Blasts from the Past: Ghostwritten by David Mitchell (1999)

This is the latest in a series of occasional posts featuring books I read years ago about which I was wildly enthusiastic at the time, wanting to press a copy in as many hands as I could.

Ghostwritten was published in my last year as a bookseller when I’d become a little jaded with sales pitches. It attracted a good few tired phrases such as ‘dazzling debut’ and ‘literary tour de force’ but in David Mitchell’s case they were well deserved.

In this set of linked short stories, some fitting together like a jigsaw, others joined by tenuous threads, Mitchell explores chance and fate. From the Tokyo subway nerve gas attack to Russian art fraud and gangsters, from a sweet love affair between two jazz obsessed young people to a resignation which sets the CIA into a terrifying spin, the stories would be ambitious in themselves but to meld them into a whole takes a level of accomplishment that few manage to attain. Mitchell did it with apparent ease, catching the eyes of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize judges.

Ghostwritten turned out to be one of those debuts which was never matched for me. I admired the literary pyrotechnics of the much-acclaimed Cloud Atlas but didn’t love it and haven’t kept up with Michell’s writing since.

What about you, any blasts from the past you’d like to share?

You can find more posts like this here.