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Fw: David Mitchell read that Nabokov wrote all his novels on
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EDNOTE. Peripheral but sounds interesting.
----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1151644,00.html
Apocalypse, maybe
He grew up anxious about the A-bomb, waiting for the end of the world, collecting postcards and keeping his mouth shut. But now he has found his voice, in novels bursting with outlandish characters, from Tokyo gangsters to 19th-century lawyers, nuclear physicists to doomed clones. And with a Booker nomination already under his belt and novel number three out next week, David Mitchell's future looks far from bleak
Interview by Melissa Denes
Saturday February 21, 2004
The Guardian
It's a rule of thumb that precocious young novelists start off with something loosely autobiographical - drug-taking in Leith or high jinks in Camden, say - but three books into his career, David Mitche! ll has revealed very little of himself. This, of course, has never been his point, and until recently he had almost no interest in delving into his own life story. By the time he started writing seriously, he says, he wanted "to write the world, underlined three times, three exclamation marks". So instead of ruminations on a childhood in rural Worcestershire, we have had, to date, the inner lives of: a Japanese terrorist, a nuclear physicist, an art thief (his debut, Ghostwritten); Tokyo gangsters and submarine pilots (Number 9 Dream); and now, in Mitchell's new novel, Cloud Atlas, a 19th-century lawyer, an investigative journalist and a doomed clone from the future. His books are dense, noisy with life - a string of multi-layered narratives.
All of which makes Mitchell sound an annoyingly tricksy writer, and it's true that his critics have him down as a bit of a clever clogs, too ambitious for his own good. But what saves his books from being just brilliant formal experiments is the heart with which he writes, the humour, and the absolute conviction with which he draws his characters. He will spend ages writing biographies for all his narrators, working out the speech patterns and the childhood traumas, before he even starts on the ghost of a story. His new book has a brilliant comic creation in the character of Timothy Cavendish, a louche publisher who had a walk-on part in Ghostwritten, and a lot of good jokes - my favourite being a tantric sexual position called the Plumber (you stay in for ages and nobody comes).
Mitchell is also aware that experiment for the sake of it leads you into all kinds of cul-de-sacs. "You have to distinguish between workable innovation and unworkable innovation," he says. "There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why." When he started on Cloud Atlas three years ago, he originally planned to write nine separate narratives and a book of around 900 pages, but eventually saw the light and settled for six overlapping stories and a book of 500-ish pages.
Last year, Mitchell moved from Japan to Ireland, and is currently renting a bungalow outside Cork with his Japanese wife, Keiko, and their nearly-two-year-old daughter, Hana. He moved to Japan in the early 1990s after failing to get a job in Britain. After graduating from the University of Kent, he sat on the waiting list for McDonald's for months, then just thought enough, and went to teach English in Tokyo. He and Keiko came to Ireland partly because it is a place that neither of them knew - "It's sort of easier when you're in a third country, if things go wrong it's nobody's fault" - and partly because Japan had become too expensive. Mitchell is 35 now and after the huge critical success of Ghostwritten and Number 9 Dream (AS Byatt described Ghostwritten as "the best first novel I have ever read", while Number 9 Dream was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker), you would expect that Mitchell could afford to rest on his laurels, but no: if he had stayed on in Japan, he would ! have had to continue teaching English and seen much less of his daughter. Here, he can write and be a hands-on father.
Mitchell also likes this part of Ireland for its warm weather, but it can change five times in a day, and on the morning I arrived the sky was dark and the rain torrential. Mitchell stood waving cheerily in the doorway as the photographer and I made our soggy approach from the village, and asked very politely if we would mind taking off our shoes - "If that's not too much like visiting your grandmother." He is tall and pale, dressed in the thirtysomething male writer's uniform of jeans and black leather jacket, and while he is not at all grandmotherly, there is something slightly old-fashioned about him. He is courteous and formal, serving tea and biscuits in the living room, and has an endearing habit of deconstructing his own sentences - "Right, let me marshal my thoughts," he will say, or, "Can I quickly put this in brackets?" and, despairingly, "This sentence is collapsing under its own weight!"
