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Ghostwritten

4.07 of 5 stars 4.07 · rating details · 8,432 ratings · 865 reviews

A sensation upon its publication in England, "Ghostwritten" is the story of nine strangers in nine countries whose lives are entwined in a strange chain of circumstance.

Hardcover, 448 pages

Published September 5th 2000 by Random House USA Inc (first published August 19th 1999)

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Oct 07, 2012 Kris rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary, fiction, favorites

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, China

Where is there a place for the individual in the midst of this overwhelming motion?

Still from Koyaanisqatsi

In his first novel, Gho...more

94 likes · like · see review

May 07, 2013 Kalliope rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-english

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...more 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 wait until close to 40% (can you tell I read it in e-format?) to get a sense of whether I was enjoying it or not.

I loathe the word “connectivity”. It is a buzz word in my office and a colleague-friend and I always make side jokes whenever it is used. At work it is supposed to mean that we have all our activities well engrained with each other to form a smooth, efficient and international business. In reality it means that very little is defined in how the various processes should be working with each other, and also that responsibilities should remain unassigned. For us this word is a code for BS.

So, it is very hard for me to say that it is the connections between the people, the stories, and the literary references (see S.Penkevich’s list of them) that have appealed to me the most in this book. Yes, the odious “connectivity” is what I single out as the best part of this novel.

I should add that it was during reading it that a long lost friend managed to contact me. This happened thanks to an unexpected series of connections that took place between London - Paris – New York – Bristol – Delhi - New Haven and Madrid.

This made my reading all the more spooky. I felt in my skin Mitchell’s depiction of the way our contemporary lives are affected by transport and telecommunications. His reminding us that we are mistaken in understanding our lives are a single line while forgetting that other points in that line do actually form other single lines that can eventually, decades later, cross our lines again, certainly hit home with me.

But the missing star is because I felt that David Mitchell does not differentiate sufficiently the various narrator voices, in spite of what most critics say. Some characters, in particular the HK lawyer and the London ghostwriter rang too close to each other. And although the Petersburg story is one of my favorites, the voice of the narrator seemed too dumb and a bit fake.

This book merits a second reading, which should also happen for me soon.
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Apr 07, 2011 D. Pow rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: alternate-paths-mysticism

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...more 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 engaged my intellect. Its intricate puzzle of loosely connected stories kept my mind sharp to each twist and turning, looking intently for the next incident that would tie disparate characters, locales and chronology together. Mitchell has first rate literary gifts, he juggles more balls than most writers would even dream of-and to go with that metaphor he’s so ludicrously daring and audacious in his choices that he’s more akin to those lunatic jugglers who work with sharp, flaming objects then some tired clown with three fuzz-faded tennis balls. The fact that this was a first novel demands even more respect.

Mitchell mixes philosophical concerns of the greatest gravitas(death, reincarnation, identity, creativity and theft, corporate greed, freedom vs. security, class agonies and the oppression of women ) with the old-fashioned capacity to tell a good story in unobtrusive, yet supple prose.

It has come to my attention that Mitchell isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Some of my good pals here think he is a cold literary technician, empty of the wisdom he attempts to convey in this book. I couldn’t disagree more. Along with his intricate plotting and deft use of language, is a wonderful (wonder-filled?), compassionate view of the world that is inclusive, empty of petty judgment and wise to the hardscrabble shit of earthly existence, the commiserate joys of physical joining be it loin to loin, heart to heart, or in mere comradely shoulder to shoulder grinding through the days and the inevitability and sometimes desirability of that great equalizer, death.

So again back to the heart, the bruised organ I mentioned at the beginning of my review. I think I’m much more a man of the heart than a man of the head. I feel way too much. And I think maybe my loving of this book night be just as likely because I’m a rube and a sucker not because I’m a greater intellect than those that hated it. Maybe they are smarter than me. Probably I’m okay with that. Maybe I liked it because I’m foolish and open and willing to look for something, in this case an intricate Buddhist-inspired diamond-like view of humanity and its sufferings that showed that we are all connected, beyond boundaries of country, time, the accidents of birth and family, even to and beyond the gates of death. Even though my conception of a personal God has faded to practical non-existence I am still pulled to joy-filled myths of individual lives having meaning, and there being a benevolent seed of being at our centers and at the center of the universe.

And maybe I’m wrong. And maybe none of this matters. And maybe this book is just an intricate con-job. And maybe that is okay too. But this book made me happy. And I think you should give it a try.
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Oct 02, 2012 Ian Graye rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2012, reviews, reviews-5-stars, mitchell

Starstruck Lover

David 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 write...more

45 likes · like · see review

Feb 10, 2012 s.penkevich rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Fans of Mitchell, LOST, Murakami, and fans of reading in general

Recommended to s.penkevich by: Ian Graye

Shelves: mind-and-genre-bending

’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...more

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Jan 08, 2013 Bennet rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels-stories

I’m wondering if you can tell a lot about a person by which of these stories she likes best. I approached the book as I do a collection of short stories, more interested in Mitchell’s way with words and characters than whether or not the book turned out to be a novel.

