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The novel is cartoonish in that Eiji has a vivid and violent imagination that fills the book with daydreams. When not chain-smoking, forlorn Eiji wanders the city following vague or cryptic leads that invariably dead-end or land him back among yakuza. Mitchell (author of the critically acclaimed Ghostwritten) has a smart, eclectic writing style that seems foreign, and the novel is well paced, but the yakuza encounters are too cinematic, complete with unusual torture and pyrotechnics. Moreover, in addition to Eiji's daydreams, the last half of the book contains excerpts from the diaries of his great uncle's World War II naval heroics and bizarre short stories that Eiji reads while hiding--the latter of which make for tedious reading.
Number9Dream is crafted from too many disparate components; it does not seem to be a full expression, but an overly crowded one. Readers will sympathize with Eiji and his search, but in the end will wonder what effect, if any, all the extraneous forces had on him. The book provides many fun moments, but ultimately it doesn't really add up to the sum of its parts. --Michael Ferch
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Shortlisted for the Man Booker PrizeA novel as accomplished as anything being written.NewsweekNumber9Dream is the international literary sensation from a writer with astonishing range and imaginative energyan intoxicating ride through Tokyos dark underworlds and the even more mysterious landscapes of our collective dreams. David Mitchell follows his eerily precocious, globe-striding first novel, Ghostwritten, with a work that is in its way even more ambitious. In outward form, Number9Dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age journey: Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sisters death and his mothers breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crossesthrough a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad lucka number of its secret power centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his fathers identity becomes just one of the increasingly urgent questions Eiji must answer. Why is the line between the world of his experiences and the world of his dreams so blurry? Why do so many horrible things keep happening to him? What is it about the number 9? To answer these questions, and ultimately to come to terms with his inheritance, Eiji must somehow acquire an insight into the workings of history and fate that would be rare in anyone, much less in a boy from out of town with a price on his head and less than the cost of a Beatles disc to his name.Praise for Number9Dream Deliriousa grand blur of overwhelming sensation.Entertainment Weekly To call Mitchells book a simple quest novel . . is like calling Don DeLillos Underworld the story of a missing baseball.The New York Times Book Review Number9Dream, with its propulsive energy, its Joycean eruption of language and playfulness, represents further confirmation that David Mitchell should be counted among the top young novelists working today.San Francisco Chronicle Mitchells new novel has been described as a cross between Don DeLillo and William Gibson, and although thats a perfectly serviceable cocktail-party formula, it doesnt do justice to this odd, fitfully compelling work.The New Yorker Leaping with ease from surrealist fables to a teenage coming-of-age story and then spinning back to Yakuza gangster battles and World War IIera kamikaze diaries, Mitchell is an aerial freestyle ski-jumper of fiction. Somehow, after performing feats of literary gymnastics, he manages to stick the landing.The Seattle Post-Intelligencer A Booker Prize finalist, this is the story of a young innocent's exhilarating misadventures in Tokyo while searching for the father he never knew. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780812966923
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