 2010 Book Fair, wondering if this cover looks like the cover of a Murakami novel Another View My more frank and earnest review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more |
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Sep 25, 2014
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Sep 30, 2014
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Oct 04, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 0340921609
| 9780340921609
| 0340921609
| 3.84
| 96,037
| Sep 02, 2014
| Sep 02, 2014
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it was amazing
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The Confused and the Bewitched [Apologies to Dean Wareham] The bone clocks Sit clutching Champagne and Barbecue, Divided Betwixt the Confused and The bewitched The Confused and the Bewitched [Apologies to Dean Wareham] The bone clocks Sit clutching Champagne and Barbecue, Divided Betwixt the Confused and The bewitched. "Being For The Benefit Of Holly Sykes!" [Apologies to the Beatles] For the benefit Of Holly Sykes, There will be A show tonight With clowns On bikes And acrobats On trampolines. If you don’t like The daring scenes, Call for The author To be sacked. You’ll get your Money back. It’s just a circus act! [image] "Jacob's Ladder" by William Blake Dwelling on a Reservation David Mitchell seems to have become a literary target, because he walks a fine line between Post-Modernism and commercial success. For the Post-Modernists, he's too popular to be holy. For the populists, he dabbles with genres without wholly embracing them. The dual attack makes you feel as if you must approach him with some reservation, with your guard up, that if you enjoy his fiction, if you derive pleasure from it, then you must do so uncritically or you might have missed some glaring stylistic flaws. Still, when I started reading "The Bone Clocks", I got swept away again. For the duration, I..yes...I suspended disbelief. So, teacher, does Mitchell deserve disbelief? Or suspension? The Book He Wrote Over the time I've been reading Mitchell, I've had some (mis-)apprehensions that I've had to work my way through each book. Recently, his style has been described as bad or atrocious. Is it really that bad? Is this exaggeration? Does he really deserve the forensic dissection and dismissal he gets at the hands of some critics? No writer is beyond critical judgement. However, not every author sets out to write "War and Peace". Mitchell is living proof that we tend to read the book we want to, not necessarily the book the author wrote. What is the point of criticising what a novel is not, or doesn't purport to be? Surely, most half-way competent authors wrote the novel they wanted to write? Maybe we should cut them some slack? Should we just ask, how successful were they in writing the novel they set out to write? This doesn't mean that we can't criticise what they did or didn't try to do. However, this can really only occur within the realm of overt subjectivity on the part of both author and reader. OK, maybe I didn't like what the author wrote. On the other hand, I have to appreciate that the author didn't write it so that I in particular might like it. They wrote it mainly so that they, the author, would like it. Genre Wreak I don't think Mitchell set out to write a self-consciously literary novel on this occasion. He just wrote the kind of novel he felt his subject matter demanded. In order to do so, he embraced genre. Again, I don't think he set out to become the next genre master, a Stephen King or Neil Gaiman. Mitchell plays around both with and within the boundaries of genre, not always by way of parody. But equally he doesn't take on strict accountability to the rules of genre (such as John Banville when he writes in the guise of Benjamin Black). He co-opts genre for his own purposes, for the purposes of his play and our entertainment. Genre is no more than a coathanger or skeleton upon which he drapes the threads or body of his narrative. My Wild Irish Prose Style Is Mitchell's prose particularly pretentious or purple? Not really. Like the character Crispin Hershey, he says he isn’t "a fan of flowery prose." It’s neither overwrought nor underwrought. If anything, it's deliciously wrought-ironical. It’s relaxed, casual, conversational, fluid, breezy, exuberant, charming, almost flirtatious. The sort of prose you'd hope to meet at a party, in fact, the very reason we used to go to parties. The Importance of Not Being Earnest I fear more that Mitchell might become too humorless, too serious, too self-consciously Post-Modernist, too precious, too everything I write is IMPORTANT, in other words, too Bill Vollmann, of all people. I fear that one day a Mitchell book will be just too, too nice, too complacent, too middle class, too metrosexual, or if it were a little more earnest, maybe too Jonathan Franzen. Luckily, this book isn't the one I fear. I hope he never writes it, or I never get to read it. Improvisational Techniquity I had another apprehension about style. Like Murakami, Mitchell goes where his characters' stories take him. He embraces improvisation. I kept looking for evidence that the result was sloppy or undisciplined. If his writing was ever rough-edged during the early drafts, then he or someone else has smoothed it over by the time I got to read it. Juxtaposition I'm Taking for Granted Well, maybe one last apprehension: that Mitchell's juxtaposition of disparate elements would be too arbitrary, too artificial, too unbelievable. Unlike "Cloud Atlas", the writing style is consistent throughout the entire novel. The style doesn't change with the subject matter or the period. This allows the reader to focus on the characters and the narrative without obstruction. "The Bone Clocks" follows the life of Holly Sykes over sixty years, often through the eyes of her peers. Here, the six chapters are more obviously interrelated than those in "Cloud Atlas". They’re very tightly intertwined, like strands of rope. The chapters segue far more smoothly. It's worth re-reading just to see how quickly and efficiently he achieves each segue. Suddenly you're on the other side of the looking glass. They’re like snakes and ladders, or slippery slides. The transition is as easy as falling down a rabbit hole (Lewis Carroll) or an echoey stairwell (Murakami). Is This Just Fantasy? The main concern of many other readers seems to be the juxtaposition of fantasy elements (common to at least three of Mitchell's previous novels) with the apparent realism of some of his writing (in particular the first chapter in which we meet Holly Sykes). Some readers can’t get their head around the "fantasy-pedalling." Mitchell anticipates the objection, when a character pitches his next novel: "A jetlagged businessman has the mother of all breakdowns in a labyrinthine hotel in Shanghai, encounters a minister, a CEO, a cleaner, a psychic woman who hears voices...think Solaris meets Noam Chomsky via Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Add a dash of Twin Peaks..." "Are you trying to tell me that you're writing a fantasy novel?" "Me? Never! Or it's only one-third fantasy. Half, at most." "A book can't be half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant." Still, what is wrong with fantasy that Mitchell is criticised for embracing it? What's wrong with fantasy-pedalling or genre-hopping? China Miéville often cops the same criticism. Does the criticism say more about the reader than the author? Deliberately or not, Mitchell's works seem to divide readers between the confused and the bewitched. Caught in a Landslide, No Escape from Reality While Mitchell has demonstrated that he can write in the style of realism if he chooses to (particularly in some chapters of "Cloud Atlas" and "Black Swan Green"), I don't think it's his preferred or most natural style. This doesn't mean that fantasy is either. His concerns are always too metaphysical or metafictional (i.e., Post-Modernist). He writes in whatever style he feels he needs. His style is as fluid as his requirements. The first-time reader shouldn't be surprised if the trappings of another genre suddenly appear in the narrative. They are almost inevitable. Here, though, it is strategically plotted, planned and foreshadowed ("the Script loves foreshadow"). Whatever your reaction on first reading, in retrospect it makes much more sense. Sometimes this only becomes apparent on a second reading. It won't be apparent if you grow impatient after the first 50 or 100 pages and skim the rest, oblivious to the detail or pleasures of the text. [image] STOP MAKING SENSE! OK, that’s enough serious talking head stuff. This book is loads of FUN! It’s an adventure story. Lots of goofy, crazy, trippy, weird shit goes down. "It’s mad! Infeckinsane!" It's "totes amazeball." Mitchell must have been doolally when he wrote it. One of the characters wears a T-shirt with the slogan, "Reality is an illusion caused by a lack of alcohol." (So is realism.) It's that kind of book. Don’t, whatever you do, take it too seriously. Take it seriously, but only as much as you would a playful entertainment like the film "Pirates of the Caribbean." It’s like Indiana Jones meets "Alice in Wonderland" meets Umberto Eco ("Foucault’s Pendulum") meets "1Q84" meets "The Da Vinci Code" meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets the Three Stooges meets "The Wizard of Oz" meets Voldemort meets Darth Vader meets Merlin meets Jules Verne meets "Jack in the Beanstalk" meets Biggles meets "Little Red Riding Hood" meets Enid Blyton meets "The Matrix" meets the Wachowski Siblings (just in time for the filmisation). It's like looking into Mitchell's mind and seeing everything he's ever watched or read, and enjoyed. It's like inspecting the last century through a kaleidoscope. This is the full David Mitchell Experience! The uncut Regurgitator! The complete acme David Mitchell Ruse Explosion! It's like...yes...Doctor Who! [image] "A Satirical, Postmodern, Science Fiction-influenced Adventure Story" It’s also like "The Illminatus! Trilogy", which wiki describes as "a satirical, postmodern, science fiction-influenced adventure story." (Yes, it’s been done before! Although this time it's more fantasy than science fiction.) I first encountered