Over the past while I have been hearing more about the name David Mitchell. He had a front page review in the Times by David Eggers that was really good for The Thousand Autums of Jacob De Zoet, Susie has written two blogs on him already having read Thousand Autumns and Ghostwritten, his first. The result has been this resounding thought in my head: “Read David Mitchell.” So I picked up Cloud Atlas, his most well-known work to-date, and started it a few nights ago.
When I first pick up a book by an author I’ve never read I’m not quite sure at what level/arena I’m going to relate. Will it be on the “entertaining storyline” level? the “this is well written” level? the “this was a really good book” level? or the “…um…uh…wow this book is blowing me away at a level I can’t quite put my finger on but my life is probably going to change by the time I get through it” level. The last is for a select few authors in my brief reading career: Melville (putting salt in my veins), Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (they might know me better than I do) , McCarthy (he just stuck his boot up my all-knowing arse and I’m so thankful), etc…It’s the same with musica: Shostakovitch, Beethoven, Bach, Part, and Messiaen….
I got about fifteen pages into Cloud Atlas and had a moment of, “wait a second…this is really good but I think this guy might be brilliant.” So I took a break, found the dictionary and encyclopedia app on my phone and had a little recap only to confirm, “yes…this man is in fact quite brilliant.” One really doesn’t put authors into that last category, they created it and then take it by force, never to let loose their hold on you. David Mitchell is already establishing himself on my conscious in this way. I hope he continues to stake his claim in this arena as I go through the work.
Cloud Atlas is composed of a series of stories that span time and are all wound into a beautiful novel. I have completed the first two. The first is an account of an American traveling from the New Zealand area of the Pacific back to America in the mid 1800s (Melville’s blood is pumping throughout). In the first twenty pages he is able to firmly establish a blender in which he throws Western Christian thought, the savage native, and the pure native. It was a nice stretch of the mind, having a incredible “zinga” of a passage in there. The second is about a wild young musician that is broke and running from debt collectors, finding refuge at the estate of an unsuspecting famous elderly composer. Here he dug a place in my heart with an incredible grasp and use of a musical education and temperament.
It is incredible when an author is able to lay such a broad foundation so naturally through the eyes of individuals that are no less than owned. So far, Mitchell seems to me a untamed literary beast that is able to wield not only his words and characters but also the styles and words of others, and moving them to a rhythm to say something purely his own. I am trying to hold on to this wave, and allow myself to continue to hear what he is saying. I’m sure I have rambled in extremes my whole way through this post as is my tendency, but–whateva man–I get excited and this is the best my unfiltered young mind could muster. Who knows, maybe I’m just impressionable. Great works, the likes of which this book is moving towards, in any artistic medium usually leave me with my mouth open only wishing to express my gratitude for their hard work and time they spent to give me this experience.
READ DAVID MITCHELL
-John P.
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