Each chapter is named for the location in which a first-person narrator is attempting to understand the particulars of his or her life and situation, despite all the attendant variables and possibilities. What each chapter or chara...more

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Sep 28, 2012 Megan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: David Mitchell fans and everybody else

Recommended to Megan by: s.penkevich

Shelves: favorites, mind-blown

Ghostwritten is a beautiful novel about human beings, their experiences and how we all effect each other. The novel is split up into different stories which each take up a different genre and a different tone and story. The first story of the novel is about a terrorist involved in a strange cult that's goal is to "cleanse" the world. This story sets the scene of the novel and ends up being extremely important as the novel goes on. After reading this one I was wondering where this novel would go...more

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Apr 05, 2013 Blair rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary, ghostly-and-magical, read-on-kindle, short-stories, favourites, to-buy-physical-copy

I want to shout from the rooftops about how much I loved this book! I don't think this is going to be a very coherent review, as it's another of those books that is difficult to describe without giving everything away. Ghostwritten was David Mitchell's debut, published in 1999, and it is similar to his better-known Cloud Atlas in that it consists of a number of diverse - but interconnected - stories (and, indeed, a number of characters from that book also make appearances here). It's hugely ente...more

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Aug 20, 2012 Megan Baxter rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Ghostwritten, and ghostridden and by a ghost, ridden.

I have no idea how to talk about what I want to talk about without referring to specifics in this book. I'm not sure how spoiler-ish they may be, but you have been warned.

This is my second David Mitchell, and I like it almost as much as the first one I read, which was Cloud Atlas, and absolutely blew my socks off. I think Cloud Atlas is a more masterful and audacious use of the same technique that you can see developing in Ghostwritten, but I...more Ghostwritten, and ghostridden and by a ghost, ridden.

I have no idea how to talk about what I want to talk about without referring to specifics in this book. I'm not sure how spoiler-ish they may be, but you have been warned.

This is my second David Mitchell, and I like it almost as much as the first one I read, which was Cloud Atlas, and absolutely blew my socks off. I think Cloud Atlas is a more masterful and audacious use of the same technique that you can see developing in Ghostwritten, but I enjoyed it in its developing stages here quite a lot.

Initially, I was skeptical of the claim that this was a "novel in nine parts," as they seemed to be discrete stories, with occasional references to the preceding chapters, through incidence and coincidence. But as the stories continued, they start to pull together, to somehow knit into a whole, even though most of the characters never met, or if they did, never realized the importance of the other stories to their own.

This is a book full of life, and humanity, and beautiful writing, and intriguing ideas, and glimpses of the unknown and improbable. It switches genres and countries, transcends humanities, and in the end, resolves.

And that is what keeps this from being five stars for me. That, and that it isn't quite Cloud Atlas. I'm not sure about the ending. (view spoiler) While it was an ending that seized me and took me by surprise, it also overshadowed the entire previous 400 pages, and I loved those 400 pages. I feel like I'm struggling to remember all the things I enjoyed about the book, without having them completely drowned underneath all the emotions that the ending provoked.

That's what happens with a loss, I know. Initially, the end obscures all the times before.

But I realize I haven't really spoken in any specifics about the book, or the stories that make it up. But how can I tie together and make coherent a book that combines stories about a Japanese cultist responsible for a subway attack, a jazz-loving Japanese teenager, a shady English financier in Hong Kong, the life of a woman who owns a tea house on the side of the Holy Mountain through the tumultuous events in the 20th century in China, the travels of a noncorporeal entity that lives in human hosts, a Russian art theft ring, a penniless womanizing drummer and ghostwriter in England, an Irish expert in quantum cognition, and a New York late night talk radio host who gets yearly calls from a mysterious listener?

Except to say that although I couldn't tell you exactly what binds these stories together, I am absolutely, positively convinced that they are part of a whole. And that they were utterly engrossing to read, and provided constant delight.

I'm also sure this isn't for everyone. Like many of the books I love, it requires a high tolerance of ambiguity, and a willingness to simply go along for a ride with no idea as to how it will end. So many books are predictable. This one is not.(less)

24 likes · like · see review

Jun 02, 2010 Krok Zero rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: summer-2010

Oh dear. All the cool kids love David Mitchell. I want to be one of the cool kids! But I won't lie to you, cool kids: this book frustrated the hell out of me, at times outright pissed me off, despite my respect for Mitchell's dexterity hat-trick (intellectual, narrative, verbal). It's the kind of book that made me scarf down the last 100 pages in a single day, breathlessly turning pages in the hopes of making sense of its head-scratching patchwork, only to put down the tome humming that Peggy Le ...more Oh dear. All the cool kids love David Mitchell. I want to be one of the cool kids! But I won't lie to you, cool kids: this book frustrated the hell out of me, at times outright pissed me off, despite my respect for Mitchell's dexterity hat-trick (intellectual, narrative, verbal). It's the kind of book that made me scarf down the last 100 pages in a single day, breathlessly turning pages in the hopes of making sense of its head-scratching patchwork, only to put down the tome humming that Peggy Lee tune that's so helpful in moments of disappointment. Is this what it was like to be a fan of TV's Lost, I wonder?

