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Like the nearly invisible thread that binds the pages of a book together, David Mitchell's extraordinarily inventive debut tethers the lives of nine strangers to each other with common ideology, characters, and names. The distance between these strangers is not metaphorical-Mitchell takes readers to nine disparate countries: from Okinawa to Mongolia, from Russia to London, and beyond. He begins with Quasar, a follower of a bizarre doomsday cult, who has just completed a mission to release poisonous nerve gas in the Tokyo subway. Fleeing to the island of Okinawa, Quasar is forced to run still further to deflect suspicion, and must listen quietly from his place of exile as he hears the sorry fate of his fellow cult members. The next tale introduces a teenage jazz aficionado on the cusp of adulthood, working in a Tokyo record shop and falling in love with a young girl from Hong Kong. The third chapter tells of a British businessman living in Hong Kong, fed up with his bourgeois life, who spies the lovebirds featured in the previous tale seated in a fast-food outlet. Each of the six following stories continues in like fashion, effortlessly conveying similar attitudes of disaffection and xenophobia, each of the protagonists facing a turning point in their lives.
Mitchell's prose is lean and economical, but certainly not devoid of emotion. A keen observer of people and place, Mitchell's debut is an impressive one.
Ann Prichard
Ghostwritten is a brave new book for a brave new world—one encompassing globalism and grunge rock, folk tales, talking trees and terrorism. Far-out Cyberstuff.
David Mitchell's breathlessly sprawling debut novel is inhabited by a large cast of spirits and unsettled souls who transmigrate faster than a bond trader reacts to a Greenspan blink. all of this intensely imaginative material is packaged as nine tales told by nine narrators from around the world. What a long, strange trip it is!
— USA Today
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Nine disparate but interconnected tales (and a short coda) in Mitchell's impressive debut examine 21st-century notions of community, coincidence, causality, catastrophe and fate. Each episode in this mammoth sociocultural tapestry is related in the first person, and set in a different international locale. The gripping first story introduces Keisuke Tanaka, aka Quasar, a fanatical Japanese doomsday cultist who's on the lam in Okinawa after completing a successful gas attack in a Tokyo subway. The links between Quasar and the novel's next narrator, Satoru Sonada, a teenage jazz aficionado, are tenuous at first. Both are denizens of Tokyo; both tend toward nearly monomaniacal obsessiveness; both went to the same school (albeit at different times) and shared a common teacher, the crass Mr. Ikeda. As the plot progresses, however, the connections between narrators become more complex, richly imaginative and thematically suggestive. Key symbols and metaphors repeat, mutating provocatively in new contexts. Innocuous descriptions accrue a subtle but probing irony through repetition; images of wild birds taking flight, luminous night skies and even bloody head wounds implicate and involve Mitchell's characters in an exquisitely choreographed dance of coincidence, connection and fluid, intuitive meanings. Other performers include a corrupt but (literally) haunted Hong Kong lawyer; an unnamed, time-battered Chinese tea-shop proprietress; a nomadic, disembodied intelligence on a voyage of self-discovery through Mongolia; a seductive and wily Russian art thief; a London-based musician, ghostwriter and ne'er-do-well; a brilliant but imperiled Irish physicist; and a loud-mouthed late-night radio-show host who unwittingly brushes with a global cyber-catastrophe. Already a sensation on its publication in England, Mitchell's wildly variegated story can be abstruse and elusive in its larger themes, but the gorgeous prose and vibrant, original construction make this an accomplishment not to be missed. 5-city author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
Library Journal
Gleefully self-referential, slyly philosophical, subtly postmodern, Mitchell's debut novel consists of nine intertwining tales and the people who move within and among them. Spanning the globe--from teeming Tokyo to the isolated Holy Mountain, from the idyllic Clear Island to Old Man London--the characters also run the gamut: criminal, professional, genius, provincial, fanatic. The novel evades the reader's aim to discern a moral, instead exploring the motions of consciousness through various lives in nine distinct and elegant voices. Although the numerous viewpoints can be distancing, the challenges of this intellectual puzzle propel the reader to the rather bizarre but compelling last two chapters. As Mitchell's Mr. Cavendish purports, "We all think we're in control of our own lives, but really they're pre-ghostwritten by forces around us." So how well does the thing read? Very well. Perhaps not revelatory, but this contemplative pleasure of a book is recommended for all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/00.]--Ann Kim, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\
Adam Begley
[An] amazing first novel...Mr. Mitchell pulls it off brilliantly...a book that wants to be read twice.
— New York Observer
Daniel Mendelsohn
...intricately assembled Fabergé egg of a novel, full of sly and sometimes beautiful surprises...[Mitchell's] book is worth a dozen of the morally anorexic first novels that regularly come down the pipe.
—New York Magazine
Tom LeClair
In the ghost world of quantum physics, coincidence seems natural, so I'm not amazed at receiving--independently, mind you--two highly praised European novels explicitly influenced by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Along with these fathers of quantum theory, David Mitchell channels other dead European geniuses: Alan Turing, forerunner of cognitive science; Carl Jung, analyst of archetypes; Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, inventors of polyphonal fiction.
