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Ghostwritten
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
EAN: 9780375724503
ISBN: 0375724508
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 448
Publication Date: October 09, 2001
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: October 09, 2001
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
"What is real and what is not?" David Mitchell's Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts plays with precisely this question throughout its elaborately compartmentalized narrative. (That there are 10 chapters in this 9-part invention is just one more aspect of the author's mysterious schema.) With its multitude of voices and globe-girdling locations--Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Petersburg, London--this first novel offers readers a vertiginous, sometimes seductive, display of persona and place.
At the heart of Mitchell's book is the global extension of the postmodern city, and the networks (cultural, technological, phantasmagoric) to which it gives rise. A metropolis like Tokyo is quite literally beyond our comprehension: Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo. It's so big that nobody really knows where it stops. It's long since filled up the plain, and now it's creeping up the mountains to the west and reclaiming land from the bay in the east. The city never stops rewriting itself. In the time one street guide is produced, it's already become out of date. It's a tall city, and a deep one, as well as a spread-out one. At this level, urban sprawl becomes an epistemological condition. On one hand it leads to a Japanese death cult, purging the "unclean" from the city's subway with nerve gas. And on the other, it produces a certain splintering of the human personality. "I'm this person, I'm this person, I'm that person, I'm that person too," chants Neal, the narrator of the book's second part. "No wonder it's all such a ... mess." He's talking about his life as a Hong Kong trader, a "man of departments, compartments, apartments." But he might also be describing the experience of reading Ghostwritten. At once loquacious and knowing, leisurely and frantic, Mitchell offers a huge, but fragmentary, portmanteau. And while he's labored diligently to solder together the many parts--the aching bodies, the reality police, the impossibly complex machinery of contemporary life--his novel, too, may suffer from an excess of split personality. --Vicky Lebeau
David Mitchell's electrifying debut novel takes readers on a mesmerizing trek across a world of human experience through a series of ingeniously linked narratives. Oblivious to the bizarre ways in which their lives intersect, nine characters-a terrorist in Okinawa, a record-shop clerk in Tokyo, a money-laundering British financier in Hong Kong, an old woman running a tea shack in China, a transmigrating "noncorpum" entity seeking a human host in Mongolia, a gallery-attendant-cum-art-thief in Petersburg, a drummer in London, a female physicist in Ireland, and a radio deejay in New York-hurtle toward a shared destiny of astonishing impact. Like the book's one non-human narrator, Mitchell latches onto his host characters and invades their lives with parasitic precision, making Ghostwritten a sprawling and brilliant literary relief map of the modern world.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Brilliant First Novel
This book is overpowering - almost unendingly brilliant, exciting, interesting and frequently hilariously funny. It's very addictive - I couldn't put it down. For a first novel, you can see the seeds of the genius which are fully realized later in "Cloud Atlas", a work of the first order. Although much of it is a bit "pulpy" as opposed to "literary", the way the stories interconnect is consistently brilliant, and the book's themes are intertwined in an intricate mesh which completely works.
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Rating:  - YOGI
In order not to be as disappointed in this novel as was I, you should know from the start that it is actually a series of nine tangentially connected vignettes. The first-person narration of numerous characters was effectively done and enjoyable, but that does not, of itself, make for a good novel.
As the novel progressed, the dramatis personae swelled in number, each chapter unique in population from each other chapter but for an occasional reference. I was looking forward to enjoying ... Read More
Rating: - Mind blowing
best book ever, it takes you through many lives of different people, whom are all connected in a way. A book which will enlighten you. The finesse and choice of words makes this book a delicious book to read.
Rating:  - Not Mitchell's best.
Ghostwritten
Quasar, a doomsday cult member on the lamb after killing hundreds; Satoru, a young employee at a vintage record shop in Tokyo who has just spotted the love of his life; Neal, a Lawyer working for a firm in Hong Kong is running very late for a very important meeting while also dealing with the fear that his account full of laundered money is going to be discovered; A girl living in a Tea Shack on the path to the top of The Holy Mountain where a Buddhist Temple is located. History ... Read More
Rating: - So good I read it twice back-to-back
This is the first book that I ever read, finished, started over at the beginning, and read straight through again. That's not to say it is the best book I've ever read, but dang it is good. I didn't want it to be over, and I wanted to go back through and make all the connections. I'm sure I'm still missing some.
If you liked Cloud Atlas, you will like this novel, too. Like Cloud Atlas, each of the stories in Ghostwritten could stand on their own as a short story, but they are so intricately woven ... Read More
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