It's really the structure that's the source of my headaches with this book. Individually I liked most of the stories/chapters/whatevers (only the "Holy Mountain" one straight-up bored me), but together they add up to something I'm not buying. And I hated how Mitchell undermined his own perfectly fine stories with confusing little twists and flourishes meant to blow our minds, I guess, like when he actually ends one of the more gripping tales with a sentence like "None of this really happened." Or the other story that ends with its protagonist keeling over in death throes only to offer some mumbo-jumbo about how he's dying "again" or remembers what it feels like to die, or something. Whatever, dude. As for the little dollops of interconnectivity that Mitchell drops in to "link" the stories, I found them either underexplained or just unconvincingly contrived.

The last story (not counting a brief, completely incomprehensible epilogue) is sort of a microcosm of my reaction to the book. I absolutely love the premise of that Manhattan-set chapter: the apocalypse from the perspective of a late-night radio DJ, sending out survivalist missives over the airwaves. (For a more satisfying variation on a similar premise, check out one of my favorite movies of last year, the awesomely brainy horror-comedy Pontypool .) I was carried along by its strangeness, its current of pleasantly defamiliarizing prose, its intriguing narrative surprises. But at some point that all goes over the top and the piece ends in an act of imaginative self-pleasuring, Mitchell's intellectual showboating finally outstripping any and all chance of my what-the-hell-is-going-on curiosities being sated.

I realize, of course, that in some respects I'm just being dim, and that some of Mitchell's project has flown over my head. Fine. I read lots of books that fly over my head; the difference lies in whether or not the author makes me aspire to fill the gap between my head and the book. The ending--and nearly all the individual pieces' endings--of this book made me shrug so insouciantly that I'm just enjoying the summer breeze of that book whooshing through my cranium's airspace.

Still three stars cuz it was consistently interesting and reading it made me feel like one of the cool kids, if only for a short while.(less)

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May 18, 2013 Cecily rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favourites, miscellaneous-fiction

Rereading, May 2013

Review from early 2000s

His first novel, generously infused with his experiences of living in the Orient (the Chinese strand, Holy Mountain, is exquisite).

It is several stories told by different protagonists, in different styles, some with an ethereal/mythical quality, some much harsher and more modern - all of them believable and enticing. I found this a more subtle approach to linked lives than the somewhat gimmicky method in Cloud Atlas (though I still enjoyed that: http://...more

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Jul 13, 2008 Rob rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: someone that wants to see Murakami's British doppelgänger

Recommended to Rob by: Amy

Shelves: to-re-read, apocalypse, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. FIRSTLY: If the entire novel had bristled with the same energy and momentum as the bottom half of the book (i.e., from "Holy Mountain" through to "Night Train") then my review here would bristle with five stars. That said, I also do not believe that those subsequent chapters could have been nearly as successful without the supporting cast of Okinawa, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. (Jury is still out on the closer, Underground.)

David Mitchell delivers a very strong novel here. Stylistically, it is very m...more FIRSTLY: If the entire novel had bristled with the same energy and momentum as the bottom half of the book (i.e., from "Holy Mountain" through to "Night Train") then my review here would bristle with five stars. That said, I also do not believe that those subsequent chapters could have been nearly as successful without the supporting cast of Okinawa, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. (Jury is still out on the closer, Underground.)

David Mitchell delivers a very strong novel here. Stylistically, it is very mature -- especially for a first novel from such a young author. He is able to bring themes, concepts, and phrases from one section into another apparently disjointed section fluidly, naturally and -- most of the time -- without that recurrence or repetition feeling like a gimmick. Mitchell is screwing with you (the reader), and you both know it, but the reason that you believe he is screwing with you is a little bit different than the reason he believes he is screwing with you. Meanwhile, the narrative has an agenda of its own. The comparisons to Haruki Murakami are justified but not all together accurate; Murakami blissfully and accidentally trips into an improbable parallel universe while Mitchell begrudgingly tries to inch his way back from a very possible tangential universe.