Cloud Atlas took longer to write than his other two books, mainly because he had to do a lot of research. For every 10 years back in time you go, he says, you can add two months to your working time. The book is structured like a Russian doll, six narratives nestled one inside the other, with a post-apocalyptic future at its centre. There is the "Pacific journal" of Adam Ewing, a bumbling lawyer; the letters home of Robert Frobisher, a 1930s cad; and a murder mystery in a nuclear plant. The first half of the book is made up of half of each of these stories, then we get to Mitchell's apocalypse, and then each story resumes where it left off, until we are back to where we began, almost - except that we have seen the future and it doesn't look good.
In spite of its title, Cloud Atlas is Mitchell's tightest, most focused book, as well as his funniest: the Russian doll structure allows him to return to the same themes - which are, broadly speaking, the struggle between savagery and civilisation, between biology and ethics. "It's a book about predacity and predation," he says, "individuals preying on groups, groups preying on individuals."
It is also strikingly political, much more so than anything else he has written: Mitchell's vision of the future is like Naomi Klein's No Logo taken to its ultimate conclusion: a consumer society in the process of consuming itself. The narrator of this section, Somni 451, is a clone genomed to smile and stand for 19 hours on end in an underground fast-food restaurant, genuflecting to the dollar, worshipping the company logo, a sort of Ronald McDonald hologram that performs endless somersaults in the air. At night the fabricants have "nitemares of angry diners, food tube blockages, lost collars and shameful destarrings". Language itself is branded: instead of shoes, films, petrol, traffic jams, Somni 451 sees nikes, disneys, exxon and fordjams. For the pure-blood consumers who live overground, spending is compulsory - "Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime." Perhaps the most terrifying thing is that Mitchell exaggerates the present only slightly.
And yet he says he is not a particularly gloomy person. Sometimes he feels, in the words of a George Monbiot column he recently cut out and kept, that, "given the choice between saving the world and a new dinner service, humanity would probably go for the dinner service". Other times, he's not sure what the doom-mongers are worrying about. It can all depend on what sort of a day he's having, and he points out that history is decided by good days and bad days. "What is that lovely Arthur Miller quote? [He is very given to lovely quotes.] 'How much of life is decided simply because it is 5 o'clock on a Friday.' "
Often, the predation he writes about in Cloud Atlas works on the level of race: the imperialists buying out the Polynesians, the Consumers controlling the Servers, the tribal warfare that follows the second Fall. "Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself," says Mitchell, "a way of subdividing into smaller groups." He pauses. "But I think banging on too much about race is something a white male hasn't quite got the right to do, because lots of other non-white writers have done it so well. Any racism I experienced in Japan was of the mildest possible sort, it never really got above the level of condescension. But it's undeniably a sub-theme - the 19th century made an ideology of racism. That is a part of my history, and we do have a responsibility to sort through our own country's dirty laundry."
As a child, he says, he was "very anxious". Growing up in Worcestershire with his older brother and artist parents, he worried constantly about the threat of nuclear war. "I was speaking to some Dutch friends about it recently, and they laughed and said, 'Why would you believe that?' It would make an interesting study - how much was nuclear war feared, really, in the early 1980s in different countries, and I wonder if there is a correlation between the size of a country's defence budget and that fear." He had read all of John Wyndham's "traumatic, disturbing" books by the age of 12 and thinks that this, too, fed his apocalyptic streak.
While he waited for the end of the world, Mitchell collected postcards and wrote poetry, two hobbies that a 13-year-old knows better than to brag about; he kept himself mostly to himself. But even then he was quietly ambitious: he amassed a huge postcard collection by writing to manufacturers to let them know that such-and-such a view of the M1 had won his postcard of the month award and could they please send more? The poetry was published in the parish magazine under the pseudonym James Bolivar, after the Venezuelan revolutionary Simon Bolivar. He waited; still no third world war. He drew detailed Tolkienesque maps on bits of cartridge paper, and devised elaborate battle plans on his ZX Spectrum.
