Number9Dream
by Mitchell, David
- Used
- very good
- Hardcover
- Signed
- first
- Condition
- Very Good/Fair
- ISBN 10
- 0375507264
- ISBN 13
- 9780375507267
- Seller
-
Albany, California, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Synopsis
number9dream is the second novel by English author David Mitchell. Set in Japan, it narrates the search of 19-year-old Eiji Miyake for his father, whom he never met. Told in the first person by Eiji, it is a coming of age/perception story that breaks convention by juxtaposing Eiji Miyake’s actual journey toward identity and understanding with his imaginative journey.
Reviews
“Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk amid the still-are”
number9dream is the second novel by British author, David Mitchell. Nineteen-year-old Eiji Miyake arrives in Tokyo looking for his father, a man he has never met, a man whose name he does not even know. He has a letter from a lawyer warning him not to try to find his father, so his first move is to stake out the lawyer’s office from a café opposite, the Jupiter Café, where works a girl with the most beautiful neck in the world.
So begins another foray into the world of David Mitchell, one that takes the reader on an interesting (and occasionally, slightly bizarre) journey. As Eiji moves from the café to the Lost Property Office of Ueno station to a game parlour to an unfinished development on reclaimed land to a safe house to a video shop to a pizza shop to a mountain retreat, he also moves in and out of danger and encounters quite a cast of (often quirky) individuals. Claude Debussy and John Lennon play significant roles, as do the Yakuza organised crime syndicate, an overabundance of cigarettes, some seriously weird pizza recipes, a cat, an absent mother and a dead twin sister.
Mitchell manages to seamlessly include the journal of a WW2 Kaiten pilot, scenes from a surreal black and white movie, a fantastic tale starring a stuttering goatwriter, a hen and a Pithecanthropus, an account of sex slavery and organ theft, and, of course, quite a few dreams. The number nine and its elements, unsurprisingly, feature heavily but in quite a subtle way. As with all of Mitchell’s novels, there are characters who appear in earlier and later books.
Mitchell’s characters, for all their oddities, are appealing; their dialogue and Eiji’s inner monologue provide plenty of humour; and they manage to express some insightful observations: “Weird. All these people like my mother paying counsellors and clinics to reattach them to reality; all these people like me paying Sony and Sega to reattach us to unreality” and “Maybe the truest difference between people is exactly this: how they see why they are here” also “Maybe the meaning of life lies in looking for it”.
The (perhaps) abrupt ending that leaves things very much “up in the air” may not be to every reader’s taste, but the characters, plot and prose more than compensate, especially the delightful feast of rhyme, alliteration and incredibly clever wordplay of the goatwriter piece. An excellent read.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Lost Paddle Books, IOBA (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- LPB006086DM
- Title
- Number9Dream
- Author
- Mitchell, David
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Very Good
- Jacket Condition
- Fair
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Edition
- First US Edition/First Printing
- ISBN 10
- 0375507264
- ISBN 13
- 9780375507267
- Publisher
- Random House
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 2002
- Bookseller catalogs
- British Literature;
Terms of Sale
Lost Paddle Books, IOBA
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About the Seller
Lost Paddle Books, IOBA
About Lost Paddle Books, IOBA
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Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Number Line
- A series of numbers appearing on the copyright page of a book, where the lowest number generally indicates the printing of that...
- Title Page
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- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
- FFEP
- A common abbreviation for Front Free End Paper. Generally, it is the first page of a book and is part of a single sheet that...
- Spine
- The outer portion of a book which covers the actual binding. The spine usually faces outward when a book is placed on a shelf....
- Edges
- The collective of the top, fore and bottom edges of the text block of the book, being that part of the edges of the pages of a...