From Publishers Weekly
At
once audacious, dazzling, pretentious and infuriating, Mitchell's third
novel weaves history, science, suspense, humor and pathos through six
separate but loosely related narratives. Like Mitchell's previous works,
Ghostwritten and number9dream (which was shortlisted for
the Booker Prize), this latest foray relies on a kaleidoscopic plot
structure that showcases the author's stylistic virtuosity. Each of the
narratives is set in a different time and place, each is written in a
different prose style, each is broken off mid-action and brought to
conclusion in the second half of the book. Among the volume's most
engaging story lines is a witty 1930s-era chronicle, via letters, of a
young musician's effort to become an amanuensis for a renowned, blind
composer and a hilarious account of a modern-day vanity publisher who is
institutionalized by a stroke and plans a madcap escape in order to
return to his literary empire (such as it is). Mitchell's ability to
throw his voice may remind some readers of David Foster Wallace, though
the intermittent hollowness of his ventriloquism frustrates. Still,
readers who enjoy the "novel as puzzle" will find much to savor in this
original and occasionally very entertaining work.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
Mitchell's virtuosic novel presents six narratives that evoke an array of genres, from Melvillean high-seas drama to California noir and dystopian fantasy. There is a naïve clerk on a nineteenth-century Polynesian voyage; an aspiring composer who insinuates himself into the home of a syphilitic genius; a journalist investigating a nuclear plant; a publisher with a dangerous best-seller on his hands; and a cloned human being created for slave labor. These five stories are bisected and arranged around a sixth, the oral history of a post-apocalyptic island, which forms the heart of the novel. Only after this do the second halves of the stories fall into place, pulling the novel's themes into focus: the ease with which one group enslaves another, and the constant rewriting of the past by those who control the present. Against such forces, Mitchell's characters reveal a quiet tenacity. When the clerk is told that his life amounts to "no more than one drop in a limitless ocean," he asks, "Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