More than anything else, though, it was Mitchell's stammer that encouraged him to "live inside myself". Until he mentioned it, I wasn't aware that he had a stammer, and though he says I'm kind to say so, it is virtually undetectable - an occasional pause or hesitation between words that I had taken for thinking time. "Having a stammer is like being an alcoholic," he says. "You never actually lose it, you just come to a more practical accommodation with it - and my working accommodation as a child was just not to say very much. I probably had enough going for me in other areas to compensate, but it's like having a faceful of acne on the inside and you can't put lotion on it."
The protagonist of his fourth novel, which he is already three-quarters of the way through, has a stammer and Mitchell says it has been a tremendous relief to get it all down. "There's been very little writing about speech impediments, even though it's this huge psychological barrier. Maybe this is a tasteless comparison if you're gay, but for me writing about it has been like coming out."
You can read too much into this, but you can't help but wonder if Mitchell's stammer, his early distrust of his own voice, has fostered his preference as a writer for other people's voices. He doesn't like the label ventriloquist, with its suggestion that he is some kind of vaudeville con artist, but does say that a voice of his own is not something that is especially important to him.
"A consistent voice, like Graham Greene's - I'm not sure I want one," he says. "I listened to an interview with Philip Glass and he said some great composer had come to his music college and said, 'Don't worry about finding your voice - that will come just by working in your 20s. The problem is not finding your voice, but losing it afterwards.' For me, it's not a conscious decision about being a ventriloquist or not being a ventriloquist, it's not about evolving my voice or not evolving my voice - it's responding to the demands a story makes of me. I need to write a book, what is the best voice to express it through? My own, in the third person, or should I invent a narrator who is part of the plot - and I tend to go for the latter."
For now, though, he is going back to his roots and is writing what he describes as "my straight story", a novel about a shy 13-year-old boy who stammers and publishes poetry under the name Eliot Bolivar (the Eliot for TS, naturally). It is, he says, the opposite of everything he has done so far, much more subtle and muted. "I want to make all the exclamation marks go away, to keep the extremes underground. I still want them to be there, but I don't want any special effects, any dum-de-dum-dum-DA! moments." He has no diary from the time, but has gone back to an old schoolfriend to piece together the necessary bits of slang: adjectives like epic, skill, ace, that lived for six months and then vanished. There is a notebook open on his desk where he collects bits of dialogue, stray anecdotes, quotes - I can make out the words "pig's arse" and "tunnel of shit" - and there is very little that passes him by; everything goes back into the work.
Mitchell has a sort of Zen master approach to writing, and believes it will take him another 30 years of constant improvement before he is truly good. In the meantime, he will keep exposing himself to better writers - Chekhov, Salinger, Murakami, Muriel Spark, Ursula LeGuin, Don DeLillo - as a benchmark to aim for. Already, he has the next three novels mapped out - after the Eliot Bolivar book, there will be a late medieval Atlantic saga, taking in Iceland, Ireland and the Orkneys, and then a historical novel set in Japan. (He saw The Last Samurai a few weeks ago and didn't think much of it. "The Japanese actors were fabulous, but Tom Cruise! They should have called it Top Gun Kicks Ass In Old Japan.")
Mitchell talks a lot about the commandments and restrictions he needs to work. The book he is writing now has 13 chapters, and the commandment is that each chapter must work as a stand-alone short story. Writing, he says, is a kind of escapology: you build your structure, set yourself some ground rules, then the best bits come from trying to get out of those straitjackets. In his teens, Mitchell read that Nabokov wrote all his novels on file cards and so for a time he did that, too. In his 30s, however, the rules have relaxed a little - he needs only his notebook, computer, a lot of green tea and his CDs - but the discipline is still there. And no wonder when he has so much fighting to get out - life, the universe and everything, underlined three times, three exclamation marks.
╥ Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, is published by Sceptre on March 1 at ё16.99. To order a copy for ё14.99 (plus UK p&p), call 0870 066 7979.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dream of owning a home? Find out how in the First-time Home Buying Guide.
