Rating: 
Summary: Almost great
Review: About half-way through this book, I was starting to believe this would be a great book. I don't just mean good; I mean great. The author has a tremendous gift for narrative, with many descriptions and phrases that would inspire both awe and envy in anyone who appreciates the mechanics of writing. The characters are vividly drawn so that the reader cares about each one, which is no mean feat considering the range of characters involved - including one who is impossible to like and one who's not even human. Best of all, the slow emergence of links between what at first seem totally unrelated storylines is done to perfection. I was in heaven.
Then I hit the last two chapters. Where I had come to expect magic, as all of the storylines finally converge, I got...what? Very suddenly, with only the most tenuous connection to the rest of the story, this non-point-of-view character with tremendous power appears, as though the author just read about "deus ex machina" and decided to give it a very literal interpretation. Then one of the characters who had actually drawn our sympathy earlier, who had been most central to the converging storylines, gets dispatched in an almost offhand way. Many of the connections established before are just left hanging, as though someone had punched a huge hole through the just-woven fabric of the story up to that point. I can almost see the author losing energy or interest, after the painstaking effort to craft the earlier chapters, and slapping the rest together just to be done with it. Maybe an overzealous editor was involved.
However you look at it, though, the ending can only disappoint. I have never seen such an immensely promising book take such a precipitous nosedive at the end. I would seriously recommend that readers read revel in the the marvelous though incomplete story up to that cutoff point, and then stop instead of ruining the experience by reading the rest.
Rating: 
Summary: Promising but uneven first novel
Review: Can't join all the Hooray Henries praising this as a "masterwork": it's a good first work of fiction, and Mr. Mitchell shows considerable promise, but "Ghostwritten" is, at best, a half-realized effort.The book is a series of 9 loosely but cleverly connected vignettes tracing the joys and travails of a wide variety of contemporary characters: a millennial cultist, a young Japanese jazz lover, a stressed-out ex-pat Brit working in a shady Hong Kong securities firm, an old Chinese woman living in a tea shack, a St. Petersburg kept-woman, a London slacker, an Irish scientist, a New York DJ. The tales, which are essentially complete in and of themselves, are each told in the first-person, and are written in a variety of styles ranging from the pseudo-Amy Tan of the Chinese narrator to the Nick Hornsby-ish musings of the young Londoner scraping out a living by ghostwriting and playing in a band. Characters and incidents central in one tale reappear in fleeting glimpses, snatches and references in the other tales, suggesting something like "It's a Small World After All" and that we're all interconnected in ways that we can't really begin to fathom. If this sounds a little New Age-y it's because it is-one section of the novel, "Mongolia," even follows a disembodied spirit as it migrates from host-body to host-body trying to unravel the riddle of its own existence. This is either your cup of tea or it isn't...for my part I found it pretty hokey. Mitchell is a keen observer and has a terrific knack for simile: when he's treating something down-to-earth like backpackers meeting on a train, or waking up with a hangover in a strange bed, or the sound of a jazz saxophone, or visiting a loved one with Alzheimer's, or the synergy between a medical and moral crisis (in the case of the Hong Kong broker) he's very compelling and provokes smiles or grimaces of recognition. When the author is indulging in flights of metaphysical fancy, however, he's merely tedious and borderline pretentious. It seems to me that Mitchell is a talented miniaturist trying, unsuccessfully, to be a whole lot more. The sections that are the most realistic-Okinawa, Tokyo, Hong Kong and London-are far and away the most successful in the book. When Mitchell (a British citizen living in Japan) tries to write from a geography or cultural consciousness he knows less well he is unconvincing and clumsy. "Holy Mountain," for instance, with its improbably out-of-touch peasant woman narrator, recycles every cliché about 20th century China, and has a number of inconsistencies, such as the narrator mistaking a microphone for a "magic silver mushroom," but in almost the same breath making an off-hand reference to a jack-hammer. Or the "Clear Island" section, which is one half lyrical paean to rural Ireland, one half silly Frederick Foresythe spy-on-the-lam-from-a-sinister-global-conspiracy piffle. It is the St. Petersburg section, however, that is almost comically inept, rife with error. While some of these mistakes are easy enough to overlook-such as when he has two ostensibly Russian women introduce themselves using "Miss" and "Mrs." (forms of address for which there are no equivalents in Russian) and then shake hands (something Russian women would never do among themselves)-others, like having a female character called "Petrovich," are unlikely to be missed by anyone who has ever been to Russia or read a Russian novel. Admittedly, this just comes down to poor editing...the real problems with the section are much more fundamental: an extraordinarily cheesy plot, which asks us to believe that priceless works of art are being successfully smuggled out of the Hermitage using a floor polisher; and the demeaning and deeply stereotyped portrayal of all the Russian characters, as one-dimensional and sinister as James Bond villains. In the end, unfortunately, the pulpier parts of the novel subsume the more serious and restrained parts, and the book ends in a serio-comic vision of the coming technological apocalypse that could have been lifted straight out of Arthur C. Clarke. I don't mean that as a compliment. Hopefully next time around Mr. Mitchell will play more to his strengths as a particularist and leave the Pynchonian post-modern globe-hopping to...well, to the inimitable Pynchon himself...
Rating: 
Summary: ...and I'm still waiting to figure out what's so good.