Now there were two thematic elements of the story that jumped out at me as worthy of commenting upon:

(1) Varying shades of apocalypse. Maybe my sensitivity to the subject is up because I'm also neck-deep in the John Joseph Adams collection " Wastelands" but there is a sense of penultimate destruction within each of the disjointed narratives in Ghostwritten. We start with a cult member trying to hurry along a very eschatological apocalypse and over the course of 400 more pages, we work our way through every flavor of personal or global threat we can stomach. The whimsical, speculative damnation of the "Night Train" component was clearly my favorite. (Though "Holy Mountain" blew my mind for the way tone and voice was used as the treatment for personal and national world-ending.)

(2) Have any other readers picked up on the sub-text that concerns conception and birth? Every one of these tales somehow works in a child (real or imagined, material or emblematic) that I presume is supposed to function as a cue for each story's theme. But the children aren't safe and sound. They're adopted orphans, aborted fetuses, ghosts of infanticide, bastards, parents that can't conceive, a precocious matricidal AI... I have not quite figured out this sub-text yet (hence the "to-re-read" shelving) but it's definitely there. And it is haunting me.(less)

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John McDonald the reason that you believe he is screwing with you is a little bit different than the reason he believes he is screwing with you...

Care to expand on...more
updated Jul 15, 2008 10:00am

Rob @John: let me see if I can re-create the headspace I was in when I finished reading the novel and wrote the review... I believe where I was going with...more
Jul 15, 2008 10:12am

Michael i'm going to try to bump your review, because the other ones are good, but they don't pay enough attention to the "gestalt," as your's does. unfortuna...more
Feb 09, 2013 04:04pm

Nov 02, 2012 Jonathan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Jonathan by: David Mitchell's fans, his other work

Shelves: personal-favourites, fantasy, gritty-reads, humorous, mystery, quirky-fiction, want, d-mitch

Four stars, or even four and a half stars cannot adequately define this novel, yet five stars appears overgenerous. Though Ghostwritten is a brilliantly ambitious novel it is also a tangled and convoluted novel. If you as a reader disliked Cloud Atlas it is unlikely that you would find this novel any better. Where Cloud Atlas seemed a more whole and structured novel this felt a little more twisted and in sections muddled knots of prose appeared to form. That said it shall receive five stars as a...more

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Jul 05, 2012 Angus rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed-and-blogged, 5-stars

Original post at Book Rhapsody.

***

The Crane, the Locust, and the Bat

Well, what do we have here? It’s the début novel of my favorite living writer. And do I need to mention the name? I think it’s not necessary, but yes, I will mention it just because I want to: David Mitchell.

Now that that’s part over, let’s go over to what Mitchell thought of writing to start his career. He chose to deal with nine loosely related stories to come up with a cohesive whole. I’m not too sure about the cohesive part...more

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Sep 28, 2007 Lissa rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

You must read this book.

Ghostwritten is at once an entire novel and a series of stories. The book is divided into nine parts told by nine different narrators: a member of a cult based in Japan that is trying to “cleanse” the earth; a young saxophone player who works in a record store; a British attorney working in Hong Kong caught up in a money laundering scheme; an old Buddhist woman who owns a tea and noodle shop on the slopes of a Holy Mountain; a non-corporal automaton looking for evidence...more You must read this book.

Ghostwritten is at once an entire novel and a series of stories. The book is divided into nine parts told by nine different narrators: a member of a cult based in Japan that is trying to “cleanse” the earth; a young saxophone player who works in a record store; a British attorney working in Hong Kong caught up in a money laundering scheme; an old Buddhist woman who owns a tea and noodle shop on the slopes of a Holy Mountain; a non-corporal automaton looking for evidence of his corporal past; an art thief in St. Petersberg; a young drummer and womanizer in London; a physicist employed by the CIA on the run; and a New York City “shock jock”. In each of these stories, Mitchell uses a different voice and realistically tells very different stories from the viewpoints of the different narrators.

Each of the nine stories could stand on their own – the people in them have little to do with one another, and yet there is a small but tangible web of connections between them. Each character is introduced briefly, tangentially, in the previous story, prior to being able to tell them own. Aside from the appearances of different characters in each others’ stories, the connections are emphasized by Mitchell’s use of language. For instance, the main character in the first story is named “Quasar”. Later, the word quasar is as an analogy for various events in two other stories. Language relating to ghosts and comets also crop up again and again in different stories. For example, this bit is from the attorney’s story:

For the last few months I’ve been living with three women. One was a ghost, who is now a woman. One was a woman, who is now a ghost. One is a ghost and always will be. But this isn’t a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she’d be a person.

And this is from the drummer/womanizer’s story:

I couldn’t get to sleep afterwards, worrying about the possible endings of the stories that had been started. Maybe that’s why I’m a ghostwriter. The endings have nothing to do with me.

Unfortunately, I found the ending of this book to be a little heavy-handed. Mitchell’s book as a whole makes a statement about the world and the way that the events in one person’s life impact the lives of other people. However, in the final story, I think he wanted to make a far grander Statement, and as a result it feels extremely heavy-handed in comparison to the rest of the book. Despite that flaw, I highly recommend this book. In fact, when I was finished, I almost felt compelled to turn it over and start again, just to look for more connections between the stories with foreknowledge of what comes next.
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Apr 24, 2007 Andy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: who would i not?

