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Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

4.03 · rating details · 4,375 ratings · 573 reviews

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 s...more

Paperback, 426 pages

Published December 18th 2007 by Vintage (first published 1999)

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Apr 07, 2011

D. rated it

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 ...moreThis 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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Jun 02, 2010

Krok Zero rated it

· review of another edition

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 ...moreOh 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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Jul 13, 2008

Rob rated it

· review of another edition

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...moreFIRSTLY: 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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Sep 28, 2007

Lissa rated it

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 f...moreYou 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

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 Faulkn...more

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Apr 13, 2009

Ben rated it

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

(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 ...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

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 forwar...more

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Aug 02, 2008

Kristopher Jansma rated it

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 ...moreOnce 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

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? ...more

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Jan 22, 2008

Robert Beveridge rated it

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 ar...more

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Sep 16, 2007

Martine rated it

· 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, ...more

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Jan 16, 2011

Cameron rated it

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 ...moreA 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!
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Jan 11, 2009

Paula rated it

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...more

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Aug 25, 2010

Ken-ichi rated it

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 spilli...more

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Nov 18, 2008

Joe rated it

· review of another edition

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,...moreThe 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.

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Jun 20, 2009

Dava B rated it

· review of another edition

I thought this was a superb first novel from David Mitchell. His choice of characters and places is eclectic and inspiring, as is his ability to link one character's experience to another's. The subtitle of this book is 'A Novel in Nine Parts' and that is really what I felt like at the end of the book, like I had read nine short stories that had elements of conditioning from each other. It was interesting to read this after 'Cloud Atlas', as I could see some of Mitchell's ideas that form the bas...more

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Aug 04, 2007

Jae rated it

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.

Each of the stories in Ghostwritten could stand on their own as a short story, but they are so intricately woven together, in ways that matter and in ways that don't. Mitchell...more

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Jun 22, 2009

Stop added it

Read the STOP SMILING interview with author David Mitchell.

Q&A: David Mitchell
by Steve Finbow

David Mitchell’s most recent novel, Black Swan Green, was shortlisted for the 2006 Costa Novel Award, Quill Book Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region Best Book). His three previous novels — Ghostwritten, number9dream and Cloud Atlas — were hugely ambitious in scope, drawing comparisons to the works of Murakami Haruki and Italo Calvino. David Mitchell tak...more

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Nov 12, 2011

Brian O'grady rated it

I found myself mildly annoyed by Mitchell's tendency to shoehorn expository language into dialogue, and some of the connections between the narrations are a little hamfisted, which distract from the story itself. Still, the story is beautifully imagined and wonderfully rambling.

One note: I think the frequent comparisons to Murakami are a disservice to both writers. Both are strong on story, and they both like the weaving-multiple-narratives approach (a category in which they're not al...more

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Apr 26, 2011

Steve rated it

With Ghostwritten you catch glimpses and sometimes even longer scenes of the feature-length greatness that’s to come in Cloud Atlas. This was Mitchell’s publishing debut. As may be true of many first works, he could barely contain all that he wanted to say. It was chock full of people, places and ideas. He gave himself nine very different vehicles for addressing the question of why things happen as they do. The settings of the nine stories span Asia, Europe, and the US. Good, bad, young, o...moreWith Ghostwritten you catch glimpses and sometimes even longer scenes of the feature-length greatness that’s to come in Cloud Atlas. This was Mitchell’s publishing debut. As may be true of many first works, he could barely contain all that he wanted to say. It was chock full of people, places and ideas. He gave himself nine very different vehicles for addressing the question of why things happen as they do. The settings of the nine stories span Asia, Europe, and the US. Good, bad, young, old, East, West – it’s all there, with different tones for each. They connect often in incidental ways. For instance, events in story A are probably not crucial antecedents in story B. But the links can be entertaining in the same way that recognizing characters Mitchell reused in his other novels can be. Seeing the likes of Neal Brose, Luisa Rey, and Timothy Cavendish, who reappear in later books in different phases of their lives, can be fun. It’s like when you watch Mystic Pizza years after it was filmed, and see Matt Damon in a minor role as the kid brother of the spoiled, rich guy. Anyway, these connections, and all connections, could be mere happenstance. Or they could be fate. Then ask yourself this: Is everything determined by sets of causal inputs? Is there a role for free will? Is choice an illusion? What are the drivers within the system, the control variates, the precipitants? What part is played by love, greed, altruism, or self-interest? Mitchell’s answers to these questions were sometimes oblique, but he deserves full credit for raising them.

