I just finished reading Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Amazing book. While reading the first few pages about a stowaway on an ancient schooner, I flipped towards the end and noticed some reference to people downloading things on their Sony’s, and realized this novel had breadth.
I then quickly learned that it also had chop, when the first part of the book ended mid-sentence, and then picked up with entirely new characters and story.
David Mitchell weaves some of that wink of self-awareness/ display of artifice that I like so much, describing a piece of music (and, silently, the flow of the book as well) as such:
“In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shant know till I’m finished” -p. 445
I’ll leave you with that, and on to some excerpts:
The first seems to me a striking recipe for an art action, and one I will soon nab, perhaps for our future funded trip down the Danube.
elaborating my map (corpus equis map/ sequential folkmaps)
“A silent blacksmith showed me how to get to Chateau Zedelghem by elaborating my map with a pencil stub” -p. 49
and a terse repartee for that annoying but vitally persistent question asked of all artists:
“If they want to know ‘what I mean’ they should listen to my bloody music.” -p. 71
dribblesome
“People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it’ll no longer function. Luger here. Thirteen minutes to go.” -p. 470
“A pi-jawed ass of kingly proportion, so busy planning his next boorish interruption that he never listens properly” -p. 449
“He spoke in bon mots like that, not to you, but into the ear of posterity, for dinner-party guests of the future to say, ‘That’s one of Hitchcocks, you know.” -p. 95
“An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton” -p. 54
“If people praise you, you’re not walking your own path.” -p. 55
And how’s this for another view of the avant-garde as someone who is in front of everyone else, walking backwards, and telling everyone what the view is like:
“I always say, Ted, to get the crowd to cry Hosanna, you mujst first ride into town on an ass. Backwards, ideally, whilst telling the masses the tall stories they want to hear.” - p. 83″
a decomposing secret
“Eva is due back in ten days, and that hawkeyed creature will sniff out a decomposing secret in a jiffy.”
“Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led.” -p. 169