Ghostwritten is David Mitchell’s debut novel and it is a heck of a read. It is the best book I’ve read in years, and as I already stated when reviewing number9dream, it reminds me of Salman Rushdie. I don’t want to explain why is that. This is not a novel, it is a collection of stories with some things in common. It is up to you to discover them.
I haven’t read Cloud Atlas yet, so I don’t know why everybody compares Ghostwritten with it; I have watched the movie, but I don’t remember much at the moment, so I’ll try in this short review to arise in you the wish to discover what Mr. Mitchell has to say.
Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
[source: amazon.com]
Ghostwritten is a puzzle of nine stories
There are ten chapters in this book, but there are actually nine stories narrated in nine different points of views. David Mitchell takes his readers from Japan to Europe to the United States, through Mongolia and China. Ghostwritten has been published in 1999, but only his second novel was to be considered for the Man Booker Prize race. This is an anomaly, but I hope he sold enough to make him a good living. If the Nobel Prize for Literature wouldn’t be so political, I dare to say that David Mitchell deserves that money more than a lot of laureates or candidates. He is erudite, he lived in Japan, he speaks the language, he has access to a different universe than the great majority of us. He proves to be a fine judge of characters and he knows his history. Mr. Mitchell also knows who seems to be in charge of the world’s reigns in the new Millennium.
Each chapter details a different story and has a different central character. The first is set in Japan, and it relates a brainwashed point of view. He is a member of a doomsday cult, and his story is based on real events. When I met this description in almost all the reviews that I found prior to reading this magnificent masterpiece, I have been thrown back and I have postponed it’s reading. I have started with nomber9dream, accordingly.
Next stories unfold vividly from a location to another. Tokyo, Hong Kong, China, Mongolia, Sankt Petersburg, London, Ireland, New York and back to Tokyo, there is a unity in them. One never knows the link, it has no particular logic. There is one conclusion, though, but you have to read the book to reach it.
David Mitchell reminds me of Rushdie because he sends me to different realms I already met before. There is a nod to Haruki Murakami, especially to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, to Jung Chang (wow, what a rich experience from Wild Swans), to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, to Isaac Asimov, to Vladimir Nabokov, to Gustave Flaubert‘s Madame Bovary.
A variety of characters are telling their stories, from that cult adept who starts the chain, to a half Japanese-half Filipino Jazz lover, to a British lawyer in Hong Kong, to an old lady in China, to a free spirit (literally a noncorpum) in Mongolia, a high luxury prostitute in Sankt Petersburg, etc. This last mention was, unfortunately, a little spoiler, because in other descriptions you will not find that. There are enough hints here that David Mitchell is a music lover and he starts his obsession with the mighty number nine, but you’ll realize that after reading number9dream.
Quasar, the sect member, actually finishes the book, but that end is, in fact, the beginning. The stories are like a puzzle. Finishing the puzzle doesn’t reveal the plot. There is no plot, there’s only a reading joy.
’The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed.’
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