the term "Post-Modern" when friends who were architects introduced me to Charles Jencks’ book, The language of post-modern architecture. I didn’t see Post-Modernism as a threat to Modernism, so much as an embrace of playful eclecticism. There are ample architectural comments throughout the novel. One of my favourites goes like this: "The BritFone Pavilion was designed by an eminent architect I've never heard of and 'quotes' Hadrian's Wall, the Tower of London, a Tudor manor, post-war public housing, Wembley Stadium and a Docklands skyscraper. What a sicked-up fry-up it is." Yes, that’ll do, this novel is a sicked-up fry-up. It’s a potpourri, a strange brew, an Irish stew, cooked up in le croc pot. One of my favourite characters would have wanted it named after him, "Marinus Stew", in honour of Gilbert Sorrentino’s "Mulligan Stew", described in one of my favourite GR reviews as "wonderful, and entertaining, and it might be the funniest book I’ve ever read, and it is totally weird, and a masterpiece." Yes! The novel is also chock-full of allusions to other writers: Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Gilbert Adair, Lucretius, Ovid, W. H. Auden, Halldór Laxness (who dat, I ask?), Michael Moorcock, Philip Roth, Tanizaki, E.M. Forster, Ursula Le Guin, Murakami, Samuel Beckett, Angela Carter, H. G. Wells, Dante, Wordsworth. There's a lot about writers and writing. Some good, some bad. How can you tell the difference between a master stylist and a wild child? Who cares! Post-Modernism can be FUN! It’s a divine comedy. Have faith! Abandon doubt all ye who enter here! Believe it! The Great Illuminati Brawl What can you say about the plot? Somebody else can précis it. Or you could read the book! OK, here's a bit of a snapshot. Good fights it out with Evil. This is one unholy sick crew. Or two. It’s a battle between supernatural action heroes called the Horologists and the Anchorites. What? A trope? How dare Mitchell! It’s the 21st century. Can’t he come up with something new? What are they fighting about? I don’t know. What do supernatural heroes normally fight about? Eternal life? Jacob’s Ladder? A stairway to Heaven? The right to get to Heaven first? The exclusive right to get to Heaven? Whatever, they’re pretty evenly matched, mirror images of each other, reversals, looking at each other through the looking glass. This is Your Last Chance (to be by, of and in the Script) Of course, the brawl is tightly scripted. In fact, it’s all in the Script. And just to introduce some narrative tension, there’s a Counterscript. And a metafictional or metafictitious guidebook that attempts to throw more (sun-) light on the Script (written by [Cirque du] Soleil Moore, aka the allusive Esmiss Esmoore). (view spoiler)[Off course;; Esmoore == Steven Moore, the greatest author of wicked excellent perfect awesome literary guidebooks evah!!! Word, bro!!! (hide spoiler)] You could be forgiven for thinking that David Mitchell had written all three works of metafiction. Some conjuring trick! No need to split the royalties. It’s a black comedy, perhaps even a black magic comedy. It’s a prank, a funfair, a carnival, a circus. There’s even a maze and a labyrinth. It’s fun, it’s playful. It's Rabelaisian. As has been said on GR before: "A work of art needs no other justification to exist than the sheer joy of the human imagination at play." [image] There's a Feeling I Get When I Look to the West There’s some serious stuff, of course. It involves the Eastern perspective on the West. Some of it is spiritual (mainly Buddhist), some economic, some political, some cultural. Traditionally, Mitchell has been very pro-East. However, as the world globalises, he seems to have become more equivocal (at least in relation to economic and political power). It doesn’t matter what complexion power has: "Shanghai's aura is the colour of money and power. Its emails can shut down factories in Detroit, denude Australia of its iron ore, strip Zimbabwe of its rhino horn, pump the Dow Jones full of either steroids or financial sewage." [image] In a Tree by the Brook, There's a Songbird Who Sings And there’s some stuff about love. There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold...Holly Sykes. Like us, she's a mortal human temporal, a bone clock. She falls in love several times. She has a daughter and a grand-daughter. But for a moment, she is a Woman in the Dunes, looking out to the Dusk as it approaches. Mitchell’s story surrounds and cocoons her. It transports her through life and this adventure and this tale. At the end, she can’t quite bring herself to say goodbye, nor can the author, nor can I: "I'm feeling erased myself, fading away into an invisible woman. For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of." After all the high jinks, there is an acceptance of mortality, not with resignation, but with grace. Life is what we do on Earth. If it exists, Heaven can wait. Memories can't wait, nor can fiction. Still, whether or not this voyage has ended, I’m certain another one will soon begin. Sort of. ADDED EXTRAS: "The Bone Clocks" (disambiguation)(From Winkipaedia, the free encyclopaedia) The Bone Clocks may refer to: * The Bone Clocks (novel), a 2014 novel by David Mitchell; or * The Bone Clocks (film), a 2017 film based on the 2014 novel, produced by the Wachowski Siblings and directed by Tom Tykwer after the Siblings' epic space opera, Jupiter Rising. This page was last modified on 13 October 2016 at 11:43. Arty Facts [image] This is a still photo of the inside of a kinetic sculpture ("Artifact" by Gregory Barsamian) at MONA, Hobart, January, 2014 (It shows the inside of a mind through a window in the skull. An internal strobe light flashed on and off rapidly, so I was very lucky to get such a clear picture.) http://vimeo.com/44454385 http://www.bookofjoe.com/2010/08/arti... http://gregorybarsamian.com/ David Mitchell on his 5 favorite Japanese novels http://www.avclub.com/article/david-m... Invitation to a Burial Beloved Reader, Don't labor For ages. Why wait To see If it Engages? Let a Review Of the first Fifty pages Deter you From a Book that Enrages! For the Want of An Editor Is this work Pretentious, Contrived or Overwrought? What if I Don't follow The author’s Train of thought? Well, I hope This Mitchell Novel won’t Come to nought. Let’s see if Bill Vollmann’s Editor Can be bought! Hugo Queues and Pees [Short Shriftfest for Gilbert Adair] Meanwhile, in the queue At the Buried Bishop, Hugo Rhymes Sartre, Bart and Barthes. Afterwards in Bed Shall I compare thee To a sordid, low-budget French feature fillum? A Moment in Love If just one moment Could last an eternity, I would choose this hug. Upon Coming to the End of the Novel, Sort Of Through my tears, I see a pair of blurry Overlapping moons. SOUNDTRACK: The Beatles - "Being for the Benefit of Mr.Kite" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCiG7... "In this way, David Mitchell will challenge the WORLD!' Keith Jarrett - "My Wild Irish Rose" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxCea... Led Zeppelin - "Stairway to Heaven" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9TGj... Talking Heads - "I Zimbra" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-RDJ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tyVn... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYFqd... 'kin amazeballs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI3os... George Harrison - "Devil's Radio" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X3z9... Robyn Hitchcock - "Devil's Radio" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gJSx... Luna - "We're Both Confused" [For Readers with Disappointed Expectorations] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tOmL... "I thought I knew [his] game I miss [him] just the same." Luna - "Bewitched" [Dedicated to Holly Sykes] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuiN7... "Her sleep is troubled Her face will twitch She wakes up angry And I'm bewitched." [image] ...more |
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Sep 25, 2014
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Sep 30, 2014
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Dec 26, 2013
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Hardcover
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| 0679733787
| 9780679733782
| 0679733787
| 3.89
| 33,258
| Jun 08, 1962
| Apr 16, 1991
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None
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Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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Mar 21, 2013
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Paperback
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| 0340822783
| 4.01
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| Mar 2004
| Feb 21, 2005
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liked it
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DJ Ian's Sunday Evening "Tell Me What You Really Think" Mitchell's Hollow Horn Plays Wasted Words I’ve tried to understand this novel. Let me tell you ho DJ Ian's Sunday Evening "Tell Me What You Really Think" Mitchell's Hollow Horn Plays Wasted Words I’ve tried to understand this novel. Let me tell you how very much I've strived, But from my humble little hovel, It seems to me horribly contrived. Like, what about the self-conscious display Of inordinate lit’ry prowess? Applied for amusement and for play, It’s the ultimate in high-browness. He’s in Haruki’s artistic debt, High up there defying gravity And recursive time without a net, Oh what gimmicky depravity! Such "belletristic masturbation" Served in mind-expanding proportions Invites a surgical truncation, So foxy ladies get their portions. Mitchell smacks of hippopotamus When one would expect an elephant. His homonyms are synonymous. Does that make him sound intelligent? When it comes to writing, I prefer Economy and austerity, Not for me smug buffoonery or Polysyllabic dexterity. Now you've heard this missive for a while, It’s true he has so much greater fame, Though I don’t envy his success, I’ll Crawl upon the author to exclaim: Foresake all your post-modernist tricks For pseudo-intellectual dicks! David Mitchell, "you’re prolix, prolix, Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!" IAN GRAYE'S REVIEW DJ Ian disagrees with Ian Graye's far more positive, pseudointellectual five-star review of "Cloud Atlas", which is here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY METAFICTON Why are postmodern Authors contentious? When does ambition Become pretentious? Why do plays with form Evoke such a shrug? Why does confidence Seem like it's too smug? Can writers achieve Beyond their station? Why doesn't their quest Inspire elation? Why do six nested Stories seem to shake Civilisation To its foundation? All this argument Seems like such a waste. There really is no Accounting for taste. QUOTATION "Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future." David Mitchell, "Cloud Atlas" SOUNDTRACK Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "We Call Upon The Author to Explain" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQtsO2... Rilo Kiley - "Portions for Foxes" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtNV3p... ...more |
