'The world unmakes stuff faster than people can make it.'

Month by month our lives spiral forth into the future, with each moment shaping who we are and who we will become. It is no wonder that the pivotal years of adolescence, the stage of development classified by Erik Erikson as the Identity vs. Role Confusion stage, is fertile land for novels (if the nutrients of such land has been dried up from overuse of such topics is up for debate). Mitchell’s Black Swan Green examines this tumultuous per More...

Rating: 1.5* of five (p66)

Strike one: Teenaged protagonist.

Strike two, and ball one of strike three: Majgicqk. Or something like it.

Strike three: David Mitchell's writing reminds me of all the MFA program writing I've ever read.

I thought The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Cloud Atlas were disorganized, and NO I did NOT misunderstand the fractured POV he used, I thought he did a poor job of executing it, and I found the preciosity of his phrasemaking in each of the three books I've either More...

Just as I opened the cover of the book, I was hit by a barrage of praise for the book comments. May be I should have stopped right there. But I didn't. Hence this review.

When I watch a Hollywood movie or a TV show involving American schools, I see schoolkids overly concerned with social status and pecking order. There are these popular and cool kids, then there are nerds and other such stereotypes. They have to constantly worry about whose parties they get invited to, who they are seen talking t More...

I think it was the summer between eighth and ninth grades that I had an absolutely hellish summer camp experience.* For whatever reason I got branded as the person to pick on and just about everything that I did was turned into a series of 'jokes' at my expense.

I haven't thought of this experience in quite sometime, it's sort of one of those things that I just don't dwell on, but it was one of those times that seriously fucked me up. Some of the taunting that Jason Taylor goes through in this b More...

I’m about to start gushing over this book now, so look out. I may end up stammering my way through this review, but if I do, just consider it a tribute to Jason Taylor.

So Black Swan Green. This is the first David Mitchell book I’ve read but I assure you, it will not be the last. I loved everything about this book. I RELATED to everything about this book. True, I have no idea what it’s like to be a 13 year old British boy growing up in the 80’s, yet there is something so universal about this char More...

A Spelling Test

I kept this book on the shelf for a few years, before thinking I was ready to read it.

I didn't want to break the spell of the first two David Mitchell books that I had read (I didn't really like Cloud Atlas) and I was a bit apprehensive about the subject matter of a young teenage boy.

Ultimately, it was very much a book of two halves for me.

Teenage Mates Land

The first half captured male teenagerdom in the period in the 60's and 70's (when I grew up) and the 80's (when Jason grew More...

Why is it that bad memories from adolescence never seem to fade away? I mean really, it's been a pretty long time since I was in junior high, yet there's certain times that those memories come flooding back to the point where it feels like all those events just happened yesterday. Being a shy, bookish type girl did not go over well in the junior high social scene, believe me. I remember one day getting off the bus after school, enduring more than the usual amount of name calling and laughing, wh More...

I remember describing this book to a coworker:

Me: "It's about this little stuttering English kid who lives out in some little village during the Thatcher era, and sort of like, his coming of age kind of experiences?"

Coworker: "Oh God, that sounds awful."

Me: "No! I mean, I know it sounds awful the way I just explained it, but the book's actually really, really great!"

Two days later....

Me: (privately, to self) "Oh, God, this is awful."

I don't know what happened! This book started out really amazin More...

David Mitchell tries to do something very ambitious in this novel. He writes about the life of a thirteen year old as if it were the thirteen year old writing, not some slightly older version of that person who can look back with wisdom and smile gently at his callow thirteen year old self. The narrator here is Jason, both a poet and a stammerer, and typically of thirteen year olds, liable to veer wildly between the acute and the cute, between great perception and great naivety, between longing More...

David Mitchell must have the aim of writing something differently each time. I've heard that China Miéville's aim is like that too...

Either way it's very nice to see an author who tries to write in multiple genres rather than pigeon-holing himself as a fantasy, sci-fi or mystery writer.

I must admit that the three star rating is because the subject matter is not my preferred. I'm into the epic (a phrase used in this book no less), the grand ideas that extend beyond a novel that envelop all huma More...

