Talk:number9dream

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References to Ghostwritten

In the "Guardian" review, it states:

"One character and one secret facility from Ghostwritten wink tangentially into life here too."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/mar/10/fiction.davidmitchell

I did notice the ghostwritten reference - could someone insert them into the main article? -Sam Newhouse, snewhouse9@gmail.com, 17:14 September 23 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.95.14.210 (talk) 21:14, 23 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Analysis?

This section reads like nothing more than POV fanboy-ism, with such lines as, "The escapism that Eiji uses throughout the novel in his fantasies and alternate realities lead us to empathize with his character..." "Us"? This isn't Amazon, a place where anyone can set themselves up as a literary critic, it is supposed to be encyclopaedic. Number9Dream is one of my favourite novels of recent years, but the Analysis section is anything but analytical. Guv2006 (talk) 19:16, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

LA Review

Number9Dream (2001), Mitchell’s second novel, is set in Tokyo. But this Tokyo constitutes a Blade Runner-ish parallel universe, one influenced by William Gibson and Murakami that nevertheless coexists with a recognizable world beyond it. The book takes its title from John Lennon’s 1974 song of similar title, which is about having a dream of indecipherable meaning. Near the end of the novel, Eiji, its young Japanese protagonist, has a dream (one of many in the book) in which he asks “John-san” what the dream means. Lennon replies, “The meaning of the ninth dream begins after all meanings appear to be dead and gone.”
The plot appears to center on Eiji’s search for his unknown father. But this reveals itself to be a search for something else. As his girlfriend Ai remarks, “You look for your meaning. You find it, and at that moment, your meaning changes, and you have to start all over again.” That explains the book’s episodic structure. In each of its nine chapters Eiji constructs a different understanding of his life. It is not until the eighth that he realizes that his quest is not really for his father’s identity, but a process he has to undergo to accept his twin sister’s death, which happened when he was in his teens. Mitchell allows Eiji’s dreams to bleed into his waking life (which is itself filled with nightmare figures from Japan’s crime syndicates), thereby clouding the reader’s apprehension of what is “real.” In the eighth chapter, Eiji has a dream about his sister, whom he is told he is keeping from being fully dead. When he asks the old woman interpreting his dream what it means, she says, “Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be walk awhile with the still-are.” Eiji’s quest ends when he accepts the permeability of the worlds of matter and spirit. Appropriately, the ninth chapter is without title and consists of blank pages, suggesting that full meaning continues to elude him as much as the reader.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/9620813484/perfectly-plausible-worlds --Gwern (contribs) 01:06 3 September 2011 (GMT)