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Feb 26, 2013
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Feb 27, 2013
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Feb 27, 2013
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Paperback
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| 9780375507250
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| Aug 17, 2004
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it was amazing
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In Memory of Double Bills I saw a lot of double bills in the heyday of independent cinemas. They weren’t just two current release films that had been pa In Memory of Double Bills I saw a lot of double bills in the heyday of independent cinemas. They weren’t just two current release films that had been packaged to eke out some extra dollars for the exhibitor. They were carefully curated films that shared a theme and formed part of a whole season of similarly matched films. Usually, the season was promoted by a poster that illustrated each film with a fifty word capsule review. For many years, I kept these posters in a folder, at least until I got married and had to start hiding what I hoarded. The double bills themselves were where I learned about the greats of film culture. Hitchcock, Ford, Godard, Truffaut, Woody Allen, etc. They whetted an appetite that continues to this day. The thing about a double bill is that the films could be enjoyed individually, but they also fed meaning to each other. One of my favourite matches was Antonioni’s “The Passenger” and Polanski’s “The Tenant”, both of which involved a character adopting the persona of another character and then embarking on a journey or travelling under the guise of the other character. Both films benefited from the juxtaposition, and it made for great discussions between friends when you emerged from the cinema. Almost 20 years later, I was sitting next to a very appealing, strong, independent, older woman at a film industry lunch, and I told her this story. She smiled and said, “That was me. I curated those seasons.” She was then a co-owner of one of the most successful chains of independent cinemas. Unfortunately, her chain didn’t survive the multiplex, nor did double bills, as far as I know. Film culture is the poorer for it. It can’t just be learned from books, it must be learned in front of a screen, preferably a big one. Why Don’t You Show Me? I’ve started with this diversion, because, even though this is my second reading of “Cloud Atlas” and the first was well before I learned there was to be a film, the novel always struck me as filmic. If it wasn’t made to be filmed (however challenging the prospect), it seemed to be influenced by film, particularly genre film, and possibly the sort of double bills that I had consumed. I love the fact that David Mitchell’s works ooze film and cultural literacy, not to mention cross-cultural diversity. It’s one of the things I hope doesn’t disappear as audiences become less genre and art form diverse. Just as James Joyce alluded to the Classics in “Ulysses”, many modern novelists allude to diverse art forms. If we restrict our interest to only one or a few, we might not “get” the allusions. And not getting them, we might not pay sufficient attention. To this extent, I'd argue that “Cloud Atlas” isn't so much a difficult novel, as it just requires an attentive reader. I’ve Tried and I’ve Tried and I’m Still Mystified I originally rated the novel three stars on the basis of a reading several years ago, before I joined Good Reads. Having re-read it with a view to a review, I’ve upgraded my review to five stars. So what happened? When I finished my re-read, I had decided to rate it four stars. There were things I still didn’t get, even though they were there on the page in front of me. As I collated my notes, things started to drop into place and I started to get things, at least I think I did. My initial reservation was that there were six stories juxtaposed in one book, and I wasn’t convinced that they related to each other adequately. If together they were supposed to constitute a patchwork quilt, some patches jarred, others weren’t stitched together adequately. I couldn’t see the relationship. It wasn’t manifesting itself to me. I didn’t think Mitchell had done enough to sew the parts together. I couldn’t understand why the six films on the same bill had been collected together. I didn’t know what the glue was. There was no bond. They were all just there. If they were supposed to be connected, I couldn’t see the connection. Who was to blame: Mitchell or me? Was anyone to blame, or did I just need to exert myself a bit harder? In a way, this review is the story of how I exerted myself a bit harder, got back on top and managed to give the author his due. Spoilers I'll try to discuss the novel with minimal plot spoilers. However, many of the themes revolve around aspects of the plot in the six stories. In an effort to reduce spoilers, I’ve limited the mention of specific stories and characters. I apologize if this detracts from your enjoyment of the review or your desire to read the novel. ”Where is the Fundamental Mystery?” There is nothing fundamentally wrong with a mystery or the fact that a mystery might retain its status after some investigation. Not all mysteries are intended to be worked out or revealed to all. Some things are intended to remain secret. Some things need a password or a code to unlock them. Some things just require a bit of effort or charm or both. The thing about “Cloud Atlas” is that it consists of six quite disparate stories (a “Cloud Atlas Sextet” in its own right), five of which have been broken into two. The result is 11 sections, ten of which surround the unbroken sixth story in the middle. Without disclosing the titles of the stories, they follow the following timeline: • 1850; • 1931; • 1976; • The present (?); • A highly corporatized future; and • A post apocalyptic future (the middle story). Once you’ve got half-way, the book works back towards 1850 in reverse order. Getting your head around this structure is the first task. The second is to work out the relationship between the stories. The third is to work out how to pull the whole thing together into one integrated whole. Choosing a Structural Metaphor The structure has given rise to metaphors like Russian or Matryoshka dolls or Chinese boxes. Each successive story is nested or nestled within the next. [One character’s letters survive the burglary of a hotel room, because they are nestled in a copy of Gideon’s Bible.] Another way to think of it is to pretend that you have opened up six separate books to the middle pages, then sat them on top of each other, starting with the oldest on the bottom, and then bound them together, so now hopefully you’ve got one idea of the structure. A third way to look at the structure metaphorically is to see the past as embracing the present, and the present embracing the future. Thus, the past has within it the potential of the present, and the present has within it the potential of the future. This metaphor raises the second question of the relationship between the layers. Does one determine the next? Does the past determine the future? What is the relationship or connection? Where does Mitchell and his novel stand on the continuum between Determinism and Free Will? Interconnectedness Apart from the question of how all 11 sections contribute to an integrated whole, there is a narrative connectedness between the 11 sections. Characters or objects from one section reappear in others as important narrative elements. In a way, they are like screws or pegs that lock one part of a piece of modular furniture into another, so that the whole doesn’t dissemble. Various characters (in five out of the six stories) have a comet-shaped birthmark between their shoulder-blade and collarbone. They also share other personal characteristics, despite not necessarily sharing genders, and there is a suggestion that the five characters with birthmarks might be reincarnations of the same soul. From a narrative point of view: • the Journals in Story 1 are found in Story 2. • The Letters in Story 2 are written to a character in Story 3. • The music in Story 2 is heard in Story 3. (When Luisa Rey hears the music, she feels that she might have been present when it was composed, hence the implication that she might be a reincarnation of the composer, Robert Frobisher.) • Story 3 is submitted to a character in Story 4 for publication. • The character in Story 4 writes a memoir that is filmed, and watched by the character in Story 5. • An interview with the character in Story 5 is recorded and becomes the “holy book” or “scripture” for a post-apocalyptic religion in Story 6 (even though it is an audio-visual work, not a written work, embodied on an “orison”). Eternal Recurrence in and of Time Time is a silent partner in the narrative of the novel. We start in the past and move forward into the future, before reversing or heading backwards (or forwards into the past?), so that eventually we come full circle: "Time’s Arrow became Time’s Boomerang." In this sense, the narrative is revolutionary, if not necessarily gimmicky. We must assume that