Teenager with saxophone
In my continuing search for post-Soviet novels written by Russians (Victor Pelevin!), I chanced upon Ghostwritten by David Mitchell. Its blurb mentions that part of the book happens in St Petersburg. So I started on Ghostwritten, which is every bit as exhilarating as the later Cloud Atlas. The novel consists of nine parts featuring nine characters who are oblivious of each other. The narrator of the Tokyo section is 19-year-old Satoru, a half-Filipino, half-Japanese clerk at a jazz record store.
“I wondered about my real mother. Not hankeringly. It’s pointless to hanker. Mama-san said she’d been deported back to the Philippines afterwards, and would never be allowed back into Japan. I can’t help but wonder, just sometimes, who she is now, what she’s doing, and whether she ever thinks about me.”
He turns up again in the later sections. I peeked. I like Mitchell’s novels because something actually happens in them (I’m old school, I like plot), and they’re big. Too many contemporary novels suffer from a lack of ambition. Look, if you’re going to aim so low, why bother to write it?
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