Hello Everyone,
Our next meeting will be Thursday January 25, 2007 at 6:30 at Christine's house to discuss Sunni's book, Cloud Atlas. Rachelle will provide her book selections and I will distribute I Lucifer, Jasmine's book.
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Biography
Born in Southport in 1969, David Mitchell grew up in Malvern, Worcestershire, studying for a degree in English and American Literature followed by an MA in Comparative Literature, at the University of Kent. He lived for a year in Sicily before moving to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England.
In his first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), nine narrators in nine locations across the globe tell interlocking stories. This novel won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.
His second novel, number9dream (2001), was shortlisted for the 2002 Man Booker Prize for fiction. It is set in modern day Tokyo and tells the story of Eiji Miyake's search for his father.
In 2003 David Mitchell was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'. In his third novel, Cloud Atlas (2004), a young Pacific islander witnesses the nightfall of science and civilisation, while questions of history are explored in a series of seemingly disconnected narratives. Cloud Atlas was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
David Mitchell lives in Ireland. His latest novel is Black Swan Green (2006).
MORE INFO ON DAVID MITCHELL
washingtonpost.com
Q&A: Book World Talks With David Mitchell
Sunday, August 22, 2004; Page BW03
We found the author of "Cloud Atlas" in the Irish fishing village of Clonakilty, where he lives with his wife and daughter. Born in the English town of Seaport 34 years ago, he also has lived in Sicily and Hiroshima, Japan.
BW: What was the inspiration for "Cloud Atlas"?
DM: There wasn't really a single Eureka moment. For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed. That said, three important sources spring to mind. First, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino -- an experimental novel in which a sequence of narratives is interrupted but never picked up again -- made a big impression on me when I was an undergraduate. I wondered what a novel might look like if a mirror were placed at the end of a book like Calvino's so that the stories would be resolved in reverse.
Second, a mention of the Moriori people in Jared Diamond's multidisciplinary Guns, Germs, and Steel led to a trip to the Chatham Islands and an encounter with New Zealand historian Michael King's A Land Apart. His idea that there is nothing inevitable about civilization caught my curiosity. Knowledge can be forgotten as easily as, perhaps more easily than, it can be accrued. As a people, the Moriori "forgot" the existence of any other land and people but their own. When I heard this, my novelistic Geiger counter crackled.
Third, a book by Frederick Delius's amanuensis, Eric Fenby, Delius: As I Knew Him, was worlds away from the Moriori but gave me the idea of Fenby's evil twin, and the struggle between the exploited and the exploiter.
Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting. (This needn't be as bleak as it sounds -- a consequence of getting can be giving, which presumably is what love is about.) Once I had these two ideas for novellas, I looked for other variations on the theme of predatory behavior -- in the political, economic and personal arenas. These novellas seemed to marry well with the structure I had in mind: Each block of narrative is subsumed by the next, like a row of ever-bigger fish eating the one in front.
BW: What did you learn in the process of writing it?
DM: I learned that art is about people: Ideas are well and good, but without characters to hang them on, fiction falls limp. I learned that language is to the human experience what spectography is to light: Every word holds a tiny infinity of nuances, a genealogy, a social set of possible users, and that although a writer must sometimes pretend to use language lightly, he should never actually do so -- the stuff is near sacred. I learned that maybe I should have a go at a linear narrative next time! I learned that the farther back in time you go, the denser the research required, and the more necessary it is to hide it.
BW: Did you write it as six separate stories?
DM: I did, but put indications where I would later cut and paste the novel into its final shape. The day I decided to do it that way was one of the major finishing posts of the novel. (I went to feed the ducks.)
BW: What was your model (which is something quite different from inspiration)?
DM: Each of the six sections has a model. My character Ewing was (pretty obviously) Melville, but with shorter sentences. Frobisher is Christopher Isherwood, especially in Lions and Shadows. Luisa Rey is any generic airport thriller. Cavendish is Cavendish -- he has a short part in the "London" section of my first novel, Ghostwritten. The interview format for "Sonmi" I borrowed from gossip magazines in which a rather gushing hack interviews some celeb bigwig. Zachary owes (of course) a big debt to Riddley Walker, a novel by Russell Hoban, though some reviewers point to "Mad Max 3." (Thanks guys.) I can't claim that Don DeLillo's monumental Underworld is a model for Cloud Atlas, but reading him always encourages me (like drinking) to take literary risks. (Both books, I just noticed, have upbeat endings, against the odds.)
BW:What, in your mind, distinguishes this book from your others?
DM: It has more of a conscience. I think this is because I am now a dad. I need the world to last another century and a half, not just see me to happy old age.
February 2004
David Mitchell - the interview
David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas book cover
Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell visited Notttingham in March.
Joe Sinclair caught up with the acclaimed novelist before he sets foot in our county to find out more about his new novel.
From ocean voyagers, to nuclear physicists and exploited clones, David Mitchell’s new novel hops forward through time towards the end of civilisation.
Cloud Atlas, out on Wednesday, 10th March 2004, is Mitchell’s third novel, following on from the success of Ghostwritten and Number Nine Dream, which was nominated for the Booker Prize.