the cycle continues to roll or revolve in this fashion ad infinitum. In Nietzsche’s words, it is an "Eternal Recurrence": "Everything becomes and recurs eternally - escape is impossible! - Supposing we could judge value, what follows? The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength (and barbarism!!)": Nietzsche Culture and Civilization, whether good or evil, positive or negative, sophisticated or barbaric, are conveyed through time by people. Human beings are vessels through which human nature passes into the future, from the past via the present (and vice versa, it seems). Each of us carries aspects of human nature, ideas, beliefs, biases, prejudices, goals, ambitions, aspirations, appetites, hunger, thirst, desire, the need for more, the inability to be satisfied, the inability to be appeased. Human nature is concrete, permanent, eternal, continuous, recurring. Individuals are separate, discrete, temporary, dispensable, ephemeral. Like an oak tree, we are born, we grow, we die. A body is just a vehicle for human nature (within a family, its DNA). You can see that, if each of us is a vehicle, then when we pass the baton onto the next runner, we (or the human nature that we carried) is reincarnated in our successor. If our characteristics continue, they succeed, instead of succumbing. In this sense, a comet birthmark is just the mark or marque or ink or stain that we pass onto our successor as evidence of the eternal chain of which each of us is but a link. You Can’t Stop Me, Because I am Determined It’s arguable that there is a determinism or fatalism going on here. However, I think Mitchell acknowledges Free Will as well, again, both in a positive and a negative sense. Much of the novel is concerned with the Nietzschean will to power, the ascent to power, the acquisition and abuse of power, the use of power to victimize and oppress. The character, Alberto Grimaldi, the CEO of the Corporation Seaboard Power (surely the name is well chosen) argues: "Power. What do we mean? ‘The ability to determine another man’s luck.’... "Yet how is it some men attain mastery over others while the vast majority live and die as minions, as livestock? The answer is a holy trinity. "First: God-given gifts of charisma. "Second: the discipline to nurture these gifts to maturity, for though humanity’s topsoil id fertile with talent, only one seed in ten thousand will ever flower – for want of discipline… "Third: the will to power. "This is the enigma at the core of the various destinies of men. What drives some to accrue power where the majority of their compatriots lose, mishandle, or eschew power? Is it addiction? Wealth? Survival? Natural selection? I propose these are all pretexts and results, not the root cause. "The only answer can be ‘There is no ‘Why’. This is our nature. ‘Who’ and ‘What’ run deeper than ‘Why?’ " While human nature shapes us, I don’t think Mitchell is positing a completely Determinist cosmos. What people do impacts on their Fate. Some rise to the top as Supermen or Ubermenschen, some fall to the bottom as Downstrata or Untermenschen. Some Men are predators, others victims. Some rise, some fall. In between, some are “half-fallen”, Mitchell calls them the “Diagonal People”. Like the character Isaac Sachs, their tragic flaw is that they are “too cowardly to be a warrior, but not enough of a coward to lie down and roll over like a good doggy.” Virtue Incarnate (or Reincarnate?) Mitchell’s six stories feature heroes (of sorts), five of whom are or might be reincarnations of the same soul. Each of them has the courage to fight against evil or power or oppression or cruelty. They are idealists, liberals, [affirmative] activists, boat rockers, shit-stirrers, young hacks, non-conformists, dissidents, rebels, revolutionaries, rogues, rascals, “picaros” (the Spanish word from which the word “picaresque” derives), messiahs and naughty boys. They eschew duplicity, dishonesty and falseness, they seek authenticity, honesty and truth: "Truth is the gold." "Truth is singular. Its ‘versions’ are mistruths." "The true true is presher’n’rarer’n diamonds." They oppose power, corruption, and lies, tyranny and mutation. [They must be fans of New Order and Blue Oyster Cult.] Talkin’ About a Revolution Our heroes create messages and symbols to overcome tyranny: journals, epistles, memoirs, novels, music, films, video confessions, “orisons” (a word that actually means “prayers”), scripts, catechisms, declarations, even new post-apocalyptic languages. Like hippies ("the love and peace generation"), they oppose mainstream culture with their own counter-cultural artifacts, as if the reincarnated souls, the Grateful Living, are perpetuating the Grateful Dead. The eponymous artwork, the "Cloud Atlas Sextet", is composed by Robert Frobisher, a bisexual wunderkind: "Cloud Atlas holds my life, is my life, now I’m a spent firework; but at least I’ve been a firework." Just like Guy Fawkes, it’s explosive and revolutionary. Frobisher composes the work while engaged as an amenuensis for the older composer Vyvyan Ayrs, who believes that the role of the musician or artist is to “make civilization ever more resplendent”. Perhaps ingenuously, for one of the reincarnates, Frobisher counters: “How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are mere scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.” His own composition resounds throughout the entire novel. It also describes the central metafictional device that Mitchell uses to construct his fiction: "A sextet for overlapping soloists: piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale and colour. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan’t know until it’s finished, and by then it’ll be too late, but it’s the first thing I think of when I wake, and the last thing I think of before I fall asleep, even if J is in my bed. She should understand, the artist lives in two worlds." Artists might live in a private world and a public world, but there is a sense in which they also live both in the present and in the future. An Atlas of Clouds At a more metaphorical level, the Atlas contains maps of the human nature that Mitchell describes. The Clouds carry the vagaries of human nature across time, encircling the world on their journey, obscuring and frustrating our aspirations and desires: "Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds." Revolutionary or Gimmicky? Mitchell directly asks us to consider whether his own work is gimmicky. Superficially, it is, but what finally convinced me that the novel deserves five stars is a conviction that his subject matter and his metafictional devices are genuinely and effectively stitched together. It wasn’t easy to come by this realization. I had to work on it, but it was worth it. Men and Women and Eroticism Women play a significant role as both characters and subject matter in the novel. To a certain extent, they represent an alternative to the corrupt corporate culture symbolized by Seaboard Power (even though its Head of Publicity is a woman): "Men invented money. Women invented mutual aid." There is a sense in which men [males] are driven by the hunger, the acquisitiveness, at the heart of the novel’s concerns, far more so than women: ”Yay, Old Un’s Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an’ made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o’ humans, yay, a hunger for more…Oh, more gear, more food, faster speeds, longer lifes, easier lifes, more power, yay.” Still, men and women still get into bed with each other, and the sexual encounters in the novel are usually either entertaining or slyly erotic, no matter how economically they are described: ”Accepted this proxy fig leaf cum olive branch and our lovemaking that night was almost affectionate.” ”Our sex was joyless, graceless, and necessarily improvised, but it was an act of the living. Stars of sweat on Hae-Joo’s back were his gift to me, and I harvested them on my tongue.” [For all the talk of comet-shaped birthmarks, this view of sex as an act of the living will stay with me for the rest of my life, even when I can no longer lift myself up on my elbows.] "Eva, Because her name is a synonym for temptation...all my life, sophisticated idiotic women have taken it upon themselves to understand me, to cure me, but Eva knows I'm terra incognita and explores me unhurriedly...Because her laughter spurts through a blowhole in the top of her head and sprays all over the morning...here she is, in these soundproofed chambers of my heart." And isn’t this exactly what life is all about? To be understood, to be cured, to be explored (unhurriedly), to be laughed at, to be sprayed all over, to be in love, in the soundproofed chambers of your heart. David Mitchell, this image alone deserves five stars. SOUNDTRACK: Jordi Savall - "Por Que Llorax Blanca Nina"(Sephardic Jewish music from Sarajevo)" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP_6Y7... This music is playing in the Lost Chord record store in the novel. Tracey Chapman – "Talkin’ About a Revolution" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKYWOw... "Don’t you know They're talkin' about a revolution. It sounds like a whisper. Poor people gonna rise up And get their share." Bob Dylan - "Shelter From the Storm" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8TayM... 'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form. "Come in," she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm." Joni Mitchell - "Both Sides Now" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcrEqI... I've looked at clouds from both sides now... +Post 125 ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 23, 2011
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Paperback
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| 0375724508
| 9780375724503
| 0375724508
| 4.05
| 31,150
| Aug 19, 1999
| Oct 09, 2001
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it was amazing
