Conversational Reading

Download Books from the Library

Six Bay Area libraries are now allowing their patrons to download audio and e-books.

Palo Alto and six other library systems last week launched a free service, which will let library patrons download hundreds of titles in an online digital library.

Library customers can download the books to their computer, personal digital assistant or their cell phone. Or, users can put an audio version on their MP3 player. Advantages include being able to check them out from the Internet and not having to worry about late fees. After three weeks, the log-in for the book expires.

SFCBR Thumbnail

San Francisco Chronicle Book Review Thumbnail
Fiction (7 full): Library of America #155 (H.P. Lovecraft; reviewed by Alan Cheuse); The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme (Andrei Makine; reviewed by Chandrahas Choudhury); Stop that Girl (Elizabeth McKenzie; reviewed by Claire Dederer); The Devil's Wind (Richard Rayner; reviewed by Tom Nolan); A Thread of Grace (Mary Doria Russell; reviewed by Malena Watrous); Angry Black White Boy (Adam Mansbach; reviewed by Buzz Poole); Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (Amy Rosenthal; reviewed by Peter Hyman)

Non-Fiction (2 full, 1 capsule): Creating Their Own Image (Lisa E. Farrington; reviewed by Dodie Bellamy); Perfect Madness (Judith Warner; reviewed by Regan McMahon); Desire Street (Jed Horne; reviewed by Dena Smolek)

Poetry (1 capsule): The Red Gaze (Barbara Guest; reviewed Alexandra Yurkovsky)

The Good

There’s some pretty solid work this week. First off is Dodie Bellamy’s review of Creating Their Own Image, a history of African-American woman artists. Bellamy artfully elucidates Farrington’s (the author’s) main arguments without sounding pedantic or confusing. They’re fairly interesting remarks. Farrington charts follows the art of African-American women, from slave times through the present, arguing that their art suffers from always being compared to what black art “should” be (i.e. “strength, rhythm, optimism, simplicity”). Farrington also deals with cultural “tourism,” wherein patrons of the arts patronize minority artists by treating their work as a chance to “experience the Other, whose difference . . . promises delight and amusement.” A good review that makes me want to check out the book. 

Claire Dederer’s review of Stop that Girl is also good. Dederer first expresses her frustration with the “plucky, quirky young girl” coming-of-age genre before showing how Stop that Girl transcends these frustrations. It’s a nice review that gives a flavor of the book, succinctly explains its plot, and even gets into a little textual analysis. My only qualm is when Dederer, in the last sentence, proclaims that Elizabeth McKenzie has “single-handedly reinvigorated the coming-of-age genre.” I’ve read the book, and while I agree it’s a good book, that’s a wee bit extreme.

Buzz Poole’s review of Angry Black White Boy is excellent. The first 3 grafs satisfyingly introduce the author’s previous works and wrap up the overall plot (satire: white boy goes to college in New York, commits crimes, gets confused for black). The rest of the review picks apart some of the book’s more interesting details and subplots and explains how the book “incisively cuts to the heart of the issue of race in America today by offering up [white boy] Macon as the voice of black angst.” The review makes the book sound wild, witty, and thoughtful.

Malena Watrous’s review of A Thread of Grace has a knockout first graf: The book’s main character tells an Italian priest “bless me father, for I have sinned” and then explains that his sin is murdering 91,867 people. The priest’s reply: “God forgive you. I can’t.” The rest of the review is just as good. 

The Bad

Leading off the bad is Alan Cheuse’s purely atrocious review of the new H.P. Lovecraft Library of America volume. After a lengthy discussion of Lovecraft’s appearance, and some unimportant details from his life, we are 5 grafs in (halfway through the review) before Cheuse even discusses the man’s work. But you know what? Cheuse shouldn’t have bothered. He tells us about Lovecraft’s “continual deployment of a single effect” (what exactly does that mean? I couldn’t say since Cheuse doesn’t) and uses the horrible pun “Poe-etic.” He also labels Lovecraft the “Herman Melville of horror” without telling us what the hell that means; also, despite that characterization Cheuse repeated trivializes and criticizes Lovecraft’s work. I guess he must not like Melville much.

