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.

by Kelly Pickerill

I spied a good looking book on Joe’s desk a few months back; it was the review copy of Howard Norman’s new book, not due out till July.  Well, it’s July!  And not only has his book arrived at Lemuria, but Howard Norman himself will be here on Friday, the 30th!

I really enjoyed reading this book.  At the start, Wyatt Hillyer sits down to write a letter to his adult daughter whom he hasn’t seen since she was very young.  Though Marlais doesn’t know her father and may never be close to him, Wyatt wants her to know what happened to him in the five years before she was born, the years when, during World War II in Canada, he participated in a violent crime that changed his life.

I loved the tone and texture of Norman’s novel more than any other aspect.  Because it’s a letter, the events Wyatt recalls are a mixture of memory and fact.  The dialogue can lack verisimilitude, though that’s forgiven because Wyatt is recalling conversations that took place more than twenty years previous.  But Wyatt is a careful wordsmith, meticulously choosing how he relates the events that eventually lead to his daughter’s birth — his parents’ simultaneous suicide, when he’s eighteen, because they are in love with the same woman, the secret infatuation Wyatt harbors for his cousin, Tilda, once he comes to live with her family, Tilda’s affair with a German student and the uproar their relationship causes in the small town of Middle Economy, and the events of the war which the citizens of Canada are finding more and more distressing, especially Wyatt’s uncle.

In the review in the Washington Post by Ron Charles, he points out that the epistolary style results in an “odd disconnect between the novel’s sober tone and its outrageous plot” making for a story that “seems shocking only in retrospect.”

At the time, you lean in, trying to catch every word, lulled by his voice as he describes the most ordinary lives that just happen to be punctuated by macabre accidents and bizarre acts of violence.

Come out to Lemuria on Friday starting at 5 to hear Howard Norman read from What Is Left the Daughter.

Even as she wound up a 9-month-long tour for Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger kindly answered the curious questions from an audience of some 35 fans Wednesday evening at our events building. And even as she was about to wrap up a long day of travel and talk, she shared dinner with six of us booksellers–who had all read and loved Symmetry–and her driver and friend Ronzo. To top it all off, I was glad to see that Audrey was able to browse our first editions and rare books.

For her devoted readers, they will be pleased to know that she has started work on a new novel about “a nine-year-old girl named Lizzie Varo who has hypertrichosis (she is covered with hair) and her desire to go to school (she’s been home-schooled by her clever and amusing Aunt Mariella) and what happens when she does go to school (things get weird)” (see Audrey’s website). If you cannot wait that long, don’t forget about her latest visual novel The Night Bookmobile which first appeared in The Guardian and will be coming out in book form in September of this year.

See Kelly and Lisa’s blogs on Her Fearful Symmetry.

i don’t remember the moment someone mentioned this book but soon after our copies started coming in. a few at a time and then each time i checked the order screen, i saw that 5 or 6 more copies were on order. i was looking for something to read and this caught my attention.

emma and dexter meet in july of 1988. july 15 to be exact. one random night. one night it is. there is a connection that is worth noticing but the night stands alone.

until july 15 of the next year..and we will check in to what is happening in the lives of these two. one day each year–july 15. they live in different places, they date other people, their jobs flop, life happens. at times there lives are intertwining, at times they are not in contact. regardless, you may catch emma’s mind floating to dexter but not always at the same time that dexter’s mind floats to emma.

i found myself cheering for them to find one another as they did that first night. i’d give it a year and i would be happy with their admirable friendship.

after finishing, i thought long and hard about focusing in on one day each year of someone’s life, perhaps my own. what would i see? what would be the same? what would be different?

and i think that’s the comforting thought in one day. there is that one person that is consistent in your life. you may not talk every single moment of every day of every year but should something happen and you need someone, you know it is them you want by your side. there are those friends who you need to be glued to your side when you have joys, sorrows, and heartaches in your life.

emma filled that gap for dexter just as dexter filled that gap for emma. em, dex. dex, em.

so i say read it…today…tomorrow…one day.

-quinn