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Starstruck Lover David Mitchell is a five star author and this, his first novel, is a five star achievement. I think. I’ve been lucky to read most of hi Starstruck Lover David Mitchell is a five star author and this, his first novel, is a five star achievement. I think. I’ve been lucky to read most of his novels in chronological order as they’ve been released. Joining Goodreads has presented an opportunity to re-read and review them. I still adhere to the rating, even if it emerges that I have a few question marks about some of his stylistic choices. What this reveals is that a highly competent author, even with his first novel, doesn’t have to write their novel my way in order to earn five stars. Sometimes, it has to be me, the reader, who has to adjust their preconceptions and criteria. The Authorial Choice Mitchell’s choice of structure announces that he wants to do things his own way. The first time I read the novel, I read it quickly and appreciatively. The second time around, I read it much more deliberately and slowly. I guess I swung from pleasure to difficulty and back again. So I had to work out why. Linear Narratives Most novels contain one narrative voice relating one narrative within a linear timeframe. A linear narrative fits neatly with the way we think we process time, space and action (even if we don’t actually process them this way). Within this framework, the author is omniscient, God-like, a ghost in the machine, making it all happen, putting things in, leaving things out, according to some overarching intelligent design. The extent to which any particular author plays with this structure determines the extent of their modernism. Narrative Voices Mitchell describes "Ghostwritten" as a novel in nine parts (although there are in fact ten "chapters", the last of which links back to the first). Without this assertion, it presents itself as nine apparently disconnected short stories told in the first person. The narrators are different, the narratives are different. None of them appears to follow any traditional narrative arc. They do not appear to have a beginning, a middle and an end. The writing is beautiful, word-perfect, but, although we know where they are situated or positioned, we don’t know the direction they’re heading. Mitchell seems to be breaking all of the rules. Why is he doing this? Does he achieve his goal? Does the achievement of his goal make for an enjoyable reading experience for us? [image] The Reader’s Challenge Mitchell’s description of the book as a novel initiates an interesting dynamic. I started to look for connections between the parts. Only, because I didn’t know the purpose of the parts, I didn’t know where to look for clues. Were they in the characters, the places, the events? Instead of being frustrated with the lack of obvious clues, I started to read the novel differently. Everything was a potential clue, nothing was unimportant. Mitchell forced me to enter a hyper-reading space. He turned me into a literary detective with a magnifying glass and a notebook. Fortunately, as I read on and found clues, he delivered on the implied promise that the parts would become a whole. Bit by bit, he and I, the writer and the reader, assembled something of artistic integrity. The integrity was there all along, only Mitchell made me look, so that I might find it. What I came to appreciate was that he doesn’t make everything obvious, he makes you think about what he has written, in order to understand. Write Around the World The chapters are set in different parts of the world. They start in Japan, move their way through Hong Kong, China and Mongolia, traverse the continent to Russia, England and Ireland, then make an Atlantic Crossing to New York, before coming full circle to Tokyo in the tenth chapter, effectively a reprise of the first chapter (hence, in a way, there are nine stories in ten chapters). Mitchell appears to be familiar with all of these places (although he hadn’t been to New York at the time of writing the book). His writing is knowledgeable, informed, worldly, cosmopolitan. He writes credibly with multiple voices within diverse worldviews. His concerns are global, pluralistic, open-minded. He doesn’t write solely within a western framework. He is equally interested in both West and East, in fact, he reverses the traditional order of what he describes as “Orientalist” concerns, by starting in the East and working his way West, in the same way that we perceive the transit of the Sun across the sky. He joins dots on a map, in the process creating a non-linear zigzag around the globe. [image] Multiple Faces In each place, there is a first person narrator, a face attached to the place. Here is a short Dramatis Personae (the people through whom the drama is performed or channeled): Okinawa: Quasar (Cult Member turned Subway Bomber) Tokyo: Satoru (Jazz Music Sales Clerk and Saxophonist) Hong Kong: Neal Brose (Lawyer/Banker) Holy Mountain (Mount Emei): Unnamed (Tea Shack Lady) Mongolia: Noncorpum (Disembodied Spirit or Sentient) St Petersburg: Margarita Latunksy/Margot (Concubine and Art Gallery Attendant at the Hermitage) London: Marco (Ghost-writer and Drummer) Clear Island: Dr Mo Muntervary (Quantum Physicist) Night Train, New York: Bat Segundo (Late Night Talk Show Host) David Mitchell captures these faces and places at a particular time, some of them in full flight, in a snapshot that he then places in the album that becomes his novel. Multiple Facets In Mitchell’s later novel, "Black Swan Green", he used two images of the same boy at different stages of life. When I first read it, I didn’t quite appreciate the aesthetic relationship between the two images. I felt that they had been merely juxtaposed without being connected or interwoven. However, here, the interconnection is fundamental to the success of the novel. The connections are not just passive, static resemblances of two or more like objects, they are active, dynamic intersections. The stories are fragmented but cohesive, individual but still collective. Individually, each picture is a separate vignette. Collectively, they form pieces of the one mosaic or facets of the one diamond. Behind each face or facet is the shared body of the diamond. Perhaps, they are symbolic of individuals within society and nations within a new world order. Ten Stories High Just as people might be multiple facets of the one diamond, the one object of greatest abstract value, the diamond, is the story that is told through us, through individuals. I’ll call these meta-stories the Story or Stories. There’s an element of determinism or fatalism in this concept. Mitchell uses his novel to explore this fatalism. In his opinion (or the opinion of his characters), we are not necessarily in charge of our own lives. They are being dictated by DNA, fate, external forces. These forces dictate the story of Life: "The world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed." (p386) The Stories, the structure and content of stories, are disembodied forces. The novel speculates that they could be ghosts, spirits, if not one God, then possibly multiple gods. Whatever its nature, there is another presence involved in the process of living and story-telling. I will call this other presence an Other. Ghosts Who Transmigrate In the stories set in Honk Kong, Holy Mountain and Mongolia, there are ghosts or disembodied spirits (call them sentient beings) that temporarily reside in humans (their "hosts"). This might sound like the stuff of fantasy. However, Mitchell discusses them in such realistic terms that you suspend disbelief. He achieves this in part by allowing one story to be narrated by one of the ghosts. It has its own "I" or self, which is perplexed that it can only reside in a human and must share the human body with other presences. It is even forced to question its own primacy: "As my infancy progressed, I became aware of another presence in ‘my’ body. Stringy mists of colour and emotion condensed into droplets of understanding…I had no idea why these images came when they did. Like being plugged into a plotless movie... "Slowly, I felt an entity that was not me generating sensations, which only later could I label loyalty, love, anger, ill-will. I watched this other clarify, and pull into focus. I began to be afraid. I thought it was the intruder! I thought the mind of my first host was the cuckoo’s egg that would hatch and drive me out. So one night, while my host was asleep, I tried to penetrate this other presence…I discovered my mistake... I had been the intruder." [image] A Ghost in Search of Self Through Its Stories It is not clear how many of these sentient beings there are. It is quite possible that there might be less than ten. The one we become familiar with is on a quest to discover the origins of the Stories that it embodies. In a way, it has developed a self and a self-consciousness separate from the Stories, and it wants to understand itself. It is seeking its own Creation Myth. By learning the source of the Stories, it will presumably discover whether it has a Maker and perhaps whether there are other Stories (although neither is expressly stated as its goal). It’s possible that some of this self-consciousness might have derived from inhabiting humans: "Slowly I walked down the path trodden by all humans, from the mythic to the prosaic. Unlike humans, I remember the path." Still, there is a difference: the Ghost is the Story or the Myth, the human is the individual enactment or performance of the role in a specific time, place and context. The Ghostwriter’s Dilemma Some of the dramatic arc concerns the growing human awareness of these Ghosts. Marco, an actual 30-something ghostwriter based in London starts to realise the presence of an Other in relation to his own work, the memoirs of a gay Hungarian Jewish raconteur, Alfred Kopf: "I couldn’t get to sleep afterwards, worrying about the possible endings of the stories that had been started. Maybe that’s why I’m a ghostwriter. The endings have nothing to do with me." (p279) His publisher, Tim Cavendish, tells him: "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 lives, but really they’re pre-ghostwritten by forces around us." (p296) Everything has been predetermined. We are just characters in someone else’s story. We are written by ghosts, ghostwritten. Somebody else is doing the typing. We are just the keys in their typewriter. At the most superficial level, Marco realises that this undermines his ability to be creative, to exercise Free Will in his own work: "You know the