Black Swan Green by David Mitchell re-creates the parallel universe inhabited by a 13-year-old English boy in 1982. It's a world of superstition, misinformation, obsession with social status, the mystery of girls, popular songs, school, his family's increasing dysfunction, and dimly understood political upheaval. Mostly though, Jason Taylor struggles with his stammer, and bullies.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
England
Wendy said, "My last one for today (promise!). Black Swan Green captures one year in the life of a British 13 year old boy. Mitchell's prose is brilliant. I can highly recommend this one for a Great Britain read. Here is my review."
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell re-creates the parallel universe inhabited by a 13-year-old English boy in 1982. It's a world of superstition, misinformation, obsession with social status, the mystery of girls, popular songs, school, his family's increasing dysfunction, and dimly understood political upheaval. Mostly though, Jason Taylor struggles with his stammer, and bullies.
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell re-creates the parallel universe inhabited by a 13-year-old English boy in 1982. It's a world of superstition, misinformation, obsession with social status, the mystery of girls, popular songs, school, his family's increasing dysfunction, and dimly understood political upheaval. Mostly though, Jason Taylor struggles with his stammer, and bullies.
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Mitchell's previous books have been some of my favorites!! I'm excited to see this one here because it's the only one by him that I've yet to read.
Neco, do you want to tell us which of his books were your favorites? Maybe we need them on our list, too.
David Mitchell wrote three books prior to Black Swan Green. They are Ghostwritten (2001), Number9dream (2003), and Cloud Atlas (2004).
Ghostwritten:
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.
Number9dream:
Number9Dream is the international literary sensation from a writer with astonishing range and imaginative energy — an intoxicating ride through Tokyo's dark underworlds and the even more mysterious landscapes of our collective dreams.
David Mitchell follows his eerily precocious, globe-striding first novel, Ghostwritten, with a work that is in its way even more ambitious. In outward form, Number9Dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age journey: Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sister's death and his mother's breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses — through a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad luck — a number of its secret power centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his father's identity becomes just one of the increasingly urgent questions Eiji must answer. Why is the line between the world of his experiences and the world of his dreams so blurry? Why do so many horrible things keep happening to him? What is it about the number 9? To answer these questions, and ultimately to come to terms with his inheritance, Eiji must somehow acquire an insight into the workings of history and fate that would be rare in anyone, much less in a boy from out of town with a price on his head and less than the cost of a Beatles disc to his name.
Cloud Atlas:
From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists 2003" issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope.
A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified "dinery server" on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilization — the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.
In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity's dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us.
***Synopses are from Powells.com***
Mitchell's books tend to contain several plots/stories arching to form a central idea/point. They can involve multiple locations, characters, and genres. While I love his novels, I don't think they would make good "around the world" book selections. They jump locations frequently and don't reveal much history or culture of the country(ies) they are set in. Although they are great reads and I wholeheartedly recommend any one (or all 3 of them), I don't feel they would aid the purpose of this blog/challenge. But I wanted to plug them in hopes that someone would pick one up.
I was actually surprised to see Black Swan Green put up as a selection. But, it is supposed to be very different from his previous novels (which some reviewers liked and others did not) and is set in England following a single storyline. That reviewers who liked Mitchell's previous works tended not to favor this novel is one of the reasons I haven't read it yet as I loved his writing style in the first three. The other is that it was only in hardback when I was considering buying it and I just haven't picked up the paperback yet, though I'd always intended to read the book to see if I agreed. Being a BATW selection gives me one more reason to get the book =^)
Lol, I had opened a wikipedia article on Mitchell when I was pulling up the Powell's pages. Which I read right after posting the previous comment. His next novel sound like a good fit for BATW:
Mitchell's next book will be an historical novel about Dejima, the man-made island in the middle of Nagasaki Harbour that was built to house Dutch traders in the 17th century. Having just finished five months of research in the Netherlands, Mitchell says that the biggest challenge will be what to omit from this complex story. "For over two centuries", he said, "the Dutch were the only white people allowed to see inside Japan". No one was allowed on or off the island except for tradesmen, translators and prostitutes. "Except", he said, "every four years when the head of the trading post made the trek to Edo (modern-day Tokyo) to pay his respects to the Shogun". Mitchell plans to contrast Shogunate Japan with the Napoleonic era in Europe, he said. Of particular interest is the fact that while the Netherlands ceased to exist for a while after Napoleon annexed it, the Dutch flag still flew in Dejima. According to a recent interview, the book will consist of 6 novellas of 18 chapters each with 9 told by one narrator (gaijin - foreigner) and the alternate 9 by another (Japanese).
-- from David Mitchell's wiki
Unfortunately, it's not scheduled for release until 2009!
Hi, Bonnie: My England choice for this challenge is the very light-hearted The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella. Here is my review. Kinsella transports you to the English countryside, which seems so peaceful, and the hub bub of England. Lots of fun!
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