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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
EAN num: 9780375724503
ISBN number: 0375724508
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 448
Printing Date: October 09, 2001
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: October 09, 2001
Sale Popularity Level: 46363
Studio: Vintage
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Product Description:
David Mitchell's electrifying debut novel takes readers on a mesmerizing trek across a world of human experience through a series of ingeniously linked narratives.
Oblivious to the bizarre ways in which their lives intersect, nine characters-a terrorist in Okinawa, a record-shop clerk in Tokyo, a money-laundering British financier in Hong Kong, an old woman running a tea shack in China, a transmigrating 'noncorpum' entity seeking a human host in Mongolia, a gallery-attendant-cum-art-thief in Petersburg, a drummer in London, a female physicist in Ireland, and a radio deejay in New York-hurtle toward a shared destiny of astonishing impact. Like the book's one non-human narrator, Mitchell latches onto his host characters and invades their lives with parasitic precision, making Ghostwritten a sprawling and brilliant literary relief map of the modern world.
Amazon.com Review:
'What is real and what is not?' David Mitchell's Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts plays with precisely this question throughout its elaborately compartmentalized narrative. (That there are 10 chapters in this 9-part invention is just one more aspect of the author's mysterious schema.) With its multitude of voices and globe-girdling locations--Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Petersburg, London--this very 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 In the time one street guide is produced, it's already become out of date.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
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Rated by buyers 
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This book is overpowering - almost unendingly brilliant, exciting, interesting and frequently hilariously funny. It's very addictive - I couldn't put it down. For a very first novel, you can see the seeds of the genius which are fully realized later in "Cloud Atlas", a work of the very first order. Although much of it is a bit "pulpy" as opposed to "literary", the way the stories interconnect is consistently brilliant, and the book's themes are intertwined in an intricate mesh which completely works.
What are these themes? That we are all connected and interrelated, and yet the world is spiraling out of control. Sometimes the author has the writer actually state the theme of the book (this is done in Cloud Atlas too) - violating the writer's injunction to "show, don't tell", and yet it works here to bring the wildness down to focus, and to show that the writer is serious and has an important message to tell.
At the end you are left with the feeling that you have been seriously entertained, but also that you got something more out of it - for me a greater appreciation of the world, and how we are all connected. A tremendous work, and unlike many books which I find moving, an enormously entertaining book as well.
Rated by buyers 
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In order not to be as disappointed in this novel as was I, you should know from the start that it is actually a series of nine tangentially connected vignettes. The first-person narration of numerous characters was effectively done and enjoyable, but that does not, of itself, make for a good novel.
As the novel progressed, the dramatis personae swelled in number, each chapter unique in population from each other chapter but for an occasional reference. I was looking forward to enjoying all the actors being brought together to form a final, complete repertory company, and a final curtain.
It never happened. I had taken the authors references to phenomena in other chapters as indication that the novel would end with all the characters' individual angsts resolved in a unified catharsis uniting all the plot lines.
Wrong. These are basically unrelated stories.
Rated by buyers 
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Ghostwritten
Quasar, a doomsday cult member on the lamb after killing hundreds; Satoru, a young employee at a vintage record shop in Tokyo who has just spotted the love of his life; Neal, a Lawyer working for a firm in Hong Kong is running very late for a very important meeting while also dealing with the fear that his account full of laundered money is going to be discovered; A girl living in a Tea Shack on the path to the top of The Holy Mountain where a Buddhist Temple is located. History takes place around her as she lives her meager life selling noodles and Tea to tourist traveling to the temple with only her talking tree to provide comfort to her; A noncorpum (a bodiless entity who transmigrates from person to person by touch) body hops from person to person seeking the origin of a story it thinks will lend insight to what it is and where it came from; Margarita Latunsky, works in an art gallery in Petersburg as part of a team of thieves whose aim is to steal the most valuable works from the gallery. She goes with the plan while dreaming about the future: Marco, a musician, a writer and a shameless player has just woken up in the bed of his latest conquest. After being invited to leave Marco heads to the house of his current ghost writing project while contemplating life and the future; Dr. Mo Muntervary , a physicist flees to her home in Ireland attempting to spend time with her family before her former employer the CIA catches up with her; Bat, a late night DJ in New York is about to receive a call that will change his life and the lives of everyone.
Each character is the narrator of his/her own story which is loosely connected in one way or another to the others.
As with all of Mitchell's work, this book isn't for everyone and this isn't David Mitchell's best work. Having read Mitchell's work before it should have been obvious that it wouldn't be. Mitchell's writing can be a little meandering and his stories and characters need time to develop. Once they do, the novels of his I have read turn into great reads. This book however being only 426 pages and being broken into 9 different stories never really gave any of the characters or stories time to evolve into greatness and instead delivered something a little bit mediocre.
The good: Mitchell's writing is still there and that is always enjoyable. The concept of the book was very good, it just never developed as fully as it should have.
The Bad: The stories were a little too meandering with not enough time devoted to any of the stories or characters for them to ever reach greatness. This pushed the book to being almost boring.
Overall: Not a terrible book to read. If you are a fan of Mitchell's you will probably find some enjoyment in this book. If you have never read Mitchell do not start with this book. Try starting with "Black Swan Green: A Novel" or "Cloud Atlas: A Novel" first.
Rated by buyers -
This is the very first book that I ever read, finished, started over at the beginning, and read straight through again. That's not to say it is the best book I've ever read, but dang it is good. I didn't want it to be over, and I wanted to go back through and make all the connections. I'm sure I'm still missing some.
If you liked Cloud Atlas, you will like this novel, too. Like Cloud Atlas, each of the stories in Ghostwritten could stand on their own as a short story, but they are so intricately woven together, in ways that matter and in ways that don't. Mitchell is an artist and craftsman. I love his writing style, so full of humour and insight. His characters are as real as any I've read.
Rated by buyers -
"The art of memory is the art of ghostwriting."
GhostWritten is Mitchell's debut novel and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Subtitled A Novel in Nine Parts, this book is a pioneer in reimagining the form of the novel. It not only contains some of the most memorable and colourful characters ever committed to writing but all of them weave in and out of each other's lives in completely unexpected ways.
The characters are:
A lawyer racing to catch a ferry whilst his suffers from a divorce and the ghost of a child in his apartment. A spirit who hops from soul to soul across Mongolia in search of its origins. A computer program which argues moral philosophy with a radio talk-show host (in between describing its incredible aerial views from a satellite) on the eve of World War III. A Russian art-thief forced to tolerate the sexual advances of her curator boss. A cult member tasked with an act of terrorism involving the Tokyo underground. A drummer in London who's going to have a hell of a night at the roulette tables. A Chinese mountainside noodle-shop owner who suffers under the warlords, then the Kuomintang, then the Japanese and then the Reds. A Japanese jazz shop assistant who struggles with very first love and the prospect of losing his beloved failing a crucial decision. A quantum physicist who's trying to escape the clutches of the United States military.
All the above, intertwining and linking. Some closely, some merely in passing. David Mitchell's GhostWritten is like a short-stories collection, only not. Most short stories involve either a single story-teller telling different stories or many authors telling their own stories. This book felt one story ripped and stretched into almost disconnected by a few authors who each tried to put a little of themselves into each chapter.
In a word, Ghostwritten feels like it's been ghost-written. By ghost-writers seeking to have their true powers unleashed.
"Lunatics are writers whose works write them". Lunacy as a literary phenomenon, eh? Now that's food for thought. Read Mitchell and have a feast.
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