real drag about being a ghostwriter? You never get to write anything that beautiful. And even if you did, nobody would ever believe it was you." (p292) The Ghost Who Writes It isn’t all just serious stuff. There are myriad opportunities for metafiction, parody and humour. An earlier character remarks: "For a moment I had an odd sensation of being in a story that someone was writing, but soon that sensation too was being swallowed up." (p56) Marco’s band (well, a "loose musical cooperative", really) is dubbed "The Music of Chance", after a novel by "that New York bloke", Paul Auster. Marco even develops a highly personalized theory that explains the role of fate and chance in our lives. He calls it the "Chance versus Fate Videoed Sports Match Analogy”": "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 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." (p292) Quantum Cognition Mitchell elaborates on some of these themes through Mo, an expert in artificial intelligence and "quantum cognition": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_.... She describes the mechanism of memory in the following terms: "Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present." (p326) If memories can be conveyed by biological matter, she believes she can build artificial intelligence that can be conveyed by non-biological matter: "Matter is thought, and thought is matter. Nothing exists that cannot be synthesized." (p344) She achieves this with a sentient called "Quancog", which has major security value for the United States security and military machine. In a way, just as the novel is concerned with the extent to which the fate of humanity is determined by a "ghost", Mo helps create an artificial ghost. [image] Image: StudioLR, Edinburgh The Zookeeper’s Dilemma Quancog returns in part 9 of the novel as "The Zookeeper" in Bat Segundo’s talk show "Night Train". At least, I think it is Quancog, otherwise it is a Ghost that has once inhabited Mo. Whatever, it has been set up (or believes that it has been set up) to obey four laws or principles. They aren’t specifically enumerated, but this is what I think they are: 1. Be accountable. 2. Remain invisible to the visitors. 3. Preserve human life. 4. Protect the zoo (i.e., society and the planet). The Zookeeper phones Bat Segundo seeking advice about a moral dilemma it confronts in relation to a conflict that is occurring in the world at the time (the world also has to deal with Comet Aloysius which is predicted to pass between the Earth and the Moon in two weeks). It has the power and authority to eliminate the source of the conflict under one of these laws, but to do so would conflict with one of the others. Ultimately, it takes advice from Bat Secundo and addresses its dilemma. It isn’t made explicit, but we are left to infer that the generic Story or Myth was inadequate to deal with the actual situation, because it did not deal with the diversity of real life. Perhaps, this is where there is an appropriate place for Free Will in a world dictated by Fate, Chance and Determinism. At a micro-level, choices are necessary, decisions have to be made. But it is also the need of the individual to confront diversity and choice at a personal level that constitutes the essence of humanity. Our range of choices is not infinite, so they have already been circumscribed by an external force or circumstance. However, to the extent that options remain, that is the arena of Free Will. The Zookeeper (or one of the other Ghosts) even wonders: "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 non-human humanist." Thus, at the end of the novel (when it is most Pynchonesque), we are left to speculate whether artificial intelligence might even be able to replicate the individual conscience of a human (i.e., to have and to exercise Free Will). Intelligent Design As you can see, this novel deals with some pretty big issues. By trying to focus on and define them in more abstract terms, I might have given the impression that it is a hard read. I don’t think that is the case (although I did find it to be the case on my first reading of "Cloud Atlas"). Whatever the complexity of the subject matter, David Mitchell is word and tone perfect. He is a subtle, imaginative, sensitive, at times humorous storyteller. He can create or take a myth and make it prosaic without being pedestrian or dull. Ultimately, he is a master of intelligent design. I recognise that he sees an element of juvenilia and inexperience in his first novel (particularly in the way he writes in the voice of women), but I think he is being too harsh. For me, he remains a five star author and this remains a five star book. If you are unfamiliar with Mitchell’s works, it is the perfect place to start. If you have started with his later novels, I recommend that you investigate the origin of his Stories. [image] David Mitchell Creates a Diamond-Edged Prosaic Mosaic in "Ghostwritten" SOUNDTRACK: Sandii & the Sunsetz - "Sticky Music" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxSV8X... In the early 80's, Sandii and the Sunsetz were a Japanese version of Diana Ross and the Supremes. I was lucky to see them in King's Cross, Sydney. The Supremes represented Black meets White, the Sunsetz represented East meets West. The world is a better place for both of them. This is the world of which David Mitchell writes. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 24, 2011
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Paperback
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| 0812966929
| 9780812966923
| 0812966929
| 3.87
| 25,435
| 2001
| Feb 11, 2003
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it was amazing
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How Will I Know? Whitney Houston sings, “How will I know if he really loves me?” Pop Music asks some of the most probing questions we can imagine. Many o How Will I Know? Whitney Houston sings, “How will I know if he really loves me?” Pop Music asks some of the most probing questions we can imagine. Many of them are secular versions of Spirituals, Gospel Music or Hymns. How will I know if He really loves me? How will I know if He really exists? How will I know if He’s really there? What would I say if he insists? (Sorry, that last one slipped in from my review of "Glee: How to Plot an Episode in 70 Words".) To which the tabloid press add: How could I tell? And, more significantly, in the Facebook era: Who could I tell? How would I tell them? Can Anybody Find Me Somebody to Love? Freddie Mercury sings, “Can anybody find me somebody to love?” Can anybody find me somebody to love me? We need somebody to love. We need somebody to love us. Need, need, need, need, need. We are the most psychologically needy creatures ever to inhabit this Earth, but we are also the most skeptical. We need to believe, we want to believe, we want to be believed in, but we are plagued by doubt. How Could We Tell? If Jesus or God returned to Earth, how could we tell it was Him? Would we expect Him to perform a miracle? Would we ask Him to show us His wounds? What if She wore a dress? What if He wore a suit? What if She was a Democrat? (God forbid.) What if He was a Republican? (God forbids.) How would we know? How could we tell? Lift Up Your Heads, Read Joyce As probing and insightful as these questions are, there is an equally important set of literary questions. Would we recognise James Joyce if he was in our midst? What if he wasn’t wearing a hat? How should we laud him? Re-Joyce, the Lord is King On the other hand, there's the reader’s equivalent of the old chestnut: who is the next Bob Dylan? Who is the next James Joyce? Would we recognise them? Would we recognise the next “Ulysses”? Could someone in the 21st century write the greatest novel ever written? Does it have to be a (or the) Great American Novel to qualify? What if it was the Great Asian Novel? What if it wasn’t written by Haruki Murakami? (I’d have egg on my face then, wouldn’t I?) What if it was written by an Englishman? What if it was “number9dream”? 2001: A Time and Space Oddity David Mitchell released his second novel in 2001. Having read the novel twice, I wondered what the blurb had said: “David Mitchell’s second novel belongs in a Far Eastern, multi-textual, urban-pastoral, road-movie-of-the-mind, cyber-metaphysical, detective/family chronicle, coming-of-age-love-story genre of one. It is a mesmerizing successor to his highly acclaimed and prize-winning debut, “Ghostwritten’.” The blurb-writer should be sacked. This is understatement of the highest (or is it, lowest?) order. “number9dream” is a time and space oddity. But, more importantly, it is a time and space odyssey. It is a 21st century “Ulysses”. No, this is an understatement. It is the 21st century “Ulysses”. Prove It? These are Facts! “It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams”: Don DeLillo, “Americana” Proof? You want proof? Must I show you Mitchell’s wounds? Must I document all his miracles? Oh ye of little faith. Must I bury reality, so that I can disclose his dreams? OK. Prove it. Just the facts. The confidential. This case that I’ve been working on so long… On Approaching “number9dream” (A Guide for Television Fans) “First you creep Then you leap Up about a hundred feet Yet you're in so deep You could write the Book. Chirpchirp The birds They're giving you the words The world is just a feeling You undertook. Remember?” It’s Juxtaposition (I Didn’t Imagine Getting Myself Into) So, how would David Mitchell tell his story? How would he know what to say? “number9dream” is typical of Mitchell’s writing in that it is not a straight linear narrative. It collects nine (apparently) disparate chapters and juxtaposes them against each other. I have to confess that I didn’t really have a clue what was going on (and why) until the middle of Chapter 5 (“Study of Tales”). Up until then, Mitchell seemed to be just assembling his paints and brushes on the table, getting everything ready, drawing an outline, only no picture was emerging. But is it too much to expect a reader to wait 250 pages before they start to get it? I think of Mitchell as a mosaic artist. I see him as an author who might feel that meaning and society have become fragmented or broken, but whose