Regan McMahon’s review of Judith Warner's Perfect Madness only does half the job. The book is about the “Mommy Myth” (which Warner's Newsweek cover story discussed last week); roughly that women are expected to be perfect mothers, raise perfect children, and have careers while still satisfying their men as paragons of femininity. McMahon explains that Warner contrasts this with France where women would regard such mothering as psycho. While I’m sympathetic to Warner’s complaints and think France (and Europe) has much sanity to offer to America’s culture, I’m a little bothered by McMahon’s irresponsible lack of skepticism. Never once does she ask that Warner prove (other than anecdotally) that France is really a safe-mother-haven that America should emulate. Grafs like this are a disservice to a reviewer’s job: “Warner lays out the economic and legislative factors that have increased mother’ anxiety level . . . The Reagan Revolution in the ‘80s upped the ante on rugged individualism. Changes in the tax structure have benefited the wealthy rather than the middle class. Reductions in public school funding have led parents to go into debt.” Well, maybe. But McMahon seems a little too willing to accept this rather obvious explanation wholesale, without telling us what’s important: does Warner actually prove any of this or only assert it?

Peter Hyman’s review of Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (by Amy Rosenthal) is about a fictitious autobiogrpahy that's structured like an encyclopeida. It's also home to this week’s most psycho remark: “While one might be tempted to call [Rosenthal's] selections random, all reference guides are essentially arbitrary. Thumb through any edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and you’ll find a listing for Stalin, Josef. But what makes the inclusion of the Soviet dictator any more important than, say, Rosenthal’s addition of “Spilled Linguine” in the “S” section of her encyclopedia?” Ummm, how about that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions and was, arguably, worse than Hitler while spilled linguine is, well, pasta on the floor. Okay, I mean I sort of get what Hyman’s trying to say, but I don’t think a murderous dictator is the example you want to use to make this point. Not to mention, Hyman repeatedly undercuts the exact sentiment expressed in that odd quote with the question of “why should we care” about minutia from Rosenthal’s life. Neither here nor there, the review is just a strange collection of quotes form the book.

Etc

This week’s back page is books “For the Younger Reader.” A roundup of teen chick-lit includes a book by Melissa de la Cruz with a rather provocative cover--a bunch of skinny midriffs in bikinis--which the reviewer doesn’t bother to comment on. Personally, I would have been a little concerned about what this cover says to the younger female audience (especially with the mommy book reviewed in these pages), but that’s just me. 

Really, though, other than the fact that there are actual books on the back page this week (instead of the weather report that we got last week), I couldn’t give a crap about books “For the Younger Reader.” Sorry, I just don’t care.

Howlers: There are two this week. #1--From Tom Nolan’s review by of The Devil’s Wind we get the unexplained term “Schapters.” I imagine this is a misprint and should have simply been “chapters.” #2--From the same review we get “His marriage doesn’t stop Valentine . . .” You would think we’re talking about 2 people here, Valentine and the married guy. Sorry, Valentine is the married guy. It should read “Valentine’s marriage doesn’t stop him . . .”

Overall

Despite some problems, this edition is a step up from last week’s. The books reviewed this go-around were a lot more relevant and interesting to me than last week’s bunch. Also the reviews, in general, were better. However, that Cheuse review of Lovecraft is staring out at me from the front page like a big wet spot on the front of my professor’s pants. B with Cheuse’s review, B+ without.
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True to his word, Ed has reinstated the San Tanenhaus brownie watch, and it's back with a vengeance. It even includes an illustration of a brownie (either that, or someone needs a new sponge for the sink).