Shelves: readownedloved

David Mitchell is rumored to be a bit of a puzzle novelist in a post-modern kind of way--you read something fairly subtle in say, the tenth chapter that if you are a careful reader, will unlock some clue to a mystery or elusive event or person you encountered in the first few chapters. Even further, this occurs between Mitchell's novels (of which there are four, at the moment), which suggests almost a fictional interconnected alternate universe he is creating, in my mind a little akin to Faulkne...more

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Apr 13, 2009 Ben rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, fiction, read-2009

Mitchell really surprised me with this one. This being his first novel, I had lower expectations than his other novels. However, this may be the best of the bunch.

I love how Mitchell weaves in these small science fiction elements without making it SF. I believe I read that he lists Le Guin as one of his early influences and it shows. However, it is just one of the small things that makes this book great. If you loved Cloud Atlas, you will love this one, and vice-versa.

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Dec 17, 2008 Jason Pettus rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Although I haven't brought up the subject here in awhile, the fact is that as a book critic and a lover of underground literature, it's important to me to become a "completist" of certain artists out there, or in other words to have consumed every single artistic project they've ever done. After all,...more (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Although I haven't brought up the subject here in awhile, the fact is that as a book critic and a lover of underground literature, it's important to me to become a "completist" of certain artists out there, or in other words to have consumed every single artistic project they've ever done. After all, I'm behind on a lot of this stuff compared to other critics my age -- I spent my twenties and early thirties as a working author myself, concentrating much more on writing my own books than reading other people's; and that leaves me near the age of forty with just these sometimes giant holes in my underground-arts education, embarrassing holes that as a critic I absolutely shouldn't have.

Take, oh, say, David Mitchell for example, who over the course of a decade now and four celebrated novels (three of them nominated for the freaking Booker) has become widely acknowledged as one of the best living surrealist authors on the planet; but before this week I hadn't ever read a single word by him, which should be some sort of crime against the underground arts if it isn't already. And it just so happens that one of the Chicago library branches up here by my place owns all four of Mitchell's books (I'm looking at you, cute nerdy acquisitions manager with the clunky glasses), so I've decided to finally start tackling them all myself, starting with the oldest, 1999's Ghostwritten. And that of course brings up one of the interesting things sometimes about reading the early work of someone who's now famous for their mature work; because many times, although not out-and-out terrible, such novels simply won't hold up to the "early masterpiece" hype of later years, or will contain diamonds in the rough that the author ends up polishing in later work, or sometimes are just so influential that they become blasé later in history, simply for all the ripoffs that came afterwards.

That's something you can honestly say about Ghostwritten too, although I found it more interesting than disappointing; that when all is said and done, the novel is essentially a British guy writing like Haruki Murakami, back in the late '90s before most English-speakers had heard of Murakami, making it not nearly the revelation anymore that I'm sure it was to Western audiences when it first came out. It's essentially what filmmaker Richard Linklater calls "vertical storytelling," a collection of tales that are mostly unrelated but with a series of fascinating synchronicity-style details, small decisions within some stories that will sometimes have devastating major consequences in others, with the chapters set around the world but especially in many Asian countries, and examining among other things the various stereotypical ways that Asians think of other Asians when white people aren't looking. All of these stories, though, have some sort of metaphysical or poetic element to them, and are written with an engaging mix of Asian minimalism and British fascination with language; one for example concerns a poltergeist in a yuppie apartment in Hong Kong, one a subway-bombing cult member hiding out from the cops in Okinawa, one a jazz-loving hipster teen in the middle of downtown Tokyo.

Ten years later, we've gotten a lot more used to these things -- metaphysical elements in our mainstream fiction, the influence of Asian minimalism on Western literature -- but when it first came out, seeing it in Ghostwritten I'm sure made a lot of people freak out in a pleasantly positive way, which I'm sure is how Mitchell gained his intense cult following to begin with, and what allowed him to go on and kick out three Booker nominees in a row after this one. And let's face it, even this novel isn't bad, even ten years later when many of its tropes have become a lot more common; even with this very first book of his, Mitchell displays a confidence in his material usually only seen in veteran authors, a relaxed assuredness with what is already experimental work, being written at a time when there were literally no precedents for it in English-language literature. Granted, I suspect at this point that his later books are going to be even better, and that readers not purposely trying to become Mitchell completists might want to actually skip this first one; then again, you might not, especially if your interest in weird lit is only a passing one, and if you mostly prefer the narrative feet of your stories planted firmly on realistic ground. I can definitely say, though, that I'm glad I read Ghostwritten; and I can also definitely say that I'm eagerly looking forward to his next, 2001's big breakthough hit number9dream, which hopefully I'll be tackling before too terribly long. (less)

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Sep 14, 2007 Kellan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Boston, December 12th, 2004

If you liked Cloud Atlas, pick up ghostwritten. And give it until page 38.