1) A novel written from the perspective, or in the voice, of an adolescent boy is nothing new.

2) A novel concentrating on the development of character through formative experiences, some of which are representative of the time he or she lives in, is nothing new. It is called a Bildungsroman.

3) A novel that highlights, or hints at, the fragility of family, or the frailty of marriage, is nothing new.

Mitchell trods on these, and other, well-beaten paths, striving all the time to deliver us somethi More...

No narrative drive, thus little impetus to read. The narration by a stuttering 13 year old boy is slightly reminiscent of Haddon's "Curious Incident" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), but not as convincing or interesting.

It mentions specific 70s brands and products too deliberately - as if he's trying to make it understandable far in the future, not at all how such a boy would have described things at the time. Also, it makes it read rather like Nigel Slater's "Toast" (http://www.good More...

Original post at Book Rhapsody.

***

A Transition

Let me first say that I did not love this just because David Mitchell wrote it. If you really want to know, I think this novel is a departure from the Mitchell that most readers are acquainted with, the one who is daring and experimental and form-defying. This one is a little tame and somehow timid. Some readers might even find disappointment in this novel if they are expecting a structure similar to Cloud Atlas or Ghostwritten. I haven’t read the la More...

Black Swan Green surfed out of David Mitchell after the literary ocean had swept up Cloud Atlas and smashed it repeatedly against the shore marked "greatness", where it burst open and loads of critical acclaim and literary awards came gushing out. I read Cloud Atlas first and managed to protect myself against the gushing geyser of praise by having a suitably large umbrella. Sadly my umbrella is mostly made of a thin but impermeable layer of cynicism so I didn't have as many lovely things to say More...

This is from back in 2006, when I read it:

Ah, yet another wonderful little trip to Mitchelland. I actually finished this a few weeks ago, so if I ever had anything interesting to say about it I've long since forgotten it. I still have my bookmark, the back of a shred of a flyer advocating Wells Fargo Credit Monitoring on which I scrawled various page numbers and passages in various pens and colors, but mostly they're just bits I found amusing.

Once again I think Mitchell took a profoundly importa More...

I think I am developing a serious author crush on David Mitchell. I am a 31 year old married woman and yet David (we're on a first name basis now because I've read two of his books, see) creates the 13 year old character of Jason Taylor in such a manner that Jason becomes EveryKid to me. I feel his adolescent pain, fictional construct though it may be, because I felt that kind of pain when I was a pre-teen. Once again, David brilliantly captures the spirit of his protagonist and the time through More...

Growing up is tough going anywhere, and the town of Black Swan Green is no different. David Mitchell's novel follows Jason Taylor, a thirteen-year-old in 1982, as he navigates around a world filled with bullies, awkward love, confusing politics, and a family on the verge of disintegration. Each chapter is a different month in his life, so the novel reads episodically, but Mitchell's great strength is making each scene resonate with humor and pathos. He makes the ordinary seem epic and perfectly More...

There's some interview from right when this came out where he says something like, "It's the best thing I've written, I'm confident of that." I don't know if that's just selfblurbing marketing nonsense or what, but I was totally buying it with this book. I thought I was done with the first person "unhappy, partially wised-up nine-year-old"* until I started reading this, and I was willing to totally make out with it, even given all of the Big Realizations the Character Comes To Discover About Wha More...

Black Swan Green takes place over the course of a year: from January 1982 to January 1983. There is one chapter for each month. Until the last chapter, the other twelve chapters read more like short stories than chapters in a novel. The plotting is subtle, often focusing on the mundane joys of life than on the big picture events.

The narrator of the book is thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor. He is like Adrian Mole but more likeable and probably smarter. His narration is told in the past tense, somew More...

It may not be quite the epic and intellectual Cloud Atlas, but infinitely more enjoyable and unputdownable. Whereas Cloud Atlas had enjoyable episodes interspersed by (shall we say) more experimental writing, this more human novel deals with the rich tapestry of everyday life. Its details of the mundane are anything but - they are touching, gentle and they make you genuinely care about the characters.
The novel is written from the perspective of Jason the protagonist - but it is more like a two More...

