NUMBER9DREAM

Name: NUMBER9DREAM
Author: David Mitchell
ISBN: 0-375-50726-4

by David Mitchell ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

Booker nominee Mitchell (Ghostwritten, 2000) offers fans of Kafka, Pynchon, and DeLillo state-of-the-art dreams of a Tokyo...

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A wildly inventive set of variations on an abandoned young Japanese man’s Sisyphean search for his father under the aegis of John Lennon and the mystical number nine.

Eiji Miyake’s quest starts off with a bang as he proceeds from the Jupiter Café to the behemoth PanOpticon building, disguised as an aquarium serviceman, to extract at gunpoint his father’s address from his attorney, who turns out to be a bioborg replicant. Or he phones her in a halfhearted attempt to make an appointment. Or he follows her to a cinema where she’s meeting his father. Or—in a scenario that seems just as real as the others—he attempts to bluff his way into the building. This hall of mirrors opens into a roistering, episodic tale that moves back and forth between Eiji’s childhood—where, spurned by the minister who supported his illegitimate twins financially but refused to see them or their mother, Eiji unwittingly sacrificed his sister Anju to the thunder god—and his increasingly baroque plans to track down his father in a postmodern Tokyo where waking and dreaming, people and computers are virtually indistinguishable. His feckless schemes immerse him in an acquaintance’s hard-nosed plot to get revenge on the girlfriend who stood him up, as well as a Yakuza war over the market for illegally harvested human organs, and project his search onto his grandfather’s testing of a desperate WWII anti-American weapon and an alter ego who clamors for the audience his animal fable offers. All the while, apparently minor characters—a computer nerd at the lost-property office, a female private eye, a Jupiter Café waitress with a perfect neck—gradually assume an importance of truly paranoiac dimensions.

Booker nominee Mitchell (Ghostwritten, 2000) offers fans of Kafka, Pynchon, and DeLillo state-of-the-art dreams of a Tokyo landscape that could have come straight out of a video game. A demented, maddeningly playful, important book.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-375-50726-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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UNRULY
by David Mitchell

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FALL DOWN 7 TIMES GET UP 8
by Naoki Higashida ; translated by KA Yoshida & David Mitchell

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.