A story about a 20 year old boy-man looking for the dad he's never met. In theory. Yawn. It's like someone said to David Mitchell "Take this cliched plot, drop some acid and see what happens." And what happens is a lot.The first chapter had me scratching my head. Wait no, I'll be honest, it wasn't that civilized. It had me kicking my feet and sighing and slamming down my coffee cup and internally screeching what the eff is going on here?! Not much later I realized, oh, ohhhh, this is what's goin...

Eiji Miyake is looking for his father but he finds many different things…Squeeze, squelch, squirt. Crocodiles scream, even underwater. The jaws unscissor and the monster thrashes off in spirals. Lao Tzu mimes applause, but I have already gone three minutes without air and the surface is impossibly distant. I kick feebly upwards. Nitrogen fizzes in my brain. Sluggishly I fly, and the ocean sings. Face submerged, searching for me from the stone whale, is my waitress, loyal to the last, hair stream...

'Maybe the meaning of life lies in looking for it.'Like the song by John Lennon which inspired the title of this novel, David Mitchell plays with the fusion of dreams and reality as he sends the reader spiraling through the chimerical passages of Number9dream. This second novel is a departure from the multi-storied structure of Ghostwritten, instead closely following one character. However, it is anything but a simple linear plot and Mitchell shows once again that he can dazzle and dance throug...

I want to say, "It was me, it wasn't you," to this novel. She and I just didn't click. She's obviously got a lot going for her besides her perfect neck, including a horribly pretentious style and a vividly dramatic penchant for detail, but while I had a very good time with some of his other novels all lined up in a row like some Voltron Robot of literature, this one just seemed to go on and on with rambling and disjointed plot-lines that EVENTUALLY, like, at the END wrapped up into the Matrix-St...

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...

“Reality is the page. Life is the word.” ― David Mitchell, number9dream Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé Another book I'm going to have to chew on for a bit to really bend my mental tongue around. At first, I was a little disappointed in it. This is my last Mitchell book left to read (I am now a Mitchell completist) and I was hoping for just a little more PoMo juice to squeeze out of his second novel. Three dreams into it and I was afraid Mitchell was aping Murakami (Norwegian Wood, A Wild Sheep Cha...

5 Stars - Phenomenal book!This is the fourth David Mitchell book I’ve read, and none have disappointed. Every time I start a new book by this author I’m hesitant because I figure, by the law of averages, that one has to be a dud. I have not found that “one” yet, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I never found it.This book is so beautifully written. It's strange and heart wrenching, funny and relatable. I have never known another author to compact so many emotions into one book and make the book a g...

Eiji Miyaki has travelled to Japan determined to find the father who abandoned him, his mother and sister. A gargantuan task with Eiji not even knowing his father’s name or whereabouts. What transpires while Eiji is searching is at times bizarre, surreal, dreamlike. The first chapter opens with Eiji breaking into the Panopticon building in which he believes that a lawyer there has vital information on his father’s whereabouts. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that this is the first of many dr...

You know those compound German constructions, like schadenfreude, comprised of dissimilar single words? Well, I’ve got a new one that ought to exist if it doesn’t already. It’s schadenselbstungeduld, which translates roughly to “the sadness of your own impatience.” Maybe you can guess why I’m bringing this up. I’ve had a bad case of it since last month when I joined the ranks of several Goodreads friends who have read all five of the David Mitchell books. We’re now waiting long days, weeks, or,

A Study of Tales or “Like watching a musician play his scales very, very well”SourceThe tension between style and substance dominates a significant portion of the David Mitchell conversation. Fairly consistently Mitchell’s writing falls into the style side of this writing dichotomy. As with anything, it's an issue of taste for anyone who has dipped their hand into the creative writing pot. It splits writers of all different stripes, in genre, literature or otherwise with geniuses on both sides.

Do you ever set books aside for a special occasion? I like to keep certain novels on hold for holidays, so that when I reminisce about a particular vacation, I will also think about what I was reading at the time. I have very fond memories of devouring The Goldfinch on a visit to London a couple of years ago, and being so immersed in the story that I almost missed my plane. David Mitchell is one of my favourite writers and I had been saving number9dream for a while now. I took it with me on a tr...

Number9Dream, what is a relatively administered star-rating system compared to the joy I experience while reading you? Faults and all. I don't completely understand everything you revealed with my mind awake, but your echo resonates lucidly through my dreamtime. You say: "Time may be what stops everything happening at once, but rules are different asleep." How I know this to be true, yet could never prove. Fantasies and dreams. Cause and effect. Repeated conclusions reveal nothing where conclusi...

”How do daydreams translate into reality?”Another book which proves what an absolute genius and magician David Mitchell is as a Writer. Yes, my head exploded again 💥The book opens with a sequence of Dali-esque daydreams, where a young Eiji Miyake fantasises about how, in true James Bond style, he would bombard the office of his father’s lawyers to discover the true identity of the father he never knew.Of course real life is not as simple, nor as glamorous. In reality, nineteen year old Eiji Miya...

Set in Japan in the present or perhaps the near future, with several versions of early bits of the plot. Is it real or is it a computer game - certainly he plays computer games? Some wonderful metaphors and some ludicrously contrived and awkward ones. Too much organised crime and mindless violence for my taste, with little of the beauty of his other books to provide balance or contrast. (Number 9 Dream is a Beatles song that plays at a disco in Black Swan Green, which I reviewed HERE.)See also M...

“A semi-orphan comes to Tokyo in search of the father he has never met”, says a man to Eiji Miyake, speaking not of himself, but of Eiji. In a simple sentence, it is the truth. This is Eiji's quest. Through his long, twisting and sometimes fantastically dangerous journey, I learned that the quest can get in the way of the real purpose. Eiji's real truth will be revealed through the people he meets along the way, and the past that follows him, found only within a huge city among millions where he...

The devil has all the best tunes, and the fiendish Mr Mitchell is in cahoots with Old Nick for the best stories too. What worries me is what the deal involves? Selling your soul to Mephistopheles is a risky manoeuvre for sure. This, Mitchell's second novel and the last one that I had not read, is the story of one who is punished by the God of Thunder, by being given exactly what he asked for. Beware of what you wish for, as it may be granted. Having lost his twin sister in that deal, bereft of a...

Mitchell's second offering dives into the age-old question of the meaning of life. For over four hundred pages, this novel takes us on a circular tale at a breakneck pace. It is easy to get caught up in the ironies, the coincidences and the over-the-top crime lord stuff, but Mitchell's gifted storytelling and imagination are really just there for our enjoyment. The real power of the novel comes from Mitchell's more sincere passages that typically deal with memories and relationships. It is not o...