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The 'G' on my keyboard barely works. I keep typing host for ghost. But that's all right - hosts and ghosts are the point in Ghostwritten. A similar problem could have given me ghost-ridden, which this book is (there's even a Caspar) yet it's the hosts here that are the most interesting, not the ghost surfing. Mitchel's characters are real - the man knows how to write, as I found out in Cloud Atlas. There, the connection between the characters is metafictional. In Ghostwritten it is metaphysical....
’The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed.’ David Mitchell’s ambitious debut, Ghostwritten, is a world of stories that migrates across the globe like a cloud across the sky, shifting and refiguring between various narrator voices and style. These voices send out ripples into the fabric of reality, which start off small but compound to forever reshape the course of humanity as the reader delves deeper into the novel, placin...
The idea of crossed paths has always fascinated me. The randomness of it, of chance encounters and all the serendipitous circumstances that bring two people together, if only for a few seconds.Whenever I sit next to a complete stranger, my imagination is set on fire. I can’t help wondering all kind of things about him or her. Where is that person going? From where? Is he or she happy with life, with his/her circumstances? My mind starts creating a story, almost involuntarily, tying up the knots
I feel like any review I make of this novel will be an unfair one, so I heartily recommend that you read some of the absolutely gorgeous reviews already out there, but I will leave you with a single impression:The Uncertainty principle Thus applied to writing fiction (or Science Fiction): You can know where a story is at any point in time or you can know its velocity (it's pacing), but you can never know both at the same time.:)Seriously, this book is pretty damn awesome. Each of the nine viewpo...
How dare I write yet another review of Ghostwritten, when most of my GR friends have read, loved, and written fantastic reviews on this book already? I have LIKED Kris’s, and S.Penkevich’s.So, I will refer my reader to those reviews and here I will only record some loose thoughts.As with any thing that is openly praised by most, I was a bit apprehensive to approach David Mitchell. Satisfaction is the difference between Attainment and Expectations.But I have liked the book even though I had to wa...
[9/10] Like the great Russians, Mitchell makes us feel that more is at stake than individual lives, although it's by individual lives that pain and loss are measured. I don't usually start my reviews with cover blurbs, but this one from 'Los Angeles Times' seems appropriate for describing in a very concise form the scope of the project and the underlying humanism of the intellectual exercise.Also appropriate, in retrospect, is the use of a quote from Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey...
"I wonder what happened to him, I wonder what happened to all of them, this wondering is the nature of matter, each of us a loose particle, an infinity of paths through the park, probable ones, improbable ones, none of them real until observed whatever real means, and for something so solid matter contains terrible, terrible, terrible expanses of nothing, nothing, nothing..." Ordinary human lives, sometimes crisscrossing, sometimes briefly touching, sometimes swiftly passing each other by thr
There are so many people living in the world. We jostle up against each other in subway stations in Tokyo.We crowd into art galleries in Petersburg, vying for the best location to view the masterpieces on display.We take trains and planes around the world, with mountains, plains, rivers, valleys, and, above all, people rushing by us, in a blur. Holy Mountains, ChinaWhere is there a place for the individual in the midst of this overwhelming motion? Still from KoyaanisqatsiIn his first novel, Gho
”There is truth, and then there is Being Truthful.Being Truthful is just one more human activity, along with chatting up women, ghostwriting, selling drugs, running a country, designing radiotelescopes, parenting, drumming, and shoplifting. All are susceptible to adverbs. You can be truthful well or badly, frankly or slyly, and you can choose to do it and not to do it….Truth’s indifference is immutable.”Have you ever had anyone say to you...Just tell me the truth? So I ponder what someone wants
Who paints historical murals? Who writes the annals of history?History is made of people’s desires.And quite so often it is made of failed desires…The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it’s the study of historians’ studies.The history we know isn’t the real history – it’s a ghostwritten history.Evolution and history are the bagatelle of particle waves.All in this world is interconnected by the play of chance and history is a
This book blew my mind. This book also ripped out my heart and stomped on it and then stuffed the battered organ back in my chest cavity, breathed feathery soft on it and set it pumping again. It was that good, that moving, that inspiring. It brought tears to my eyes on more than one occasion and left me feeling that wonderful mind expanding, worldview shifting buzz that only art (or sex, or chocolate) of the highest order can accomplish. I feel subtlety changed by this book. First off, it engag...
Loved revisiting this first foray into the Mitchellverse. As snappy and ambitious as always, with some added crassness and rougher edges owing to being a debut. Still definitely an outstanding work!We abdicate certain freedoms, and in return we get civilization. We get protection from death by starvation, bandits and cholera. It’s a fair deal. Signed on our behalf by our educational system on the day we are born. However, we all have an inner self, that decides to what degree we honour this cont...
Starstruck LoverDavid 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 writ...
This predates the more famous “Cloud Atlas” (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...) by about four years; it has similarities of theme (connectedness, migrating spirits), structure (linked narratives, in contrasting styles), and even characters, but in a less contrived format. The subtitle is “A novel in nine parts”, and although some of the earlier ones could be read as standalone short stories, that would be missing the point, particularly with the later sections. Much as I love Cloud Atlas,...
David Mitchell's first novel is a striking and stylized Piece of writing, that lights the fuse and fires off into ten different narratives, globe-trotting from Asia to Europe and back again. Starting with the sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, we would move to a young jazz buff falling in love, a tea shack in a China gripped by the revolution, a spiritual awakening in Mongolia, some dodgy characters involved with art fraud in Petersberg, and a ghost writer in London that lives above a p...
Oh my God. Can David Mitchell write.Reading this book, you will never think it's a first novel; Mitchell's mastery of the written word is so consummate. The prose flows, one word after another, forming sentences, paragraphs and chapters in natural progression. The skill of the author is evident in the fact that he himself is invisible - the story seems to write itself, thus justifying the title of the novel in a fashion.This novel -"in nine parts", as Mitchell calls it - is a series of interconn...
The most admirable thing about this novel is its ambition. Had I read this when it came out and Mitchell was a new unknown author maybe I would have been a lot more impressed. But having read Mitchell’s best novels my expectations were, unfairly perhaps, up very high. The ten episodes that make up this novel deal with globalisation, terrorism, banking fraud, conspiracy theory, particle physics – in other words the most pressing issues of our times. The biggest problem for me was I found the char...