Style

Like the rest of us, I read a lot of short essays/articles online. One of the writers whose name has stuck in my head (in a good way) is Ben Yagoda. Thus, when I was shopping for a thesaurus last weekend and happened to come across his book The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing, I had to pick it up for a perusal. After a short perusal, I had to buy it. 

As the title implies, Yagoda’s book is about style in writing. I just finished reading the book’s introductory essay and, quite naturally for a book about style, the introduction argues why style is important. Basically, Yagoda’s argument is “it’s not what you say but how you say it.”

Style in the deepest sense is not a set of techniques, devices, and habits of expression that just happen to be associated with a particular person, but a presentation or representation of something essential about him or her . . . “Our style betrays us,” Robert Burton observed in The Anatomy of Melancholy. 

And for all you Strunk and White haters out there (you know who you are):

I emerged with a paradox: as important as personal style is in writing, it is strangely overlooked in books that purport to be able style in writing. Exhibit 1 is an 84-page volume called The Elements of Style. 

Heh.

Yagoda’s main point jibed with my own personal observations. Most great novels do not unleash onto the world some profound, unheralded truth a la Kant or Einstein (some do, but usually not); more commonly, great novels do one of two things: 

1. They point out something which is somewhere between obvious and earthshattering--the kind of thing that is smart, but seems fairly obvious once it’s been pointed out (kind of like when you slap your head and utter “why didn’t I think of that!?”)

2. They reaffirm something fairly trivial (e.g. true love is rare and special; bad people are usually not evil, but weak; politics is corrupt)

Yagoda’s introduction helped me complete my thought. Often in great literature, the style is more significant than what’s being said. Great writers can get away with saying mundane things because it’s their style that is saying the interesting stuff. It’s the style that leaves a book open to interpretation, that fills a work with its uniquely Borgesian (or Orwellian, or Austerian, etc) feel. And, of course, as Yagoda says, to a certain extent this style is just a reflection of who the author is, i.e. not a conscious element the author purposely brings to the text.

I’d like to extend to blogs the argument Yagoda makes for style in books. Often a good blog is good simply because of the blogger’s style. I don’t want to invalidate the very often intelligent remarks made at many blogs I visit (and I do believe that content is important in blogs), but let’s face it, there’s only a certain number of things to say about, for instance, Tom Wolfe’s book tanking. I think that, sometimes, the way you say Tom Wolfe’s book sucked is as important as the fact that you’re saying Tom Wolfe’s book sucked.

This is especially important since style does reveal things about the author, and blogging is a very personal medium.

Some Observations on The Siege of Krishnapur

Some Observations on J.G. Farrell's 1973 Booker-winning The Siege of Krishnapur

1. Thank God the New York Review of Books brought this back into print.

2. Mash-ups are popular. Think EM Forester combined with Ernest Hemingway. With a dash of pomo ironic humor.

3. Speaking of. It's been said that history loves ironies. I'll say that J.G. Farrell loves history's ironies. This book is full of them. Never smug or overt, mind you, but they're there peering out at you like eyes in the wallpaper. And they're hilarious.

4. This book was written in 1973, but it sounds as though it was written in the late 19th century. Farrell did extensive research through letters and diaries of the Brits who actually lived and endured the Siege of Krishnapur, during the larger Sepoy rebellion in India in 1857. His narrator captures the tone and sound of a previous era, but appears aware of the history of the 20th century. It's an interesting combination, but done it a totally subdued way which strikes the right notes.

5. I wouldn't call this historical fiction. Certainly, it's a dramatization of what might have happened in Krishnapur in 1857, but it's just as good as any period drama. It works as literature first. Farrell is using the setting and the culture of the time to better elucidate his characters and his plot.

6. "Krishnapur" is a word that I always think I'm misspelling, but never am.