Getting back to structure – the focus of many reviews – Mitchell’s hallmark inventiveness was in early evidence here. To be honest, though, I didn’t think the pieces were stitched together quite as effectively in this one as in Cloud Atlas. Still, there were signs of the mastery to come. He switched voices well, clearly recognized the importance of good storytelling, and only occasionally dragged when describing the many people and places. I thought the stories set in Tokyo and London were especially well done. Other characters were appealing, too, or if not that, at least interesting. The common thread of the parts I enjoyed most was that they were told without devices, in a straightforward, true-to-life kind of way. I felt in other parts of the book that the then less mature Mitchell relied too much on transmigrating spirits, sci-fi AI constructs, and other phenomena not of this world. The supernatural entities helped tie things together, but for my taste they took more away in cogency than they added in creativity. He was also more convincing with the nobler traits. The young sax player in love was so much better drawn than the terrorist who was brainwashed. Thank you, David, for that.

I’ll sum up my experience reading this with a reference to Keith Jarrett. He’s the pianist that the young jazz buff in the Tokyo chapter appreciated for his improvisational skills. Jarrett will occasionally throw in little vocalized drones during his solos that can be a distraction. Despite this, you often get some of the best original work ever. And he just makes it all up.

With a rating of four I’m dropping a star, but not my membership in the Mitchell as Marvel Fan Club.
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Feb 05, 2011

Paul rated it

Shelves: fiction

I have previously reviewed two David Mitchell novels: Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green. With both, I was most impressed by structure. With Ghostwritten, now somewhat used to Mitchell's looping, interwoven way of structuring a story, I was most impressed by his mingling of supernatural and science fiction plot lines. A free-floating intelligence inhabits a series of human bodies as it seeks to learn its origins; later, a mathematically-created artificial intelligence thwarts our increasingly co...more

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Oct 23, 2010

Amy rated it

Shelves: read-in-2009

I love this book. I love this book so much that when I finished it I had to lay there and think about it for a while. I love this book so much that I went out and bought a copy for me and a copy for my mother. I love this book so much that I can't even begin to write a proper review of this book because I just start to gush.

Ghostwritten is about the macrocosm of the world and the microcosm of our lives. Yes, the separate parts are seemingly disparate stories that link up in quiet, subt...more

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Sep 20, 2010

Parksy rated it

4.5
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Very cool. He does an amazing job weaving a bunch of related stories into one over sweeping story. Each of his themes and stories are very interesting in their own right!

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Amazon.com
"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 inve...more4.5
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Very cool. He does an amazing job weaving a bunch of related stories into one over sweeping story. Each of his themes and stories are very interesting in their own right!

------------------------

Amazon.com
"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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
Nine disparate but interconnected tales (and a short coda) in Mitchell's impressive debut examine 21st-century notions of community, coincidence, causality, catastrophe and fate. Each episode in this mammoth sociocultural tapestry is related in the first person, and set in a different international locale. The gripping first story introduces Keisuke Tanaka, aka Quasar, a fanatical Japanese doomsday cultist who's on the lam in Okinawa after completing a successful gas attack in a Tokyo subway. The links between Quasar and the novel's next narrator, Satoru Sonada, a teenage jazz aficionado, are tenuous at first. Both are denizens of Tokyo; both tend toward nearly monomaniacal obsessiveness; both went to the same school (albeit at different times) and shared a common teacher, the crass Mr. Ikeda. As the plot progresses, however, the connections between narrators become more complex, richly imaginative and thematically suggestive. Key symbols and metaphors repeat, mutating provocatively in new contexts. Innocuous descriptions accrue a subtle but probing irony through repetition; images of wild birds taking flight, luminous night skies and even bloody head wounds implicate and involve Mitchell's characters in an exquisitely choreographed dance of coincidence, connection and fluid, intuitive meanings. Other performers include a corrupt but (literally) haunted Hong Kong lawyer; an unnamed, time-battered Chinese tea-shop proprietress; a nomadic, disembodied intelligence on a voyage of self-discovery through Mongolia; a seductive and wily Russian art thief; a London-based musician, ghostwriter and ne'er-do-well; a brilliant but imperiled Irish physicist; and a loud-mouthed late-night radio-show host who unwittingly brushes with a global cyber-catastrophe. Already a sensation on its publication in England, Mitchell's wildly variegated story can be abstruse and elusive in its larger themes, but the gorgeous prose and vibrant, original construction make this an accomplishment not to be missed. 5-city author tour.(less)

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Sep 05, 2010

David rated it

Recommends it for: Brit Lit fans

Shelves: british-literature

This is one of the best books I've read in about ten years. It is difficult for me to be surprised by fiction anymore because I have been a reader for over forty years but in this case Ghostwritten has managed to do just that.

There are flaws in this wonderfully executed work. Mostly when he leaves the literary path of character and style and delves into the forbidding waters of politics, economics, banking, physics, ethics, and philosophy in general. In some cases the answers he gives ...more

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Jul 10, 2010

Rhys Thomas rated it

· review of another edition

Whoa.

