A Chicken in Every Pot and Cloud Atlas on Every Bookshelf

Newsday reviews David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. And pretty damned well, I must say:

The British novelist's impressive 1999 debut, "Ghostwritten," was both lauded and maligned for its reliance on the sort of brainy literary games beloved by fans of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. But for all its tonal lapses, Mitchell's globe-spanning daisy chain of loosely connected stories was far more interesting than nearly any other debut novel of the time. "Cloud Atlas" might even be read as a radical rewrite of "Ghostwritten," a greatly improved, three-dimensional version of the tricky and, yes, show-offy original. More so than in "Ghostwritten," the half-dozen protagonists of "Cloud Atlas" recount their stories in radically different times, spaces, voices and styles amplified by the momentum of popular fiction at its most action-driven.

If this review doesn't get yr mouth watering, nothing will.

Comments

[Steve of Splinters/Inwriting]

Nothing will then!

[Alyx L]

Terrific review! I'm half-way through it now, just starting on the downhill slope, and already planning to read it again in a year or so.