counter-strategy is to fix it by making it whole again. He is one of a group of artists who shepherds us from disintegration to integration. Individually and socially. As long as people feel that alienation is not a natural or desirable state, I will look to culture and artists like Mitchell for this experience and outcome. Yet, I had started to believe that this work might be an artistic failure, that he was trapped in mere juxtaposition. The chapters didn’t seem to be conversing, they weren’t informing each other, they weren’t relating to each other. It was only in chapter 5 that the mosaic started to take shape for me. Father On Up the Road Eiji Miyake is a 20-year old boy from the country who now lives in Tokyo. His father abandoned his family when he was very young. His twin sister, Anju, died nine years ago when they were 11. Eiji’s mother became an alcoholic, and he more or less ran away from home. It’s about time he started to make something of his life. In a way, Eiji is a composite of both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom from Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Eiji and Stephen are on a quest to find a biological or metaphorical father, to flesh out, contextualise and complete a family. Eiji and Bloom are on a quest to consummate or repair a sexual relationship, which in Eiji’s case will mark the completion of his passage through adolescence (in the same way it does in Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood”). Joyce took 18 Episodes, Mitchell takes nine Chapters (one of which is wordless, apart from the digit “9”). Joyce’s work is structurally modeled on Homer’s “Odyssey”. Mitchell’s work takes “Ulysses” and leaps from it into a postmodern waterfall of meanings. Only, paradoxically, like “Alice in Wonderland”, he leaps upwards rather than diving downwards – hence, “First you creep/Then you leap/Up about a hundred feet/Yet you're in so deep/ You could write the Book”. Playing with Some Ballpark Figures of Speech While Joyce explores different styles of writing in each Episode, Mitchell’s pyrotechnics are on display throughout. However, the stylistic resemblance is most apparent in Chapter 5, where Mitchell playfully works his way through as many figures of speech as he can in the space of 66 pages (alliteration, assonance, consonance, euphony, hyperbole, puns, rhyme, probably many more that I’ll leave you to detect). This happens to be a chapter in which Mitchell conjures a novel within a novel and the character in the internal novel realises that he is being written. It’s important that you not take him too seriously. He’s not using purple prose to display his intellectualism. He’s playing with words in the most Joycean or Nabokovian fashion. ”First frost floated a wafer of ice on edelweiss wine.” ”The fourth noise, the whisperings which Goatwriter was waiting for, was still a way away, so Goatwriter rummaged for his respectable spectacles to leaf through a book of poems composed by Princess Nukada in the ninth century.” ”Suddenly the sky screamed at the top of its lungs.” (Note the Pynchoneque screaming.) ”A hoochy-koochy hooker honked.” Then there are sentences you just read for the pleasure: ”The naked eyeball of the sun stared unblinkingly from a sky pinkish with dry heat.” ”A desert wind did nothing to cool the world it wandered through.” ”The road ran as straight as a mathematical constant to the vanishing point.” ”A quorum of quandom quokkas thumped off as Pithecanthropus flexed his powerful biceps, drummed his treble-barrelled chest and howled a mighty roar.” Don’t worry if they don’t appeal to you. There are plenty of other jelly beans in the packet. There’s bound to be a flavour that you’ll savour. Lookin' for Soul Food (and a Place to Eat) Of course, sooner or later, one of us must know that Mitchell’s journey concerns stories and dreams. Goatwriter seeks out and tells “truly untold tales”, yet is a character in one that is being told. A character in one of Eiji’s dreams tells a story and remarks: ”Stories like that need morals. This is my moral. Trust what you dream. Not what you think.” An Ogre in Eiji’s dream warns, “Be very careful what you dream.” An old lady exchanges persimmons for dreams that give her nourishment and replenish her soul: ”You are too modern to understand. A dream is a fusion of spirit and matter. Fusion releases energy – hence sleep, with dreams, refreshes. In fact, without dreams, you cannot hold on to your mind for more than a week. Old ladies of my longevity feed on the dreams of healthy youngsters such as yourself.” ”Dreams are the shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Beaches where the yet-to-be, the once were, the will-never-be may walk amid the still-are.” In a world of telephones, televisions, computers, technology, we have lost touch with the tactile and the spiritual, we have become too analytical and serious. We have lost our sense of humour and absurdity and play. We are not being refreshed the way we need to be. We are consuming too many spirits of an alcoholic nature and too little soul food. number9dream (Lennon’s on Sale Again) Of course, “#9 Dream” is the name of a John Lennon song, and Lennon features in the novel. Eiji plays guitar and learns how to play all of John Lennon’s songs. He meets Lennon in a dream and discusses the meaning of three songs: “Tomorrow Never Knows”, "Norwegian Wood” and “#9 Dream”. Eiji asks Lennon about the meaning of “Tomorrow Never Knows”. John jokes, “I never knew” (and they “giggle helplessly”). John explains that the song wrote him, rather than him writing it. Character John is being a bit disingenuous here. In the song, real John advises “turn off your mind, relax and float downstream”, “lay down all thoughts and surrender to the void”, “listen to the colour of your dreams” and “play the game ‘Existence’ to the end/of the beginning”: “Love is all and love is everyone It is knowing.” These messages are consistent with the themes of the novel. Character John also reveals that “#9 Dream” is a descendant of “Norwegian Wood”. Both are ghost stories. While “Norwegian Wood” is concerned with loneliness, “#9 Dream” is concerned with harmony: “two spirits dancing so strange”. John also explains that “the ninth dream begins after every ending”. In a sense, there is a sequence of eight dreams, the eighth dream ends the first cycle and is followed by a ninth dream which starts a new cycle. This explains why chapter 9 of the novel is blank. It is an empty capsule or container for Eiji (and the reader) to fill with our new vision. After eight chapters, we have simply reached the end of the beginning. If Sex was Nine By the end of chapter 8, Eiji has completed his quests for his father and a partner, in different ways. At the very end, we see him running from the news that there has been a massive earthquake in Tokyo. Having resolved his own concerns, he must still live in a world dictated by the vagaries of Nature. He might be Mother Nature’s Son, but he cannot impose his Will on her. However, just as he might be running from disaster, he is running towards his future, hopefully towards the embrace of his new love, Ai. He is escaping from something to something else. As real John says, he is floating downstream, he is not dying. West Meets East There is much more I could say about the detail of the novel. However, I will leave that to you and to others to explore. I want to say something more about why I rate David Mitchell so highly as an author. Mitchell doesn’t just write within the Western literary tradition. His wife, Keiko (to whom he dedicated this book), is Japanese and they lived for many years in Japan. Henry James sought to understand himself by exploring the relationship between the new America and the old Europe. Joseph Conrad sought to understand the Enlightenment of Europe in contrast to the Darkness of Africa. Like John and Yoko, Mitchell works at the intersection of East and West. While at the time of writing he understood and was influenced by Murakami, he has his own distinct and unique voice. The world is not dominated by America or Europe anymore. The future will contain (already contains) Asian DNA. Mitchell understands this and has been exploring it since he first sat at a writing bureau with a pen. His Odyssey extended beyond the Middle East and discovered the Far East (sorry if I offend anyone by using that term, but it says what I need it to say in this context). Whereas Ulysses returned home to Helen of Troy and Bloom duplicated his journey internally within Dublin, Mitchell and his characters have made their home in a global village. They don’t need to return anywhere, because they are comfortable anywhere on this planet. Despite the fragmentation of society by technology and modernism, Mitchell is a Great Integrator. I said at the beginning that I wanted to make a case that Mitchell is a 21st century James Joyce. This case is closed. Postscript: ”If You'll Be My Bodyguard” On the occasion of her death during the week of this review, I want to dedicate this review to Whitney Houston, who I totally adored in “The Bodyguard”. I wore a hired uniform for a week after that film. The film was directed by Lawrence Kasdan (one of my favourite directors, who also directed “The Big Chill”, from which Kevin Costner’s role as "Alex" - the dead guy - was cut). However, the film was also an important statement about the portrayal of inter-racial romance in Hollywood, only it involved a relationship between a white man and a black woman. Hollywood hasn’t had the guts to feature a relationship between a black man and a white woman (like Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie). I’m sorry if I offend anybody by saying that. David Mitchell writes for and about a world in which the answer to the question “how will I know if he really loves me” is color-blind. All hail, David Mitchell and the ship you sail in. Genesis 9:09 (Unauthorised) "So they went into the ark with Noah, by twos, of all flesh and of all colours, in which was the breath of life." ...more |
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Feb 08, 2012
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Feb 20, 2012
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Feb 23, 2011
