Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

"This is David Mitchell's debut novel, and it has received some lively reviews. It's an ambitious book, which goes from East to West. Ghostwritten seems to follow an Edward Rutherfurd format: nine individual stories that are subtly linked. It's like the Six Degrees of Separation or the Kevin Bacon game, whereby everybody on the planet is linked much more closely to each other than we would have ever imagined. Half the fun of Ghostwritten is trying to spot references from all the other stories. Despite having such seemingly random stories, Ghostwritten does follow quite a strict chronology. There's also a slight element of the ballad in these pleasing repetitions and hooks. Ghostwritten is very much a book of the nineties. It starts of as a thriller, with a story based on the Japanese Aum cult that released Sarin gas in the underground. This is fairly faithful to the real life events, but by having this part narrated by a devotee of His Serendipity, we don't actually get to see the whole folly of the actual cult leader Asahara. The experimental Sarin gas attack in the Nagano Prefecture did happen, there were links to Korea and Russia, and Ashara's wife did denounce AUM to a certain degree. And then we're whisked off to Tokyo for a very sweet love story, accompanied by some nice jazz. David Mitchell must like John Coltrane. From there, we're summoned to Hong Kong to see a British trader embroiled in some kind of unbearable Barings disaster, and you start to wonder whether David Mitchell has watched too much CNN. The action then shifts to a Holy Mountain in China, and Mitchell covers the Cultural Revolution very well...."

다른 지명, 다른 인물, 다른 이야기들로 구성된 단편집이지만 읽다 보면 서로 연결되었다는 것을 알 수 있다. 개인적으로 이 작품의 분위기는 무라카미 하루키를 생각나게 했다. 특히  Tokyo라는 제목의 작품이 그런 느낌이었다,  "My place comes into existence through jazz. Jazz makes a fine place. The colours and feelings there come not from the eye but from sounds...." ".... it was as tough as having Korean parents....." "I remember you said you enjoyed The Great Gatsby  - there's a new Murakami translation of Fitzerald's short stories we've just brought out, The Lord of the Flies, that's a laugh a minute, and a new Garcia Marquez...." 등의 문장들이 눈에 띄었다. 전체적으로 장편이고 문장들이 그렇게 복잡하지는 않지만 의미를 이해하는데 노력이 필요하다. 원서의 경험에 따라서 읽기에 힘든 작품일 수 있다.