7. There's some amazing characterization in this book. All the major characters feel spot-on, and Farrell conveys so much with so little. To-wit, here's the Collector, the sort of head bureaucrat during the siege:

Later, while he was drinking tea at the table in his bedroom with three young subalterns from Captainganj a succession of musket balls came through the winder, attracted by the oil-lamp . . . one, two, three and then a fourth, one after another. The officers dived smartly under the table, leaving the Collector to drink his tea alone. After a while they re-emerged smiling sheepishly, deeply impressed by the Collector's sang-froid. Realizing that he had forgotten to sweeten his tea, the Collector dipped a teaspoon into the sugar-bowl. But then he found that he was unable to keep the sugar on the spoon: as quickly as he scooped it up, it danced off again. It was clear that he would never get it from the sugar-bowl to the cup without scattering it over the table, so in the end he was obliged to push the sugar away and drink his tea unsweetened.

There's something that just gets me about that passage. The Collector resigned to his sugarless tea, enduring the siege with a straight face, almost bored with the musket balls except that he can't keep his body from the fear of evisceration. He's trying to be diginified and British, but he's also resigned to the fact that he's not quite pulling it off, but he's still trying to create the appearance of it. It's so the Collector. All of Farrell's characters are like this.

8. One of the major themes is how Britain's smug superiority hijacked it in the end and made it vulnerable to ossification (there's this great scene where the Collector is literally trapped in the British flag, has it wrapped around him and is flailing to get it off, which pretty much sums up the book). That's a lesson that transcends the historical situation of Britain in 1857 and is really, really pertinent to the globe's current superpower.

9. It's also a very human drama. These people are trapped in the fort for months, so obviously if there isn't some interesting inter-personal stuff going on the book is going to get stale pretty quick. It's all very good--the young British men (who, in their 20s have never seen a woman naked). The men and their unbearably paternalistic tone w/r/t/ women (but Farrell makes them more tragic than chauvinistic--it works real well). The women, trapped by the wealthy society that infantilized them. The natives, representing other and alien, and the Brits who can't really understand why they would resist being made British (again, ring any bells?). Suffice to say that the siege affects the characters in major, but totally realistic and satisfying ways. It's a joy to watch the transformations unfold and Farrell handles it masterfully.

Review--Stop That Girl by Elizabeth McKenzie

Parts of Elizabeth McKenzie's new "novel in stories," Stop that Girl, have appeared in the lit journals ZYZZYVA and The Threepenny Review, as well as the anthology The Best American Nonrequired Reading. That's some pretty good company, and this company creates high expectations for McKenzie's first novel, but Stop that Girl doesn't disappoint. Here's my review.

God's Gym

God's Gym, as reviewed in the Denver Post, sounds good.

C.S. Lewis once said that for stories to be stories, they must be a series of events; yet at the same time it must be understood that this series is only a net to catch something that has no sequence, but rather something more like a state or quality.

John Edgar Wideman has struggled with this hard truth that the means of fiction are always at war with its ends throughout his writing career. In "Brothers and Keepers" (1984), he insisted, "people and events take shape not in orderly, chronological sequence but in relation to other forces and events, tangled skeins of necessity and interdependence and chance."

In his new group of 10 stories, "God's Gym," as in earlier collections, "Damballah" (1981), "Fever" (1989) and "The Stories of John Edgar Wideman" (1992), Wideman often rejects linear narrative for a lyrical form of meditation and improvisation characteristic of the jazz riff, a form that derives from the repetitive call-and-response patterns of West African music.

SF Chronicle Book Review Thumbnail

Quite frankly, TEV's LATBR thumbnail was a great idea. Why didn't it occur to anyone earlier to rate your home paper's Sunday book review? Suffice to say, I'm jumping on the bandwagon. My local book review of record is the San Francisco Chronicle's Book Review, so here's my take. Hopefully, I'll be able to do this every Sunday.

