Am I the only one who had to restart this novel three times? It is set in a very unfamiliar place (the artificial island of Dejima, off Nagasaki) in an unfamiliar time (late 18th century), and filled with characters from all kinds of places, with all kinds of stations in life--in short, a bit har...
Mitchell is a virtuoso writer, so basically cannot construct an infelicitous sentence or boring story. But here he borrows elements from "Ghostbusters II" (evil spirit in a painting), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (in a pinch, a soul takes refuge in someone else's body and must later emerge) an...
In Memory of Double BillsI saw a lot of double bills in the heyday of independent cinemas.They weren’t just two current release films that had been packaged to eke out some extra dollars for the exhibitor. They were carefully curated films that shared a theme and formed part of a whole season of ...
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,...
'Maybe the meaning of life lies in looking for it.'Like the song by John Lennon which inspired the title of this novel, David Mitchell plays with the fusion of dreams and reality as he sends the reader spiraling through the chimerical passages of Number9dream. This second novel is a departure ...
'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 v...