The book is composed of six stories, emerging out of each other like Russian dolls as each new narrator discovers the journal, letters, novel, film and holographic projection (think Princess Lea) of the previous story.
The uncompleted successive stories echo with each other through time until we arrive at the fallen remnants of civilisation at the centre of the novel.
David Mitchell
In the second half of the book each story is completed, leading us back to the beginning, where reluctant voyager Adam Ewing finds himself dying aboard ship on the Pacific Ocean.
It's an imaginative, provocative and entertaining journey.
David Mitchell moved to Hiroshima, Japan, in his mid twenties, where he taught English and decided it was time to get serious about his writing.
After eight years and two successful novels, David returned to the British Isles, and now he’s on his way to Nottingham to talk about his new book.
He’ll be appearing at Waterstones with fellow author David Peace on Monday, 1st March 2004.
He spoke to me from his home in Cork, Ireland, where he lives a relaxed life with his Japanese wife and baby daughter.
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Have you ever come to Nottingham before?
No, I haven’t. It’s one of the last great unknown British cities for me. I’m really looking forward to it.
Do you have any plans for things to do while you’re here?
David Peace has told me that Nottingham has one of the oldest pubs in the country, so we’re hoping to hunt that down. One thing I really missed in Japan was British Indian cuisine, and I’ve heard Nottingham is one of the best in the country for that. So it’ll be a pint in the oldest pub and a meal in one of the best Indian restaurants as well.
You got a travel scholarship to research your book. Can you tell me more about that?
When I went to New Zealand I used part of the money to fly myself out to the remote Chatham Islands, which appear in the book, just to get a feel for the landscape, the weather and the mood of the place. The next year I used the second half of the money to do added extras around Hawaii. I went walking on lava fields.
Do you travel a lot?
When I lived in Japan I used to do an annual trip. Now I’m a father I’ve got some more immediate responsibilities at home and can’t really swan off for quite so long. In a publicity year the trick is to combine wanderlust fulfillment with book business.
In Japan you were a foreigner in an alien environment, and in Cloud Atlas many of the main characters find themselves in similarly alien environments. Did you write the characters into those situations on purpose?
Probably not actually. But I have noticed the same thing about Cloud Atlas – people tend to be isolated and trapped, which might have been what it’s like walking around Japan for the first couple of years. I think rather than me choosing consciously the predicaments of my characters it more just comes through on a fairly unconscious level. I think artists have a sort of inner architecture that is made manifest in the art work.
What affect did being a foreigner in Japan have on you and your writing?
Inner monologues. I’ve only ever written once in the third person [The Luisa Rey Mystery in Cloud Atlas], everything else is first person. I think one explanation for that is wandering around for all those years in Japan and not being able to communicate that fluently. It does turn you in on yourself a little bit. Your environment effects you wherever you are.
How good is your Japanese?
I can argue with my wife in Japanese, but I can’t win the arguments.
Is that down to the language?
Good point. She’s like most Japanese women. They’re fairly softly spoken but that doesn’t mean they don’t have opinions.
Why did you structure the novel like you have?
The idea of that structure has been knocking about in my head for years. It’s to do with form, the idea of a Russian doll. I read about an Egyptian Goddess who gave birth to a pregnant daughter, whose embryo in turn was already pregnant and so on to infinity. That’s just beautiful. It seems to be a beautiful model for time as well. Every possible moment is contained in this moment, regressing on to infinity.
In Ewing’s final diary entry he warns that a "purely predatory world shall consume itself", and we can trace this happening between stories within the novel. Did you feel compelled to write this novel as a warning to people about the way the world is going?
Compelled is probably too strong. It sounds arrogant if I say that I David Mitchell wanted to deliver this message to the unthinking ears of society. It’s not really like that at all. It’s simply something that I was attracted to writing so I wrote. I’m not a great deep political thinker. A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points. But I am a novelist with a political streak.
This is the most political of your novels so far. It deals with sweat-shops, migrants, globalisation and so on. Are these issues which have struck you since you came back from Japan?
Yes, the excesses of neo-capitalism. But those are also fairly evident in Japan – just watching people’s working patterns and how grueling they are. I think there’s something in the air at the moment. As evidence I’d sight the success of Michael Moore’s books. Around the time I was writing Somni 451 I was reading Fast Food Nation, the expose of the fast food industry in the States. With feasible science fiction all you have to do is take what’s here already, just take the present and exaggerate it slightly and you’ve got some sort of awful grotesque world.
Reading clubs are very trendy in Nottinghamshire at the moment. If you were to recommend five reads – apart from your own books – what would they be?
1. For Esme – With Love and Squalor, by J.D. Salinger.
2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
3. The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber.
4. Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain Fornier.
5. The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki.
Writer’s groups are also very popular in Nottinghamshire. Have you got any advice for Nottinghamshire’s budding writers?
