Literary blue balls in book #2
2. Number9Dream by David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas was easily one of the best books I read last year, so I immediately ordered Mitchell's other two novels. Number9Dream was an absorbing read, although the ending left me unsatisfied. The novel's John Lennon obsessed protagonist moves to Tokyo from the provinces to discover the identity of his father. Along the way, he gets mixed up with the yakuza, falls in love with a diabetic pianist with a perfect neck and searches for meaning to his life.
At points, Number9Dream reads like an homage to Murakami -- there is even an allusion to Wind-Up Bird Chronicles -- and I think its abrupt, Murakamian (Murakamiesque?) end-of-the-world/end-of-the-dream conclusion doesn't serve its previous 400 pages well. Why, oh why, do authors spend years crafting wonderful novels and don't wait another week to think of a better-suited ending? (I had the same problem with Patricia Dunker's highly recommended novel, The Deadly Space Between.) I don't mean a Shakespearean ending, where all the couples are married off or everyone's corpse fills the stage and there is a moralizing soliloquy by the sole righteous survivor, I just want an ending which follows the spirit of the book. Maybe I am revealing myself as a classicist, but I prefer resolution over cop-out.
If the book is mediocre, this doesn't bother me as much. (I can only demand so much from mediocre writers.) But when the author gets me all worked up and hot and bothered only to leave me hanging, well, I've been blue balled.
Cloud Atlas was easily one of the best books I read last year, so I immediately ordered Mitchell's other two novels. Number9Dream was an absorbing read, although the ending left me unsatisfied. The novel's John Lennon obsessed protagonist moves to Tokyo from the provinces to discover the identity of his father. Along the way, he gets mixed up with the yakuza, falls in love with a diabetic pianist with a perfect neck and searches for meaning to his life.
At points, Number9Dream reads like an homage to Murakami -- there is even an allusion to Wind-Up Bird Chronicles -- and I think its abrupt, Murakamian (Murakamiesque?) end-of-the-world/end-of-the-dream conclusion doesn't serve its previous 400 pages well. Why, oh why, do authors spend years crafting wonderful novels and don't wait another week to think of a better-suited ending? (I had the same problem with Patricia Dunker's highly recommended novel, The Deadly Space Between.) I don't mean a Shakespearean ending, where all the couples are married off or everyone's corpse fills the stage and there is a moralizing soliloquy by the sole righteous survivor, I just want an ending which follows the spirit of the book. Maybe I am revealing myself as a classicist, but I prefer resolution over cop-out.
If the book is mediocre, this doesn't bother me as much. (I can only demand so much from mediocre writers.) But when the author gets me all worked up and hot and bothered only to leave me hanging, well, I've been blue balled.
posted by Mi at 11:01 AM
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