Contents
Fiction--5 full, 2 capsule. Full: Nice Big American Baby (Judy Budnitz, reviewed by Sarah Coleman); K. (Robert Calasso, reviewed by Troy Jollimore); The Ha-Ha (Dave King, reviewed by Malena Watrous); Collected Stories (Carol Shields, reviewed by Christine Thomas);  Jass (David Fulmer, reviewed by David Abrams). Capsule:  Give Me (Songs for Lovers) (Irina Denezhkina, reviewed by Jami Attenberg); Johnny Too Bad (John Dufrense, reviewed by Francesca Wodtke).
Non-Fiction--5 full.  History on Trial (Deborah E. Lipstadt, reviewed by Yonatan Lupu); Strange Angel (George Pendle, reviewed by Christina Eng);  Wedding of the Waters (Peter L. Bernstein, reviewed by Chuck Leddy); The Confident  Hope of a Miracle (Neil Hanson, reviewed by Richard Zimler); Gods and Monsters (Peter Biskind, reviewed by James Sullivan).

The Good
It's nice to see the Chron giving more space to fiction than non-fiction. In addition to that, their picks were pretty good. I happened to read  Judy Budnitz's short story "Miracle" in The New Yorker, and it was a striking experience that I still remember well. The review of Budnitz's collection is thoughtful and indicates that the book contains many more short stories in the same magical, twisted realm.

It was also nice to see The Ha-Ha getting it's name in another major review, meaning that it will stick on the front shelf at bookstores for at least another week.  It was a good review that conveyed the gist of the book's narrative and showed why the book is a noteworthy spin on a tried and true plot.

The review of Shields's collected stories struck the right notes--since most of these stories were previously published, the review focused on contextualizing them w.r.t. Shields's entire oeuvre and providing some general information about Shields's career. Lastly, on the non-fiction side, Leddy's review of Wedding the Waters was just what I wanted: it told me why I needed to read a book about the Erie Canal, provided some startling facts, and gave me a bit of a narrative.

The Bad
The non-fiction was a weak point this week. With several books already documenting the trial of Deborah Lipstadt versus Holocaust-denier David Irving, I don't see why Lipstadt's needed to be reviewed. The only reason I can think of is that Lipstadt, writing about her own trial, would bring a unique perspective, but the reviewer barely mentions this point.

Likewise, Strange Angel seems like a missed opportunity. It's about George Parsons, a man who, at the age of 25, became the first government-sanctioned  builder of rockets in America. On top of this, he was heavily interested in the occult. So why does the review  ramble on with dull facts from the man's childhood? Only a review like this one could parenthetically state that Parsons died at 37 in an explosion at his home instead of devoting an entire paragraph to relating this intriguing, atypical death that is even more interesting in light of the fact that the man pioneered rocketry.

The review of K. starts off well with a summary of Calasso's interesting career, but peters out toward the end with bland criticism instead of illumination,  as does the review of  The Confident Hope of a Miracle.

Etc
The worst thing about the Chronicle's Sunday Book Review is the last page. Why? It has no last page--the back page is a freaking weather forecast! With only 6 pages in the entire review (one of which is devoted to a voluminous "events listing" and letters) you can't be sticking the weather up on the back page. Throw that shit in Style or Classifieds, or some crap like that.

On the plus side, the review is advertisement-free, and includes a couple of nifty features--"Editors Recommend" (which seems to add and lose a couple of books each week, blog-style) and the Bay Area's non-fiction, fiction, and paperback bestsellers (as well as reprinting the Times' national lists).

Rating
Overall, this isn't too bad. There's certainly room for improvement, but, on the other hand, there was nothing that seriously pissed me off. It was a nice mix of books with at least a few thoughtful reviews. It would be nice to see a couple extra pages, a better selection of non-fiction, and a little better editing. B-

Saturday

I haven't yet read all of Ian McEwan's new novel, Saturday, but after reading this post, I feel like I have. This is an excellent, thoughtful, researched, and above all, provocative meditation on McEwan's new novel. It's some excellent blogging. (link via RSB)

The number9dream/Mitchell Post

number9dream
David Mitchell
2001, Random House

As I have not yet read any Haruki Murakami, I did not realize how much Mitchell emulates Murakami in  number9dream.  The Complete Review and the SF Chronicle, among others, have set me straight.