Shades of Murakami and Borges (both of whom briefly grace the pages) and Hornby (who doesn’t), a warm up for the pyrotechnic doppleganger genre switching of CA. But mostly its David Mitchell all over again (or really for the first time if you still believe in linear time).

Not as archly triumphant as CA and with one or two sour notes (I’d recommend fast forwarding through “Petersburg” skipping an...more

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Apr 14, 2013 Tina rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013, literary-fiction

Original post from One More Page

This is a very, very, very late review, and I am sorry. What was I doing the past months? I don't know, except that I was busy reading and not reviewing.

But let's not get to to that.

When I finished reading my first David Mitchell book, Cloud Atlas, one of the many things I felt after reading that was: I'm so happy that he has other books I haven't read yet. It's a bit rare for me to find an author whose back list I would gladly read, all of which were praised by m...more

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Dec 16, 2012 Richard rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

The New York Times did a rave profile of Mitchell (see David Mitchell, the Experimentalist ), so I thought I should take a look.

Ghostwritten is a half-full glass. Considering how good the good parts were, and that this was Mitchell's debut, that is a very good thing indeed.

The form of the novel is unusual — each chapter is essentially a short story with a different central character, and the stories are strung together with a few very minor links. A fan would use the simile of a string of pears...more

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Aug 02, 2008 Kristopher Jansma rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Once again my busy teaching schedule has gotten in the way of my posting, so I'm going to attempt to catch up today with a series of briefer updates.

As I've intimated in my earlier Mitchell posts, ghostwritten has been my least favorite of the bunch - which still makes it one of the best books I've read all year. Years ago, I read a review of Number9Dream and was so intrigued that I went out and bought this earlier novel to tide me over until the new one came out in paperback. But a few pages in...more Once again my busy teaching schedule has gotten in the way of my posting, so I'm going to attempt to catch up today with a series of briefer updates.

As I've intimated in my earlier Mitchell posts, ghostwritten has been my least favorite of the bunch - which still makes it one of the best books I've read all year. Years ago, I read a review of Number9Dream and was so intrigued that I went out and bought this earlier novel to tide me over until the new one came out in paperback. But a few pages into ghostwritten, I lost interest. Over the years I picked it up a hundred times, trying to get into it and failing. I kept feeling not-sucked-in by the opening story - the first few pages were somewhat vague and the character hard to visualize. When I finally realized my love for Mitchell, I turned to my shelf, happy to have saved the book for so many years and realized it was gone. I think I'd finally given up a bout a month earlier and sold it to the Strand for probably next-to-nothing.

But I found a new copy on my trip and dove in headfirst, pushing past those troublesome first few pages and happily discovering that the first story was, indeed, very exciting - all about a crazed monk who decides to poison the subway tunnels in Tokyo.

What follows is a series of essentially unconnected stories, each taking place in a different city, beginning in the Far Far East and moving steadily westward, through Hong Kong and Mongolia and Russia and on to London and eventually to a New York radio station. As with Mitchell's other books, there is no overt connection between the stories at first, but steadily the lives begin to overlap and the stories begin to connect together. All of this is absolutely amazingly done - not only are all the individual stories amazing in their own right, but they begin to take on new excitement when they overlap with one another (and, for real fans, with some of the characters from the later books!). Just to give you a sense of it, there are stories about a "non-corporeal being" stalking backpackers in Mongolia, an ancient tea-shop owner in Tibet, art theives in St. Petersburg, a ghostwriter in London... on and on.

So why didn't I love it? Well, the trouble began for me right with the final two or three chapters. There's a fantastic chapter about a physicist on an island off the coast of Ireland, which begins a strange apocalyptic thread that goes into a New York City radio station, as an artificial intelligence begins to run amock upon the globe - and while I appreciate some good crazy apocalypse stuff here and there, the ending was ultimately too science-fiction for me and I had trouble suspending the requisite disbelief - even though I really wanted to. The final chapter does some incredible things, but I never quite got back into the flow of the story the same way. Still, a good book - and I think for readers who are a little more comfortable with strange futuristic twists, it could even be totally fascinating.(less)

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Dec 01, 2007 Trish rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was my first foray into David Mitchell, and I haven't made up my mind whether or not I'll give him a second go. He's unquestionably talented--he makes the various places and people that form the novel's mosaic vivid and unique, their voices and experiences distinct and (for the most part) compelling. The connections between stories are (for the most part) deft touches--an errant phone call, the repetition of the word "quasar," camphor trees, etc.