----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1151644,00.html
Apocalypse, maybe
He grew up anxious about the A-bomb, waiting for the end of the world, collecting postcards and keeping his mouth shut. But now he has found his voice, in novels bursting with outlandish characters, from Tokyo gangsters to 19th-century lawyers, nuclear physicists to doomed clones. And with a Booker nomination already under his belt and novel number three out next week, David Mitchell's future looks far from bleak
Interview by Melissa Denes
Saturday February 21, 2004
The Guardian
It's a rule of thumb that precocious young novelists start off with something loosely autobiographical - drug-taking in Leith or high jinks in Camden, say - but three books into his career, David Mitche! ll has revealed very little of himself. This, of course, has never been his point, and until recently he had almost no interest in delving into his own life story. By the time he started writing seriously, he says, he wanted "to write the world, underlined three times, three exclamation marks". So instead of ruminations on a childhood in rural Worcestershire, we have had, to date, the inner lives of: a Japanese terrorist, a nuclear physicist, an art thief (his debut, Ghostwritten); Tokyo gangsters and submarine pilots (Number 9 Dream); and now, in Mitchell's new novel, Cloud Atlas, a 19th-century lawyer, an investigative journalist and a doomed clone from the future. His books are dense, noisy with life - a string of multi-layered narratives.
All of which makes Mitchell sound an annoyingly tricksy writer, and it's true that his critics have him down as a bit of a clever clogs, too ambitious for his own good. But what saves his books from being just brilliant formal experiments is the heart with which he writes, the humour, and the absolute conviction with which he draws his characters. He will spend ages writing biographies for all his narrators, working out the speech patterns and the childhood traumas, before he even starts on the ghost of a story. His new book has a brilliant comic creation in the character of Timothy Cavendish, a louche publisher who had a walk-on part in Ghostwritten, and a lot of good jokes - my favourite being a tantric sexual position called the Plumber (you stay in for ages and nobody comes).
Mitchell is also aware that experiment for the sake of it leads you into all kinds of cul-de-sacs. "You have to distinguish between workable innovation and unworkable innovation," he says. "There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why." When he started on Cloud Atlas three years ago, he originally planned to write nine separate narratives and a book of around 900 pages, but eventually saw the light and settled for six overlapping stories and a book of 500-ish pages.
Last year, Mitchell moved from Japan to Ireland, and is currently renting a bungalow outside Cork with his Japanese wife, Keiko, and their nearly-two-year-old daughter, Hana. He moved to Japan in the early 1990s after failing to get a job in Britain. After graduating from the University of Kent, he sat on the waiting list for McDonald's for months, then just thought enough, and went to teach English in Tokyo. He and Keiko came to Ireland partly because it is a place that neither of them knew - "It's sort of easier when you're in a third country, if things go wrong it's nobody's fault" - and partly because Japan had become too expensive. Mitchell is 35 now and after the huge critical success of Ghostwritten and Number 9 Dream (AS Byatt described Ghostwritten as "the best first novel I have ever read", while Number 9 Dream was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker), you would expect that Mitchell could afford to rest on his laurels, but no: if he had stayed on in Japan, he would ! have had to continue teaching English and seen much less of his daughter. Here, he can write and be a hands-on father.
Mitchell also likes this part of Ireland for its warm weather, but it can change five times in a day, and on the morning I arrived the sky was dark and the rain torrential. Mitchell stood waving cheerily in the doorway as the photographer and I made our soggy approach from the village, and asked very politely if we would mind taking off our shoes - "If that's not too much like visiting your grandmother." He is tall and pale, dressed in the thirtysomething male writer's uniform of jeans and black leather jacket, and while he is not at all grandmotherly, there is something slightly old-fashioned about him. He is courteous and formal, serving tea and biscuits in the living room, and has an endearing habit of deconstructing his own sentences - "Right, let me marshal my thoughts," he will say, or, "Can I quickly put this in brackets?" and, despairingly, "This sentence is collapsing under its own weight!"