1. Take your time.
2. Write your characters’ autobiographies.
3. It’s about people.
4. A quote from Stephen King: "adverbs are not your friends."
5. Write something every single day, even if it’s just three lines. And it doesn’t matter if it’s any good – just write something every day.
knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but until I came to Japan to live in 1994 I was too easily distracted to do much about it. I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but would I have become the same writer if I'd spent the last 6 years in London, or Cape Town, or Moosejaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself.
In Japan, I am, in writer/critic Donald Richie's phrase, an alien amongst natives. The Lonely Planet guide quotes the idea that some countries have a 'mission' attitude towards foreigners, and some have a 'club' attitude. 'Mission' countries define foreignness by behavior -- act like a native, and as far as other natives are concerned, you eventually have as much right to be there as they do. 'Club' countries define foreignness by your lineage or passport -- it will never matter what you do, how well you learn the language, how many soccer teams or famous department stores you buy -- you are foreign and always will be. Japan is a classic club society. Living here, I kiss my sense of social belonging goodbye. When I was a kid, my main talent was sulking -- spectacular, multi-day sulks. I don't think I sulked to manipulate: the point was to isolate myself. I sometimes believe that my real motive behind living abroad is to enjoy the same fruit.
This lack of belonging encourages me to write: I lack a sense of citizenship in the real world, and in some ways, commitment to it. To compensate, I stake out a life in the country called writing. I don't mean the publishing world: I mean a mental state (mental is the word!), where characters and plots in the head achieve the solidity of people and lives outside the head. Of course, other writers not living in Japan, and many non-writers, not to mention psychotics, do the same. But for me, my ability to compound inner-skull reality is a direct result of my life away from where I 'belong.' To date, many of my characters show the same trait.
My life in Japan is stripped down. Two reasons: firstly, my ability to read the Chinese characters used here is roughly on par with a 10 year-old. I get by in everyday spoken Japanese OK, but even here, with more formal adult registers of speech I lose track quickly. Secondly, apart from drunk businessmen, my foreignness repels the residue depositors of daily life: pamphleteers, TV license people, salespeople, bores in bars.
Both my lingusitic inability and my repulsion field allow me to zone out at will. Japan is a famously built-up place, but I can walk through the adverts, announcements, signs, notices, warnings, screens, and in terms of its demands of me, I may as well be in a forest. Japan teems, but what it teems with is, for me, largely devoid of meaning. TV, faculty meetings, cell phone conversations -- I can zone out of these, too, like King Louis (I forget which number) who could manipulate his ocular blindspot to erase irritating courtiers from existence. I'm not advocating blinkerdom -- if it weren't for my girlfriend I wouldn't know a typhoon was coming until a pylon flew past my window - but as a writer, I find it pays (and keeps away gentlemen from Porlock -- they don't even bother calling.) Another example: in the apartment building where I live, a couple starts most mornings with a row. I don't know what they argue about -- his affairs, leaving the toilet seat up, disagreements on how to dispose of the bodies of neighboring eavesdroppers. All I hear is how they argue -- the spite and anger in the man's voice, the life-sentenced quality of the woman's voice. In a sense, I would understand less if I understood more. For foreigners, the casing of the human condition sometimes turns transparent, like a see-through Swatch.
I need to write a paragraph about how Japanese arts have influenced me. This is a ruthlessly edited list. Haiku, I feel, is the optimum of 'less is more'. I would love to make such complex compounds in such simple crucibles. The ending of Ghostwritten is influenced directly by the ending of Mishima's problematic masterpiece, The Sea of Fertility, which in turn comes from Buddhist reality-is-illusion art. Haruki Murakami's novels show how literature can marry popular culture to cook up humour and metaphor. Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters exemplify how compulsive the mundane can become if you look at it in the right way. Zen art uses space as matter pregnant with possible meaning, and Toru Takemitsu's otherworldly compositions demonstrate how loud silence can be. Japanese film is adept at dialogue-through-gesture -- perhaps this tradition has its roots in Noh theatre. Don't make a character say it -- move the character's head, in just the right way, and it is said. I could have and would have learned the same things from non-Japanese sources (Bill Evans the jazz pianist is a master of the silent note, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is an ordinary life in an extraordinary book) but it so happens I learned them through the media of Japanese art, and I think they affect the way I write.
Fiction is stuffed with what life is stuffed with. I guess most writers draw from what is lying around them. Obviously, what I draw from happens to be Japanese - this is especially true for the novel I'm working on now. Japanese buses, faces, disaster movies, red-light districts, open windows, cinema queues, schoolkid herds, mountains, petty gangsters, music, beauty, grot. Other countries' grot is always exotic grot. What I draw from this local reservoir may be major -- the Fellowship cult in the first part of Ghostwritten is based on Aum, which let off sarin bombs in the Tokyo metro in 1994, and which, gobsmackingly, is still active. Or it may be minor -- on my walk to the station today I saw a woman sobbing into her mobile phone, her make-up running, kneeling by a bonfire of scorched cans -- and thought - like the true parasite writers are -- 'hey, bet I can use that!'
My life in Japan has coincided with the start of my education as a writer. Although my ideal future as a novelist is one of reinvention, and although I won't be in this place for good, I think this place will be in me for good.
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