Review: David Mitchell, Ghostwritten (Random House, 1999) Ghostwritten was one of the first books to hit my Amazon wish list back when I first set it up four years ago. I have no idea what inspired me to put it there, but having now finally read the thing, the question has gone from "why did I do this?" to "what on earth was I thinking?" The story revolves (very slowly) around nine different characters whose lives interconnect. And while the characters themselves are interesting, Mitchell's portrayal of them doesn't do them justice. I'm not sure how one takes a member of a cult (based obviously on Falun Gong) on the verge of collapse and makes him boring, but it happens here. By the time you've meandered through forty uninteresting pages on the fourth or fifth of these characters, you'll have stopped caring in the least about how these connections are going to get more tenuous. (zero)
Rating:
Summary: Dreadful and one-dimensional
Review: I can't believe I wasted so much time... The description of OM Shinrikyo was accurate, as were his descriptions of Japan, Okinawa, and England. The rest of the book was fuzzy, unconvincing, and characters seemed like cardboard cutouts. The conclusion was frankly retarded. The book limps along like a lame dog. When I finally read the last page, it was as if someone mercifully put a bullet in the dog's head. Although Mitchell's prose is lyrical, his storytelling and research could use quite a bit of work.
Rating: 
Summary: Creative and well written
Review: I don't know if I have ever read a book quite like this. The author describes how small events connect people from different places and times in the world. It's quite an original idea, and Mitchell pulled it off excellently. Each chapter is like a totally different story but is somehow connected to the events of the previous chapter, even if the connection is so minor that the reader almost misses it. I enjoyed some chapters more than others (some chapters contain graphic language and content), but overall I enjoyed this book. It was a good break from the monotony of most novels.
Rating: 
Summary: Well written, clever linking of stories, lags in the middle
Review: I loved the first story - beautifully written, very interesting choice of character to explore and a convincing background for Quasar. The second was also excellent, but things start to fall away after this. I wasn't too impressed with the Hong Kong or St Petersberg stories, couldn't even read through the London one, and the China story was a bit cliched, with the whole "perpetually hard lot of Chinese women" theme a bit laboured, albeit accurate. I'm really surprised so many other reviewers didn't like (or perhaps didn't "get"?) the ending of the New York story, a very clever twist after we started the book dismissing the "White Nights" as nothing more than a deranged fantasy. Mitchell can certainly bring his characters to life, but plotwise I think he's taken on too much. I felt that some stories really didn't need to be here (e.g. the London piece), while others could have been taken further, e.g. Satoru's story, although this character seems to have been reincarnated as Eiji in Number9Dream. All in all, a very good read, even if you have to skip a few of the middle stories.
Rating:
Summary: A Bright Light Amid the Muck
Review: I picked up my copy of Ghostwritten at a friend's used bookstore in my home city. I had never heard of the author but the overall "story" intrigued me, so I gave it a shot and began reading it on a Saturday. The novel gripped me from the first line.
Each of the stories, as well as the central characters of the stories, are linked to each other in some way, either by one chance meeting, or over and over until it became a pattern/habit. You do not delve into the characters' backgrounds too much, but just enough so as to flesh them out, making them REAL rather than cardboard.
Mr. Mitchell's writing, to me, is a breath of fresh air in the "muck" that is labeled as worthy reading today. I felt myself with each character, watching everything that they did or say. I felt like I was RIGHT THERE rather than propped up on my couch at home with the book in my lap.
There are a good number of writers that have the "Gift", and I think that David Mitchell is one of them. I can't wait to read his other books and judge for myself if that same gift is apparent in them as well.
Rating:
Summary: An impressive debut
Review: I really liked this book. It was hard to put down for a variety of reasons and it is hard to believe that this was Mitchell's first novel. By the time I reached the middle I was already keen on reading every book this author has and will publish.
What I liked most about this book was that it defied definition. It was easy to read but wasn't a book that you can breeze through passively. You have to pay attention. If you don't you miss out on a lot. This story is shaped ike nine short stories set in various locations around the world. Each location tells the story of one character unrelated to the other characters in the stories, but yet somehow overlapping. It is this overlapping that holds the story together and makes it so fun to read. Two of my favorite were "London" and "Night Train", possibly because I "sensed" more of the author in the words. Of course this might also be things that turn some readers off, especially those that can't tolerate ambiguity. Ghostwritten doesn't try to be something more than it isn't. It maintains a modest and enduring tone throughout the novel, unveiling here and there little bits and pieces about the overall big picture.
I am impressed by Mitchell's style and vision. This was not an easy book to pull-off. That he did so as his first book inspires me and fills me with awe. The characters were well-crafted. Although he has a large cast of characters, none of them feel canned. All of them were distinct, and you really feel as if they were real characters living the full lives that is told in the stories.
Rating:
Summary: Intertwined stories
Review: Stories. At first seemingly disconnected, but slowly clues in one story indicate something else in another. Some of the links seem simple and easy, some are are quite obscure. Some stories are quite tightly linked together. The more you progress through the book these connections become stronger. The first few stories however seem to link only by the simplest of coincidences, those connections become stronger as the stories move on. The multiple links through mutiple stories. By the end of the book I kept checking back in earlier stories for the events that I had missed. The author spent time in Hiroshima teaching English, and I think this has had an influence on his writing, both for locations and in the use language. You can read each story by itself, or as a whole. The final one however does seem to bring everything together.
Rating:
Summary: Amazingly good
Review: The author has a sure, solide, mature beyond his years voice and uses it to good effect. Fascinating story and structure; the words and the hours just fly by as you read it. Slows down a bit and goes off the far end of the dial toward the end, but this is forgivable. A brilliant book; can't wait to read the rest of his works.
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