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3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
Some absolutely gorgeous excerpts with the trippy and mind-bending qualities I have come to absolutely love out of Mitchell, but I am going to have to sit with the conclusion of this book. It was very off-putting, but I am sure that was intentional. Perhaps it will grow on me. Not my favorite of the author's, but definitely still a high-quality read.
Looks like this will be my last review of the year.
David Mitchell's Number 9 Dream is easily identifiable as one of his early works. I love, love, love The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I'm a big fan of Slade House and Black Swan Green. And, there are other important Mitchell masterworks I haven't read yet (Cloud Atlas, anyone?). This book clearly comes before the others in that it's murky (well, yes, dreamy) and slow-moving. The plot juts out in seemingly random directions. Or, is there a genius scheme that explains it all? A Fibonacci sequence plot diagram? If so, I don't get it.
Number 9 Dream's hero's journey is propelled by Eiji Miyake, a Japanese orphan from a tiny island village who comes to Tokyo to search for his father. He is constantly mourning the loss of the twin sister whose drowning he feels responsible for; he is constantly preoccupied with the waitress with the perfect neck; he is constantly smoking and scheming and stalling and dreaming. The line between Eiji's dreams and his reality shifts and blurs moment to moment. Reading, I felt disoriented and never sure what was real. Along the way, there's yakuza, typhoons, prostitutes, Yoko Ono, gruesome crimes, video rentals, pizza deliveries, G-rated romance, WWII suicide torpedos, truckers, disappointments, and tiny specks of wisdom. "Time," Eiji laments "has so many gears." There are other sentence gems, too, pearl necklaces of word strung to word, that foreshadow Mitchell's future brilliance. Ai gives Eiji "a look with ninety-nine possible meanings." Tomomi has "a tarantula-in-underpants effect on me."
I don't know if you will like this one. Perhaps it will help if you go in knowing you may need a cloud atlas. "Shit doesn't have to make sense," my writer wife likes to say. No, no, it doesn't.
Oh, two other thoughts. First, this reminds me of a lot of Murakami. And, second, is it weird that Mitchell, who did live for quite a few years in Japan, wrote this book so steeped in Japanese culture? Hmm...
David Mitchell's Number 9 Dream is easily identifiable as one of his early works. I love, love, love The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I'm a big fan of Slade House and Black Swan Green. And, there are other important Mitchell masterworks I haven't read yet (Cloud Atlas, anyone?). This book clearly comes before the others in that it's murky (well, yes, dreamy) and slow-moving. The plot juts out in seemingly random directions. Or, is there a genius scheme that explains it all? A Fibonacci sequence plot diagram? If so, I don't get it.
Number 9 Dream's hero's journey is propelled by Eiji Miyake, a Japanese orphan from a tiny island village who comes to Tokyo to search for his father. He is constantly mourning the loss of the twin sister whose drowning he feels responsible for; he is constantly preoccupied with the waitress with the perfect neck; he is constantly smoking and scheming and stalling and dreaming. The line between Eiji's dreams and his reality shifts and blurs moment to moment. Reading, I felt disoriented and never sure what was real. Along the way, there's yakuza, typhoons, prostitutes, Yoko Ono, gruesome crimes, video rentals, pizza deliveries, G-rated romance, WWII suicide torpedos, truckers, disappointments, and tiny specks of wisdom. "Time," Eiji laments "has so many gears." There are other sentence gems, too, pearl necklaces of word strung to word, that foreshadow Mitchell's future brilliance. Ai gives Eiji "a look with ninety-nine possible meanings." Tomomi has "a tarantula-in-underpants effect on me."
I don't know if you will like this one. Perhaps it will help if you go in knowing you may need a cloud atlas. "Shit doesn't have to make sense," my writer wife likes to say. No, no, it doesn't.
Oh, two other thoughts. First, this reminds me of a lot of Murakami. And, second, is it weird that Mitchell, who did live for quite a few years in Japan, wrote this book so steeped in Japanese culture? Hmm...
Man, I had a hard time with a lot of the Yakuza plot lines and a lot of the characters were really unredeemable (which I understand was the point). But the good plot points didn't redeem the rest of the book. This is the first miss I've had reading David Mitchell ...that's not too bad.
Great coming-of-age quest exploring the highs and lows of Japanese teen Eiji Miyaki searching for his estranged father in the urban sprawl of Tokyo. Having to deal with everything from finding work to the Yakuza, it's a rush thoroughly rendered through the unique perspective of our protagonist. A socially awkward journey of great emotional scope.
200 pages in and lost interest. Good writing set in Tokyo but story feels prolonged and got boring
Hallucinatory Japan. Entrancing? Yes. Mediocre? Yes.
The book David Mitchell wrote for fans of Haruki Murakami.
adventurous
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
A 3, but a strong 3... it's not as good as Cloud Atlas, but still very, very entertaining. And it's ballsy, I think, for a non-Japanese writer to make a Japanese country boy living in Tokyo his main character. Mitchell is a show-off in a good way, never content to just be telling one story at a time. There's a lot of interweaving going on here.