Cloud Atlas took longer to write than his other two books, mainly because he had to do a lot of research. For every 10 years back in time you go, he says, you can add two months to your working time. The book is structured like a Russian doll, six narratives nestled one inside the other, with a post-apocalyptic future at its centre. There is the "Pacific journal" of Adam Ewing, a bumbling lawyer; the letters home of Robert Frobisher, a 1930s cad; and a murder mystery in a nuclear plant. The first half of the book is made up of half of each of these stories, then we get to Mitchell's apocalypse, and then each story resumes where it left off, until we are back to where we began, almost - except that we have seen the future and it doesn't look good.
In spite of its title, Cloud Atlas is Mitchell's tightest, most focused book, as well as his funniest: the Russian doll structure allows him to return to the same themes - which are, broadly speaking, the struggle between savagery and civilisation, between biology and ethics. "It's a book about predacity and predation," he says, "individuals preying on groups, groups preying on individuals."
It is also strikingly political, much more so than anything else he has written: Mitchell's vision of the future is like Naomi Klein's No Logo taken to its ultimate conclusion: a consumer society in the process of consuming itself. The narrator of this section, Somni 451, is a clone genomed to smile and stand for 19 hours on end in an underground fast-food restaurant, genuflecting to the dollar, worshipping the company logo, a sort of Ronald McDonald hologram that performs endless somersaults in the air. At night the fabricants have "nitemares of angry diners, food tube blockages, lost collars and shameful destarrings". Language itself is branded: instead of shoes, films, petrol, traffic jams, Somni 451 sees nikes, disneys, exxon and fordjams. For the pure-blood consumers who live overground, spending is compulsory - "Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime." Perhaps the most terrifying thing is that Mitchell exaggerates the present only slightly.
And yet he says he is not a particularly gloomy person. Sometimes he feels, in the words of a George Monbiot column he recently cut out and kept, that, "given the choice between saving the world and a new dinner service, humanity would probably go for the dinner service". Other times, he's not sure what the doom-mongers are worrying about. It can all depend on what sort of a day he's having, and he points out that history is decided by good days and bad days. "What is that lovely Arthur Miller quote? [He is very given to lovely quotes.] 'How much of life is decided simply because it is 5 o'clock on a Friday.' "
Often, the predation he writes about in Cloud Atlas works on the level of race: the imperialists buying out the Polynesians, the Consumers controlling the Servers, the tribal warfare that follows the second Fall. "Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself," says Mitchell, "a way of subdividing into smaller groups." He pauses. "But I think banging on too much about race is something a white male hasn't quite got the right to do, because lots of other non-white writers have done it so well. Any racism I experienced in Japan was of the mildest possible sort, it never really got above the level of condescension. But it's undeniably a sub-theme - the 19th century made an ideology of racism. That is a part of my history, and we do have a responsibility to sort through our own country's dirty laundry."
As a child, he says, he was "very anxious". Growing up in Worcestershire with his older brother and artist parents, he worried constantly about the threat of nuclear war. "I was speaking to some Dutch friends about it recently, and they laughed and said, 'Why would you believe that?' It would make an interesting study - how much was nuclear war feared, really, in the early 1980s in different countries, and I wonder if there is a correlation between the size of a country's defence budget and that fear." He had read all of John Wyndham's "traumatic, disturbing" books by the age of 12 and thinks that this, too, fed his apocalyptic streak.
While he waited for the end of the world, Mitchell collected postcards and wrote poetry, two hobbies that a 13-year-old knows better than to brag about; he kept himself mostly to himself. But even then he was quietly ambitious: he amassed a huge postcard collection by writing to manufacturers to let them know that such-and-such a view of the M1 had won his postcard of the month award and could they please send more? The poetry was published in the parish magazine under the pseudonym James Bolivar, after the Venezuelan revolutionary Simon Bolivar. He waited; still no third world war. He drew detailed Tolkienesque maps on bits of cartridge paper, and devised elaborate battle plans on his ZX Spectrum.