So what's not to like? Well, two of the final...more

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Jan 22, 2008 Robert Beveridge rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: defenestrated, cle-pub-lib

David Mitchell, Ghostwritten (Random House, 1999)

Ghostwritten was one of the first books to hit my Amazon wish list back when I first set it up four years ago. I have no idea what inspired me to put it there, but having now finally read the thing, the question has gone from "why did I do this?" to "what on earth was I thinking?"

The story revolves (very slowly) around nine different characters whose lives interconnect. And while the characters themselves are interesting, Mitchell's portrayal of t...more

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Sep 16, 2007 Martine rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Murakami and Borges fans.

Shelves: postmodern, modern-fiction, british

What a stunning debut. No, not all of the interconnected, non-linear stories in this "novel in nine parts" are successful (the Holy Mountain story, for instance, feels sketchy to me), but together they form a tremendously imaginative and ambitious web of ideas and situations, full of originality, knowledge and local colour. As usual with Mitchell, each story has its own tone of voice; the man's command of style and language is stupendous, and he uses it to good effect here. As usual, too, the s...more

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Sep 16, 2012 B0nnie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to B0nnie by: Megan

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....more 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. However, the whole overarching theme of ghostwriter puts a foot in that other door, as a sort of containing device.

Who but a writer would use ghostwriter as a metaphor for the metaphysical? Writers: the people who give us books. If only non-writers could write. But...they can...! and that is why ghostwriters exist. It's a big industry - for instance the ghostwriter for Hillary Clinton's memoirs received a fee of about $500,000 of the book's $8 million advance. In fact probably all books written by the famous are ghostwritten. Cookbooks, guides, self-help books too. Medical papers. Nancy Drew.

Oh please let Chronicles, Vol. 1 and Just Kids be the exceptions!

Ghostwritten has ten chapters, nine places, and many remarkable characters. Their lives intersect directly and sometimes just by a bare feather's touch. The plot is can be explained like this totally spoilered summary:

A mad religious fanatic sees himself in a baby's eyes and phones a jazz guy to say that his dog needs to be fed and this causes the jazz guy to run to Tokyo and be noticed in a restaurant by an unhealthy man who is screwing his maid (her grandmother had been raped and had a baby and that old woman talks to a tree: the tree ends up as a baby girl) and later there's a comet which has nothing to do with Eve and the Serpent by Delacroix [a fictional painting] being stolen from the Hermitage, nor the gunfire, nor the unhealthy man's wife moving to London because she can't have a baby even though there's a ghost baby in their apartment, so she screws a guy who's a ghostwriter, whose girlfriend had had a baby several years earlier, and that same guy saves the life of a physicist who also once had a baby but damn, babies turn into teens before you can say Jackie McLean (or Miles Davis, Kenny Burrell, Chick Corea, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker, or Herbie Hancock - all mentioned by the jazz guy - see Ian's review for the whole list and a better review too) but the physicist does know the three laws of robotics - and uses them wisely - however those rules can be circumvented ever so easily, damn, as we learn from a DJ (he has a baby too - it's about 8 years old) by his giving bad advice to a gizmo machine that seems to be a sentient satellite with powers that can make others give up the ghost...and possibly all ghosts.

Just read it. (less)

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Jan 16, 2011 Cameron rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A surrealist puzzle box of a novel that, like Cloud Atlas, showcases David Mitchell's talent to move seamlessly between wildly disparate characters, genres, and geographies without losing track of his central thematic tensions: determinism versus chance, isolation versus community, and rootedness versus exile. Ghostwritten is a series of nine, interconnecting character vignettes that travel a wide swath of the globe, from the isolation of Okinawa to the humming post-industrial hive of Hong Kong...more A surrealist puzzle box of a novel that, like Cloud Atlas, showcases David Mitchell's talent to move seamlessly between wildly disparate characters, genres, and geographies without losing track of his central thematic tensions: determinism versus chance, isolation versus community, and rootedness versus exile. Ghostwritten is a series of nine, interconnecting character vignettes that travel a wide swath of the globe, from the isolation of Okinawa to the humming post-industrial hive of Hong Kong to the caffeine-and-booze-motored unreality of a late-night call-in radio show in New York City (think Coast to Coast AM, then get even weirder). Unlike Cloud Atlas, here the links between characters are more understated and aleatoric. Which is probably the point considering the novel's interest in how small, chance events can transfigure a life, or even a country. The word "virtuoso" appears in many reviews of Mitchell's work, and I'll admit that his sure hand at so many different styles would come off as cheeky if he wasn't so obviously invested in making his characters and conflicts matter. I particularly found affecting the "Holy Mountain" section, which manages to cram a century's worth of compelling modern Chinese history into fewer than a hundred pages *and* create an "ancient grandmother" character that yanks on my tethers of my heart without me even resenting it too much.