This book is nowhere near as ambitious as Cloud Atlas but definitely seems more finished. It's a year in the life of Jason Taylor, a thirteen-year-old boy growing up in the small English town of Black Swan Green, in a family that's on the verge of breaking apart. In the hands of another author this story might have become a self-indulgent, thinly veiled autobiography, but David Mitchell knows what he's doing. Jason is an intelligent and interesting person (and not annoyingly precocious, which i More...

My mom sends me a lot of books, many of which kind of suck. Every now and then though, she hits the jackpot (e.g., it seems like she was kind of ahead of the wagon on that whole "harry potter" thing).

Anyhow, this would fall into the "occasional awesomeness" category. I'm not sure if it's impressing or disconcerting, but the author is really fucking good at capturing the essence of being a 13-year-old boy.

Anyway, to summarize, let us quote the great George Oscar Bluth:

"No, I didn't like thirtee More...

6 stars.

What I'm coming to love about Mr. Mitchell is that, unlike so many "important" writers who set out trying to reinvent the wheel, Mr. Mitchell sets out to tell a classic story, winds up overwhelmingly improving on that classic structure, and in the process, winds up respectfully and effectively reinventing the wheel.
As with each of his books, there are moments that are staggering, pitch-perfect interactions that are hilarious, and throwaway lines and metaphors that alternately soar above More...

Reading Mitchell for me is like experiencing J.D. Salinger again in high school or Don Delillo or Murakami in college. There are certain books you feel the author has almost hand-feed you emotionally and intellectually. This might only be objectively a 4.5 star book, but bugger objectivity, I loved it.

I've heard this called a British Catcher in the Rye, and although the protagonist isn't nearly as depressed or angst-ridden, the comparison is apt. It's a beautiful, poignant character sketch of a fictional boy who I wished were real so I could be his friend. I loved it.

lovelovelovelove LOVE

here's my original review from my blog back in 2007:


What a GREAT book. OK, let's backtrack. I read "Ghostwritten" in 2004. It was a good book, but I didn't wholeheartedly love it. Each chapter was about a new/different person (with some very tenuous connections scattered across the book) and while some chapters were wonderful, some chapters, in laymen's terms, I really didn't like; or, in more academic terms, I didn't find the narrator sympathetic and thus could not find a w More...

You never know what you're going to get when you read a 'coming of age' book. When you get right down to it, they're often very indulgent and narcissistic exercises in creative non-fiction masquerading as the experience of the typical (or atypical, as they'd want you to believe) teenager or young adult. Other times they can be very true to life and touching, if not altogether inspiring.

'Black Swan Green' sort of splits the difference between these two results. It's not a bad book, but it's not t More...

Although a few minor elements seemed somewhat hokey or unnecessary, as a whole, Black Swan Green is, in my opinion, a great piece of contemporary fiction. I really enjoyed Mitchell's characterization and use of episodic and unresolved short stories that combine to evoke a very strong empathy in the reader. This book is definitely a coming-of-age novel, and almost every scenario is stereotypically within that category, ie: first cigarette, first kiss, being bullied, dealing with parents, dealing More...

I can't even tell you how much I adored this book. Part of it was the anticipation of reading another David Mitchell book, part of it was the fact that Mr. Mitchell and I (and his protagonist) are of an age, and part of it is Mitchell's sheer brilliance as a writer.

This book has a very simple premise -- it is a year (1982) in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor, a sensitive yet quite ordinary boy who lives in the back of beyond, Worcestershire. Each chapter of the book is a month in Jason's lif More...

I read this book a month ago but it hasn't yet fallen into that oblivion in my mind so I'll write about it.

Before this one, I read David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas which is totally, totally awesome! I mean, like, really awesome. And from that book, I already had David Mitchell pegged as one of The Good Guys In My Book. One of those Guys who can write really, really well and has an enourmous and empathetic world vision. Other Good Guys In My Book include Thomas Pynchon and William T. Vollmann, as poi More...