[TABLE="class: tborder, width: 100%, align: center"] [TD="class: alt2, width: 175, bgcolor: #F4F2ED"]Vui lòng đăng nhập hoặc đăng ký để xem link Viện sĩ Tham gia ngày: Jun 2008 Bài gởi: 828 Xin cảm ơn: 9 Được cảm ơn 16,466 lần trong 820 bài [/TD] [TD="class: alt1, bgcolor: #F8F7F4"] Ghostwritten (1999) - David Mitchell [HR][/HR]Ghostwritten - David Mitchell Amazon.co.uk Review "What is real and what is not?": David Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts, plays with this question throughout its "parts". (That there are 10 sections is just part of the mystery of this book's schema.) Told through a range of voices, scattered across the globe--Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Petersburg, London--Ghostwritten has been described as a "firework display, shooting off in a dozen different narrative directions" (Adam Lively). Certainly, Mitchell offers his readers a vertiginous, sometimes seductive, display of persona and place. "Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo," he writes in "Okinawa", the first section in the novel. "It's so big that nobody really knows where it stops." That sense of the global extension of the (post)modern city, the networks-- cultural, technological, phantasmagoric--to which it gives rise, is one key to this story of a Japanese death cult devoted to purging the "unclean" (gas attacks on the metro). "No, in Tokyo you have to make your place inside your head": that's how this immense world gets smaller, more subjective, more mad, as the narrator, Mr Kobayashi, sheds his "old family of the skin" to join a new "family of the spirit". It's a common theme. "I'm this person, I'm this person, I'm that person, I'm that person too," chants the voice of "Hong Kong", in the second section of the book. "No wonder it's all such a fucking mess." Neal's talking about his world, his life as a Hong Kong trader--"he's 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 his readers a huge, but fragmentary, portmanteau which builds in the links between its parts--aching bodies, reality police, the "ghost" writer in the machine of contemporary life, its mad, comic, and cosmic voices--without quite convincing you that they really do come together. -- Vicky Lebeau [/TD] [/TABLE]
Number9Dream (2001) - David Mitchell [TABLE="class: tborder, width: 100%, align: center"] [TD="class: alt2, width: 175, bgcolor: #F4F2ED"]Vui lòng đăng nhập hoặc đăng ký để xem link Viện sĩ Tham gia ngày: Jun 2008 Bài gởi: 828 Xin cảm ơn: 9 Được cảm ơn 16,466 lần trong 820 bài [/TD] [TD="class: alt1, bgcolor: #F8F7F4"] Number9Dream (2001) - David Mitchell [HR][/HR]Number9Dream - David Mitchell Eiji Miyake arrives in a sprawling Japanese metropolis to track down the father he has never met. But the city is a mapless place if you are 18, broke, and the only person you can trust is John Lennon. His 8-week hunt plunges into the hinterland between the city and the mind, where a Polish art movie is no less real than the coffee in front of him and letters from an Imperial Army soldier are signposts to next week, and where he crosses paths with numerologists, staion masters, gateballers, hostesses, organ harvesters and insane chefs. Philosophical, colourful, sometimes violent, this is a dazzlingly inventive novel about image, control and memory. [/TD] [/TABLE]
Cloud Atlas (2004) - David Mitchell [TABLE="class: tborder, width: 100%, align: center"] [TD="class: alt2, width: 175, bgcolor: #F4F2ED"]Vui lòng đăng nhập hoặc đăng ký để xem link Viện sĩ Tham gia ngày: Jun 2008 Bài gởi: 828 Xin cảm ơn: 9 Được cảm ơn 16,466 lần trong 820 bài [/TD] [TD="class: alt1, bgcolor: #F8F7F4"] Cloud Atlas (2004) - David Mitchell [HR][/HR]Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell Amazon.co.uk Review It's hard not to become ensnared by words beginning with the letter B, when attempting to describe Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's third novel. It's a big book, for start, bold in scope and execution--a bravura literary performance, possibly. (Let's steer clear of breathtaking for now.) Then, of course, Mitchell was among Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and his second novel number9dreamwas shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Characters with birthmarks in the shape of comets are a motif; as are boats. Oh and one of the six narratives strands of the book--where coincidentally Robert Frobisher, a young composer, dreams up "a sextet for overlapping soloists" entitled Cloud Atlas--is set in Belgium, not far from Bruges. (See what I mean?) Structured rather akin to a Chinese puzzle or a set of Matrioshka dolls, there are dazzling shifts in genre and voice and the stories leak into each other with incidents and people being passed on like batons in a relay race. The 19th-century journals of an American notary in the Pacific that open the novel are subsequently unearthed 80 years later on by Frobisher in the library of the ageing, syphilitic maestro he's trying to fleece. Frobisher's waspish letters to his old Cambridge crony, Rufus Sexsmith, in turn surface when Rufus, (by the 1970s a leading nuclear scientist) is murdered. A novelistic account of the journalist Luisa Rey's investigation into Rufus' death finds its way to Timothy Cavendish, a London vanity publisher with an author who has an ingenious method of silencing a snide reviewer. And in a near-dystopian Blade Runner-esque future, a genetically engineered fast food waitress sees a movie based on Cavendish's unfortunate internment in a Hull retirement home. (Cavendish himself wonders how a director called Lars might wish to tackle his plight). All this is less tricky than it sounds, only the lone "Zachary" chapter, told in Pacific Islander dialect (all "dingos'n'ravens", "brekker" and "f'llowin'"s) is an exercise in style too far. Not all the threads quite connect but nonetheless Mitchell binds them into a quite spellbinding rumination on human nature, power, oppression, race, colonialism and consumerism. --Travis Elborough [/TD] [/TABLE]
Black Swan Green (2006) - David Mitchell [TABLE="class: tborder, width: 100%, align: center"] [TD="class: alt2, width: 175, bgcolor: #F4F2ED"]Vui lòng đăng nhập hoặc đăng ký để xem link Viện sĩ Tham gia ngày: Jun 2008 Bài gởi: 828 Xin cảm ơn: 9 Được cảm ơn 16,466 lần trong 820 bài [/TD] [TD="class: alt1, bgcolor: #F8F7F4"] Black Swan Green (2006) - David Mitchell [HR][/HR]Black Swan Green - David Mitchell From highly acclaimed two-time Man Booker finalist David Mitchell comes a glorious, sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new. In his previous novels, David Mitchell dazzled us with his narrative scope and his virtuosic command of multiple voices and stories. The New York Times Book Review said, "Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine, can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across [Cloud Atlas's] every page." Black Swan Green inverts the telescopic vision of Cloud Atlas to track a single year in what is, for 13-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the 13 chapters create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. Pointed, funny, profound, left field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell's subtlest yet most accessible achievement to date. [/TD] [/TABLE]