CR: "number9dream doesn't just invite comparison to Murakami Haruki's work, it demands it. Mitchell is obviously and openly following in the footsteps of the master. His characters, their concerns, and what happens to them are all Murikamiesque. The quirky occurrences, the strong but lost girls, the ominous forces all about are all pages out of Murakami's books. Everything one might find (and has found) in a Murakami-novel is there: "Goatwriter" tales interspersed in the story, Beatles-songs (and a lot of John Lennon), a few popular-literary titles, and even a diary from World War II."

SFC: "While Mitchell inserts an outright reference to Murakami's novel "The Wind- Up Bird Chronicle," the Murakami touch is also evident in the inclusion of dreams, stories within stories and other texts (a diary that details a secret Japanese mission during World War II, for instance), as well as in the structure of "Number9Dream." Essentially, it's a quest/pseudo-detective novel, much like Murakami's "Chronicle," Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" and, more recently, Colson Whitehead's "The Intuitionist," in which a hero must decipher clues and make his way in a confusing not-what-it-seems world."

Although I can't speak to Murakami, I can I can be quite the mighty windbag regarding another author Mitchell is often compared to, Thomas Pynchon. Honestly though, I don't see that many simularities; other than the fact that they both can loosely be described as hysterical realists, I don't see too much that Pynchon and Mitchell have in common.

Here's the difference: Mitchell's strong suit is  ventriloquism. Pynchon's strong suit is fucking your head the fuck up. For instance, let's compare quotes from Lot 49 and number9dream:

Pynchon:  "She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT's must give access to dt's of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright. But nothing she knew would preserve them, or him."

Mitchell: "At what age did Anju and I learn the world is actually two: one outside, and one inside, which we call "imagination"? A stupendous discovery, you would have thought, but I have no memory of the day. For babies in the wombs, imaginings must be reality."

Now I'm not trying to slight either quote. I'm just saying that the Pynchon quote has a lot more interpretive leeway, so to speak. Or let me put it another way. If I ask "What in the hell did that freaking horn in Lot 49 stand for?" I'll get about 50 different answers. If I ask "What do Eiji's dreams tell us about the nature of consciousness?" I'll get 1, maybe 2 answers.

I don't mind it when a novel has the Certain Explicit Message it wants me to get. It's fine if it's a carefully wrought story designed to crescendo like a fine classical symphony. There's an art to doing that well and I give authors credit when they make it happen.

However, Mitchell is not writing that kind of book. As the Village Voice observed

A few years ago, David Grand and David Mitchell both dazzled the critics with Louse and Ghostwritten, debut novels that were classic examples of the phenomenon: conspicuous, hyper-inventive fiction that wears ambition and talent on its blurb-studded sleeve. . . . [number9dream] is show-offy fiction on a bad hair day. . . .  But the novel is also a wild explosion of color and energy, amped up on action-packed set pieces and astute observations of contemporary Japanese society. Like a lot of flamboyant fictionalists, Mitchell's problem isn't a lack of imagination or intelligence, but an inability to curb his excesses.

That's harsh, but not inaccurate. In fact, I think this quote only gets one thing wrong about number9dream: Mitchell shouldn't be curbing his excesses, but embracing them.

Look, anyone who has read Mitchell knows that his books sound the way a Hierononymous Bosch painting looks. These aren't your classic realist tales of high drama. They're cartoons/video games/intense movies/manga. Wrapping up a tight little moral like a Christmas present doesn't suit the kind of book Mitchell writes at all. Mitchell is big. He is sprawling. He's a one-man out-of-control dynamo of literary energy. His books shouldn't mince around depositing little acorns of wisdom. That kind of thinking just doesn't fit Mitchell's writing at all. I keep wanting Mitchell to just let loose, to write something totally wacked out that I can gape at and read about 17 different ways, and quote to my friends with my little hands clasped over my heart.