I'm starting to wonder if David Mitchell is actually human. In this book he talks about the Iraq War and imaginary weapons of massive destruction causing wars. And it was written in 1999!

Ghostwritten is a novel told in nine separate stories, all of which interweave and interlink in startling ways. But it is not the interlinking that is most impressive. It's the purity of each story. It's stunning.

One story is about a soul that has come untethered from i...more

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Apr 05, 2010

David Fenton rated it

Shelves: favorites

This was the first book I read by David Mitchell. I started reading it prior to a two-week holiday on Paxos in 2000 and finished it within days of arriving there. The book fell apart in the heat of the Greek summer sun as I took it everywhere just so I could read it in snatched moments. I simply couldn't bear to leave it behind.

It takes the form of a series of short stories, starting with one connected to the Aum Shinrikyo attack on the Tokyo underground in the mid-90s. Although eac...more

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Jun 10, 2009

Jessica rated it

I think this is the sort of book that really benefits from an immediate re-read, but it's a library book & I took so long getting through it the first time that I just want to give it back now.

I loved Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and Ghostwritten is similar in that each chapter is a self-contained story that slyly links back to the other stories. These stories take place all over the world & in different eras, but none stands completely alone. I love that, but what I loved even more abou...more

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Mar 20, 2011

Andrew rated it

Well, Love went to bed. It fucked, over and over, until it got sore-knob bored, quite frankly. Then Love looked around for something else to do, and it saw its lovely friends all having lovely babies. So Love decided to do the same, but Love kept having its periods, same as ever, however much it inseminated itself. So Love went to an infertility clinic, and discovered the truth. As far as I know Love’s stiff is there to this very day. And that, boys and girls, is the Story of What Happened to Lo...moreWell, Love went to bed. It fucked, over and over, until it got sore-knob bored, quite frankly. Then Love looked around for something else to do, and it saw its lovely friends all having lovely babies. So Love decided to do the same, but Love kept having its periods, same as ever, however much it inseminated itself. So Love went to an infertility clinic, and discovered the truth. As far as I know Love’s stiff is there to this very day. And that, boys and girls, is the Story of What Happened to Love.

***

At the recommendation of many, I recently picked up a copy of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, possibly the most well known of his works. Before cracking it open, I decided to do something I’ve never done for an author: I checked him out online. I’m glad I did. Mitchell, it seems, shares an interest of mine—the interlinking and weaving together of stories, characters and plotlines across not only one book, but several that, on the outside, would seem disconnected from one another. Without spoiling too many details for myself, it was easy to see that his characters were constructed legacies meant to carry ideas, themes and concepts across a body of work, rather than being constricted to simple one-shots or a more readily defined series of linked titles. As a direct result of this research, I decided to hold off on Cloud Atlas and start at the beginning, with Mitchell’s first book—Ghostwritten.

Divided into nine parts, Ghostwritten tracks several characters—a Japanese terrorist, a pair of young lovers in Tokyo, a distressed businessman in Hong Kong, the owner of a small tea shop at the base of a mountain, a disembodied spirit in Mongolia, a group of art thieves in Petersburg, a ghostwriter-cum-musician in London, a physicist on Clear Island, and a late-night radio host in New York—as their lives gradually intersect in increasingly more dramatic and world-changing ways.

The intersection of these characters, in the hands of a lesser writer, could feel like nothing more than a six-degrees-of-separation plot device. But these characters are evidence of a greater plan, which Mitchell has chosen to slowly divulge over the course of this book (and, ostensibly, in books to follow). Their connections are never forced or presented in an overtly clever way; rather they feed into one another with butterfly-effect ramifications, the extent of which can only be understood when the individual parts are looked at from a distance, the way one would only be able to understand the logic of a maze from a bird’s eye view.

Though the title of the book is not invoked until the seventh part, the theme of ghostwriting—of abdicating responsibility for the impact one leaves on the world—runs through all of the book’s plots and subsidiary themes: history, culture, art, economics, and warfare. While some parts are certainly stronger than others, with some characters unfortunately relegated to role of thematic ciphers, the impact of the cumulative whole is satisfying.

All in all, Ghostwritten is an intriguing read. It falters only when ideas trump character development and plot, but not significantly enough to dampen the impact of Mitchell’s creativity, or the quality of his multi-tonal writing.(less)

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Mar 02, 2009

Bob rated it

Nine 50-page vignettes narrated by wildly divergent characters and each connected to the prior in ways sometimes subtle and tangential, sometimes more overtly plot-driven. The opening section, narrated by a Japanese young man, seems to be trying to outdo Murakami at his own game; thereafter it touches down everywhere from an international art theft ring to the kind of science fiction that makes you infer a lot instead of telling you.

Overall the persistence of loose ends at the clos...more

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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, studying for a degree in English and American Literature followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature.

He lived f...moreLibrarian 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, studying for 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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