As in Haruki Murakami's work--in my imagination, Mitchell and Murakami call each other all the time to gossip, à la the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, except they talk about glowing unicorn skulls and reincarnation and metaphysics--I had the occasional sense that Mitchell had too many balls up in the air, and some ties between the disparate narratives are fuzzy, albeit ambitious (e.g. the noncorpums from the Mongolia story showing up in the Zookeeper section.) And, yes, some characters made me prick up my ears more than others. The narrator in the St. Petersburg section, for instance, a vampish docent at the Hermitage, is about as interesting as a damp crumple of Brawny.

Pick it up. Read it. Pleasant hauntings!
(less)

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Jan 11, 2009 Paula rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Paula by: Juanita

Shelves: novels-and-stories, best-reads-of-2009

I’ve become quite a fan of Mitchell’s. I loved Cloud Atlas and now much appreciate Ghostwritten, his first novel. Both novels employ the device of linked narratives very effectively. While CA progresses and then regresses through large swaths of time, the various narratives that make up Ghostwritten are roughly contemporaneous beginning at the time of the gas attacks in the Tokyo subways in 1995 and tracking into an apocalyptic proximate future. As for location in space, the action moves from Ok...more

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Aug 25, 2010 Ken-ichi rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: escape, snoot

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Old review from 2007. I'd actually forgotten that I'd read it and picked up another copy! Think my UK edition got loaned out and never came back...

Another wonderful book, very similar to Cloud Atlas. Debate between fate and chance runs throughout, with the Biblical serpent spelling it out: "Why do things happen the way they do?" Like Cloud Atlas, certain things recur almost irrelevantly, with even less structure than CA, like the presence of camphor trees, coffee spilling out of an over-filled p...more

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Nov 18, 2008 Joe rated it 3 of 5 stars

The concept of Ghostwritten is compelling: several unrelated, interconnected stories that somehow are suppose to create a whole. At first, part of the fun in reading Ghostwritten is being plunked in the middle of some interesting crisis in a character's life. You become fascinatingly absorbed in the tale and then suddenly you're unceremoniously removed from the character's somewhat unresolved story and plunked into the middle of another character crisis in another part of the world. Disoriented,...more The concept of Ghostwritten is compelling: several unrelated, interconnected stories that somehow are suppose to create a whole. At first, part of the fun in reading Ghostwritten is being plunked in the middle of some interesting crisis in a character's life. You become fascinatingly absorbed in the tale and then suddenly you're unceremoniously removed from the character's somewhat unresolved story and plunked into the middle of another character crisis in another part of the world. Disoriented, you read along sucked into this new tale only to have this happen to you again and again. It's jarring and throws off the momentum a bit, but keeps the novel fresh and exciting.
What makes this so much fun is unexpectedly stumbling across interconnections to characters from past stories that thread throughout. I found myself excited from anticipation when each new chapter began, looking out for the surprise connections. Because of this, I read the book slowly, savoring each new twist and turn wanting to make the read last. Mitchell is a good storyteller and sucks you in completely.

Perhaps in reading this so slowly I missed something. The last interesting chapter is London with the ghostwriter. The final few chapters fall apart, especially the New York City chapter. The DJ chatting with the Zookeeper was a complete "What the ...???" moment and when I read the last page I scratched my head and thought, "Did I miss something?" I didn't understand the point to having the stories interconnect outside of its entertainment value. I wasn't quite sure I "got" the big picture. I think the novel went in a full circle but I'm unsure.

It's enough to make me want to closely re-read the novel to see what I've missed but I don't think I really need to know that badly to compell me to re-read Ghostwritten. It's a fun read, full of wonderful visuals and lyrical writing but for me it wasn't a completely cohesive read. I give it three stars. Recommended, but expect to be somewhat disappointed with the ending.

(less)

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About David Mitchell

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

David Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England, raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Kent. He received a degree in English and American Literature, followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature.

He lived for a year in Sicily, then...more Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

David Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England, raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Kent. He received a degree in English and American Literature, followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature.

He lived for a year in Sicily, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England. After another stint in Japan, he currently lives in Ireland with his wife Keiko and their two children.

In an essay for Random House, Mitchell wrote:

"I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but until I came to Japan to live in 1994 I was too easily distracted to do much about it. I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but would I have become the same writer if I'd spent the last 6 years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself."

Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), moves around the globe, from Okinawa to Mongolia to pre-Millennial New York City, as nine narrators tell stories that interlock and intersect. The novel won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for best work of British literature written by an author under 35) and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.

His two subsequent novels, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2003, he was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. In 2007, Mitchell was listed among Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World.

Mitchell's American editor at Random House is novelist David Ebershoff. He lists John Banville, Muriel Spark, Haruki Murakami, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Russell Hoban, Italo Calvino, Peter Carey, George Orwell, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Wright, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Ursula K. Le Guin among his many literary influences.(less)

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Quotes from Ghostwritten

“Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.” — 52 people liked it

“Memories are their own descendents masquerading as the ancestors of the present.” — 40 people liked it

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