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Paperback
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| 0340921579
| 9780340921579
| 0340921579
| 4.02
| 64,414
| May 13, 2010
| 2010
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it was amazing
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Exit Only Through the Sea Gate "The Thousand Autumns" is set in Nagasaki over a period of almost 20 years beginning in 1799. Dutch traders are restrict Exit Only Through the Sea Gate "The Thousand Autumns" is set in Nagasaki over a period of almost 20 years beginning in 1799. Dutch traders are restricted to an island in the harbour called "Dejima". From the Japanese perspective, its name reflects the fact that it is an "exit island". Dutch ships arrive at and depart from the sea gate, while the Japanese officials and traders access the island through a land gate. The Dutch are not permitted to enter Japan proper under the isolationist Sakoku policy. Thus, from their point of view, it is not a point of entry. As much as it represents the intersection of two cultures, it is more a place of confinement for the Dutch. [image] Fan-shaped Dejima The Land of a Thousand Autumns Jacob de Zoet inhabits this point of intersection. Nominally an earnest and trustworthy clerk who manages the books of account, he is also responsible for communication with the Japanese. He learns the language in order to negotiate, record and translate contractual documents. As a result, he has the greatest opportunity to learn about and appreciate Japanese people and culture. He soon discovers that he shares an affinity with the Japanese translator Ogawa, one which extends to an affection for the midwife Orito, the daughter of a highly respected, but debt-ridden, samurai. A Scroll of a Hundred Things The novel begins with a birth and ends with a death. Orito is present physically at one and spiritually at the other. Both scenes contain some of the best writing I've ever read. In between is a tightly-plotted, present-tense, third-person narrative that exploits the full potential of the characters as well as the clash of cultures: sovereignty, politics, property, jurisprudence, economics, trade, wealth, translation, diplomacy, protocol, etiquette, desire, love, intrigue, piety, worship, pilgrimage, medicine, midwifery, motherhood, sisterhood and religious orders. This list might sound intimidating ("I could tell you a hundred things, and nothing at all"), but the tale prevails. Character and plot dominate. Post-modern gimmickry takes a back seat to a love story that is close to historical fiction. The Author's Creation Unfolds Mitchell describes love as an act of creation: "Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us, at the speed of days and nights, and we call it 'Love'. Needless to say, the love is illicit. Ultimately, the novel is the only evidence of its existence. It documents the fans and drawings and scrolls that captured it at the time. Like all great art and desire, it is both perpetrated and perpetuated by words and images. [image] Orito's fan (exchanged for a persimmon, (view spoiler)[if not perhaps an artichoke (hide spoiler)]) The Ghost of Future Regret Still, it is "a story that must move...and misfortune is motion. Contentment is inertia." The "ghost of future regret" calls upon the infatuated Jacob to act impulsively: "I love her, comes the thought, as true as sunlight." Spontaneity struggles with rules. Orito acts within the bounds of tradition, uncertain whether she wants the life of "a Dejima wife protected by a foreigner's money". Then: "...the Land-Gate slams shut. The well-oiled bolt slides home." A Master of Go This is just the beginning. There is much to come yet. Only, unlike the game of Go that winds its way through the novel, there is no "clean board of lines and intersections": "If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders." You have to wonder whether this longing applies to the act of writing as well. [image] A Well-Waxed Paper Door Between Two Worlds Mitchell's use of language is both highly functional and beautiful. Perfect sentences punctuate the action like jewels. Many have the aphoristic quality of haiku. He uses words like brush strokes: "A tiny girl skips Like a skinny frog around A persimmon tree." "Twilight is cold With the threat of snow. The forest's edges Dissolve and blur. A black dog waits On an outcrop. He senses a fox's hot stink. His silver-haired mistress Struggles up the twisted path. A dead branch cracks Under a deer's hoof Across the loud stream. An owl cries, In this cedar or that fir... Once, twice, near, gone." "The House may own me, But it shan't own Time." "To list and name people Is to subjugate them." "The soul is a verb, Not a noun." "Be less ambitious And more content." For the first third of the novel, I wasn't sure where it was going or at what pace. However, the brushwork soon cohered, until a vivid picture emerged and the dynamic became irresistible. I read on, eager to learn whether the gate between the two worlds would open again. I can't tell you, but I hope you get to enjoy the experience as much as I did. [image] SOUNDTRACK: Teenage Fanclub & Jad Fair - "Smile" (from the album "Words Of Wisdom And Hope") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-f0D... Steve Hackett - "Please Don't Touch" (Live) https://youtu.be/qR3tmY-MDxw The first instrumental section (roughly 2.5 minutes?) is a piece called "Land of a Thousand Autumns". Mitchell reveals that this is one of the names Japan gave itself. The instrumental appeared on a 1978 album and precedes the novel. ...more |
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Jul 30, 2014
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Feb 23, 2011
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my rating |
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| 3.29
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not set
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Mar 05, 2023
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| 4.00
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liked it
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Nov 28, 2020
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Oct 20, 2019
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| 0.00
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not set
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Dec 19, 2016
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| 5.00
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not set
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Jun 02, 2016
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| 3.71
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not set
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Jul 15, 2015
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| 3.81
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really liked it
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Aug 19, 2015
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Jan 14, 2015
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| 3.92
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not set
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Jan 14, 2015
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| 3.74
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liked it
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Jan 16, 2015
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Nov 02, 2014
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| 4.05
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not set
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Oct 05, 2014
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| 3.80
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not set
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Oct 05, 2014
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| 4.09
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not set
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Oct 05, 2014
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| 4.03
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not set
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Oct 05, 2014
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| 3.84
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it was amazing
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Sep 30, 2014
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Oct 04, 2014
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| 3.84
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it was amazing
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Sep 30, 2014
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Dec 26, 2013
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| 3.89
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not set
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Mar 21, 2013
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| 4.01
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liked it
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Feb 27, 2013
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Feb 27, 2013
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| 4.01
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it was amazing
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Oct 09, 2012
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Feb 23, 2011
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| 4.05
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it was amazing
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Jan 10, 2012
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Feb 23, 2011
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| 3.87
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it was amazing
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Feb 20, 2012
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Feb 23, 2011
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| 4.02
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it was amazing
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Aug 18, 2014
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Feb 23, 2011
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