Watching Mitchell work is like watching a movie crew with a $100 million special effects budget and the best and brightest computer dorks around spend all their time, money, and talent on making a real cool simulation of a car driving down a straight road at about 25 mph.

In all honesty, I actually liked number9dream better than Cloud Atlas. The Atlas was a great read (hell, both of them are great reads) but it seemed like, if anything, Mitchell was trying to pin down his meaning even more severly in novel #3. At least number9dream had some ambiguity, some room to squeak through competing arguments. Cloud Atlas basically puts you in a headlock and is like "Look, humanity is doomed to keep destroying itself in an ever-spirialing cycle of violence that only gets worse as technology gets better. Got it?!? GOT IT!!!?!!"

So basically, Cloud Atlas is even more obviously organized and regimented than number9dream. And what of novel #1, Ghostwritten? Well, according to the Guardian:

Despite its enormous ambition, however, it left some wondering how much of a novel it was. Each section was linked to its fellows only by fleeting, marginal appearances of characters from other sections; rather than any overarching narrative structure, the effect was one of spectral patterns interleaved, ripples interpenetrating in a pond. The reader was eventually given leave to suppose that the entire novel had been compiled by the sky-surfing, satellite-hopping electronic consciousness of its penultimate chapter. True to its title, Ghostwritten was a dazzling performance of authorial absence.

I think Mitchell's moving in the wrong direction.

And then, we get to something like this:

I found myself extremely reluctant to read David Mitchells's new novel number9dream. I had read and enjoyed 'Ghostwritten', his first novel, but felt strongly at the time that all those who heaped praise upon him had not read Haruki Murakami's novels and thus were unaware of just how much David Mitchell was looting  from the Japanese author. Nevertheless I did enjoy the book and was prepared to forgive.

When number9dream was nominated for all kinds of literary prizes I thought the same phenomena was happening again. Allocades that should be given to Murakami are being awarded to Mitchell. Now I have read number9dream I seriously think that Mitchell should, at the very least be exposed for his blatant 'flattery".

number9dream is a mixture of Murakami's Norwegian Wood, South of the Border, and his latest Sputnik Sweetheart. Is this appropriation? If his novels had come out simultaneously with Murakami's work, then we could argue that both men are working the same vein and are entitled to similar reactions and characters and even stories. But Murakami has been writing for twenty years and his work has been out there all that time, available for all to read - aand clearly Mitchell has assimilated them - in detail. Conscious or unconsciously.

The Guardian (and others) also found Mitchell to be very heavily cribbing from Murakami. And let's not forget that reviews of Cloud Atlas remarked about the simularities of each of Mitchell's segments to various writers: #1--Melville, #2--Waugh, #3--Chandler, #4--Amis, #5--Dick/Blade Runner.

Mitchell seems a very odd writer. He is immensely apt at impersonating other writers, but I'm not exactly sure where the David Mitchell is in David Mitchell's works. I suppose the best place to find him is in his novels' structure. They're all structured through coincidences and implied links, and I think this is where Mitchell is his strongest. Who/What is it that makes these stories connect? What does this format say about story-telling? Is this the literary equivalent of hip-hop's borrowing from multiple genres to fuse together a single song?

Perhaps the best thing about number9dream is that the many coincidences are left unexplained. It is undeniable that they are there and that someone left them there for a reason, but there is not nearly enough explication (something Mitchell tends to overdose on) or evidence to figure out exactly why. I hope that Mitchell's next novel leaves more ambiguities like this and takes less pains to spell everything out so clearly. Otherwise, his books will end up being the literary equivalent of the panopticomic repressive state that he paints so dreadfully well in his novels.

Moleskine Hacks

Moleskine hacks.

This is brilliant. Creative ways to make the most of your Moleskine. There's the original post, plus about 100 comments and 20 trackbacks to keep you full of Moleskine ideas for months.