Ghostwritten was shortlisted last year for the Guardian Prize, a new competitor to Britain's prestigious Booker Prize. Now published in the United States, the novel seems as American as the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Paul Auster. Like these writers, Mitchell is a globe-orbiting satellite camera, able to see half of everything at once and able to peer into minds that don't use English.
Ghostwritten opens and closes in the head of a Japanese man who has dropped the poison gas sarin in a Tokyo subway to cleanse the world for spiritual rebirth. In between these terrorist bookends are eight sections, averaging fifty pages in length, about eight characters in, respectively, Tokyo, Hong Kong, a Chinese village, Mongolia, St. Petersburg, Russia, London, an Irish village and New York City. While the progress of these sections moves against the earth's rotation, time flows forward, so a major character in an early part can become a minor character affecting events in a later part. Or, in quantum fashion, vice versa.
In place of plot, Mitchell engineers many degrees of separation and connection, sometimes with a literal ghost or "noncorpum that transmigrates from one live person to another and 'writes'" --or dictates--characters' actions, mostly in China and Mongolia, where the proprietor of a teahouse near a Buddhist shrine and a housewife in Ulan Bator believe in daimons.
More believable to this reader is Mitchell's ghost in the multinational machine: money. Because a young money-laundering lawyer in Hong Kong unexpectedly dies, art thieves in St. Petersburg are killed. The intermediate causes--phantom cash transfers and the like--are invisible but real. When an Irish physicist tries to run away from a profitable high-tech company that depends on her brain, she is hunted from Hong Kong to Ireland by government spooks. At novel's end, her "Quancog" invention (quantum cognition in hardware form) and the Japanese terrorist's "Arupadhata" (pure soul) compete for planetary power on a late-night New York City radio call-in show of which one "Bat" Segundo is host. Though hyperbolic and apocalyptic, this duel between science and spirit plausibly emerges from the mostly realistic sections preceding it.
Like a literal ghostwriter, Mitchell conceals his attitude toward the voices he ventriloquizes. All the sections are in first person. Some are vivid character sketches--a teen-age clerk in a Tokyo CD shop, the rustic family of the Irish scientist. Other, conventionally plotted sections rely on stereotypes--a greedy English lawyer, a Russian femme fatale, even a bumbling London ghostwriter.
The thirty-one-year-old author's strengths and, I believe, interests lie less in people and plot than in setting and system. Mitchell gives very careful attention to earthly locales that have not yet become ghost towns, destroyed by multinational uniformity. If Mitchell has not been to Ulan Bator, he, like Pynchon and DeLillo in their Asias, makes us believe he has taken the long journey by train. During the ride, I also believe, Mitchell spent lots of time thinking about parallels between Buddhist cosmology and quantum mechanics, analogs between cognitive science's pandemonium inside our brains and the noisy wired world outside our heads.
One of Mitchell's characters says stories use people "to tell themselves." Like Mitchell's blind Irish musician, Japanese jazz aficionado and American disc jockey, the author is more an arranger of stories than a composer. Because the stories seem found, Ghostwritten--with its sometimes loose, sometimes tight connections--feels like a more appropriate model of reality than plotted realism offers. Like a walking tour of the world, Ghostwritten can be slow going page by page but a glory to behold from afar, a chaotic order, an elegant swirl.
Kirkus Reviews
An inordinately ambitious first novel, the work of a Westerner living in Japan, traces a chain of events that affect lives on several continents, explored in stories "ghostwritten" by other (in some cases, literally alien) intelligences than those of the people who experience them.
From the Publisher
A brave new book for a brave new world—fueled by a brilliant imagination and buoyed by beautifully descriptive writing.”—USA Today
“[David Mitchell] has a gift for fiction’s natural pleasures—intricate surprises, insidiously woven narratives, ingenious voices.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Elegantly composed, gracefully plotted and full of humor.”—Los Angeles Times
“Unlike so many of the chroniclers of the twenty-first-century pastiche—an industry dominated by ad men and feature-writers, not novelists—Mitchell has set out to craft actual characters, not archetypes. The result is a dazzling piece of work.”—The Washington Post
“Mitchell deftly sketches each character to such a compelling extent that you become totally immersed. . . . His nine characters and their random but fateful interactions provide a playful, suspenseful foray into our ever-shrinking world.”—Entertainment Weekly
“An intricately assembled Fabergé egg of a novel, full of sly and sometimes beautiful surprises. . . . In an era in which much literary fiction is characterized by unearned ironies and glib cynicism, it’s hard not to be impressed by the humanism that animates Mitchell’s book.”—New York
“Gripping and innovative. . . . [Ghostwritten serves] to illustrate the strange interconnectivity of the modern world and the improvisatory nature of fate.”—The New York Times
“A daring novel, uniquely structured and just as uniquely compelling.”—The Denver Post