More than anything else, though, it was Mitchell's stammer that encouraged him to "live inside myself". Until he mentioned it, I wasn't aware that he had a stammer, and though he says I'm kind to say so, it is virtually undetectable - an occasional pause or hesitation between words that I had taken for thinking time. "Having a stammer is like being an alcoholic," he says. "You never actually lose it, you just come to a more practical accommodation with it - and my working accommodation as a child was just not to say very much. I probably had enough going for me in other areas to compensate, but it's like having a faceful of acne on the inside and you can't put lotion on it."
The protagonist of his fourth novel, which he is already three-quarters of the way through, has a stammer and Mitchell says it has been a tremendous relief to get it all down. "There's been very little writing about speech impediments, even though it's this huge psychological barrier. Maybe this is a tasteless comparison if you're gay, but for me writing about it has been like coming out."
You can read too much into this, but you can't help but wonder if Mitchell's stammer, his early distrust of his own voice, has fostered his preference as a writer for other people's voices. He doesn't like the label ventriloquist, with its suggestion that he is some kind of vaudeville con artist, but does say that a voice of his own is not something that is especially important to him.
"A consistent voice, like Graham Greene's - I'm not sure I want one," he says. "I listened to an interview with Philip Glass and he said some great composer had come to his music college and said, 'Don't worry about finding your voice - that will come just by working in your 20s. The problem is not finding your voice, but losing it afterwards.' For me, it's not a conscious decision about being a ventriloquist or not being a ventriloquist, it's not about evolving my voice or not evolving my voice - it's responding to the demands a story makes of me. I need to write a book, what is the best voice to express it through? My own, in the third person, or should I invent a narrator who is part of the plot - and I tend to go for the latter."
For now, though, he is going back to his roots and is writing what he describes as "my straight story", a novel about a shy 13-year-old boy who stammers and publishes poetry under the name Eliot Bolivar (the Eliot for TS, naturally). It is, he says, the opposite of everything he has done so far, much more subtle and muted. "I want to make all the exclamation marks go away, to keep the extremes underground. I still want them to be there, but I don't want any special effects, any dum-de-dum-dum-DA! moments." He has no diary from the time, but has gone back to an old schoolfriend to piece together the necessary bits of slang: adjectives like epic, skill, ace, that lived for six months and then vanished. There is a notebook open on his desk where he collects bits of dialogue, stray anecdotes, quotes - I can make out the words "pig's arse" and "tunnel of shit" - and there is very little that passes him by; everything goes back into the work.
Mitchell has a sort of Zen master approach to writing, and believes it will take him another 30 years of constant improvement before he is truly good. In the meantime, he will keep exposing himself to better writers - Chekhov, Salinger, Murakami, Muriel Spark, Ursula LeGuin, Don DeLillo - as a benchmark to aim for. Already, he has the next three novels mapped out - after the Eliot Bolivar book, there will be a late medieval Atlantic saga, taking in Iceland, Ireland and the Orkneys, and then a historical novel set in Japan. (He saw The Last Samurai a few weeks ago and didn't think much of it. "The Japanese actors were fabulous, but Tom Cruise! They should have called it Top Gun Kicks Ass In Old Japan.")
Mitchell talks a lot about the commandments and restrictions he needs to work. The book he is writing now has 13 chapters, and the commandment is that each chapter must work as a stand-alone short story. Writing, he says, is a kind of escapology: you build your structure, set yourself some ground rules, then the best bits come from trying to get out of those straitjackets. In his teens, Mitchell read that Nabokov wrote all his novels on file cards and so for a time he did that, too. In his 30s, however, the rules have relaxed a little - he needs only his notebook, computer, a lot of green tea and his CDs - but the discipline is still there. And no wonder when he has so much fighting to get out - life, the universe and everything, underlined three times, three exclamation marks.
╥ Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, is published by Sceptre on March 1 at ё16.99. To order a copy for ё14.99 (plus UK p&p), call 0870 066 7979.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dream of owning a home? Find out how in the First-time Home Buying Guide.