What do you think of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas?

sadly, in their home country this guy is a lot more famous

No disrespect to this guy intended.

On another note, I reread De Zoet over Christmas and it's far and away my favourite of his. I was asked to interview him for a magazine, and started making inquiries, but later realized the editor was talking about this [other] guy

that sux cuz he was by a decent margin the most interested and enjoyable of the handful of authors ive ever interviewed

ive thought about giving de zoet another shot because it took a second reading for me to really 'get' black swan green but i cant muster up the energy.

I like "...De Zoet" even more after letting it sink in and talking about it with my friends as they've read it.

apparently tom hanks is going to star in an adaptation co-written and co-directed by the wachowskis and tom tykwer of run lola run?

produced by ... michael bay?

i always thought it should be a 12-episode HBO miniseries broadcast in the same order as the book, w/ different directors for each segment doing 2 episodes each

unfortunately i am not in charge

your idea is better!

Much better, although conversely I don't think there's so much spilling out of Cloud Atlas that it couldn't be served well by a film adaptation. Hopefully they restrict Hanks to just one section rather than having him play several characters.

Luisa Rey section aside, the BBC might make a better fist of a Cloud Atlas series than HBO. Can't quite see an HBO-ised Timothy Cavendish story somehow.

It would be OK if Hanks just played the old gay bloke that Luisa Rey meets on a balcony

definitely, matt, HBO was just a placeholder

i think the most middle section of the book could be awesome – if it were done all dreamy and super-futuristic like

It would be OK if Hanks just played the old gay bloke that Luisa Rey meets on a balcony

Apparently playing Dr. Henry Goose: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1371111/

About one hundred pages into Jacob de Zoet, which I am so far enjoying more than his other books.

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hugh grant in makeup on set

i always thought it should be a 12-episode HBO miniseries broadcast in the same order as the book, w/ different directors for each segment doing 2 episodes each

― ban drake (the rapper) (max), Tuesday, April 12, 2011 10:03 PM (7 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

This is a great idea and would prob be better than the book which for all its effort never really shook the milquetoast Englishman tone

What an insult to Calvino frankly

J/k it was p good

nice try

Do u love this book max, cause I only like it it, its a bit stilted or something

yeah i do. i dont get 'stilted' at all from it--some parts dont succeed as well as others for sure. i think ghostwritten is better probably. (the others are all good too but not as easy to compare.) this guy is like my favorite working author though!

Ghostwritten is still my favorite, although a large chunk of the new one was beautiful.

It's a great book and I agree with Max (and suspect Alfred is correct about excellence of new book also) -- as living authors go, DM is brilliant and admirable and I like to celebrate him.

as I have said before I even thought no9dream, which no one here liked, was often staggeringly brilliant

I really liked Cloud Atlas, but I found Jacob de Zoet problematic. I seem to remember feeling it toiled somewhat. Pretty sure I wrote something on ILB, hang on.

Here we go:

I... can't make up my mind. Some good things - there's a nice aesthetic tingle produced by yoking constructs of Dutch 18th C Enlightenment/language with Japanese, and also his brief thumbnail detail has a sort of... well, what I wd approximate ignorantly with Japanese brush strokes, or the fine detail of its poetry/art.

Yet, and yet, it's awful slow burning. Mitchell's good at little set pieces, but actually, not an awful lot is happening. Continual hints at mystery are beginning to produce an atmosphere of a type of magic realism, whereas Cloud Atlas details a sense of real magic, rather than gesturing towards a sort of totemic/symbolic/metaphoric spirituality, which always strikes me as half-baked, and not a little lubberly.

There's a touch of the TEFL about the language stuff and a touch of the history lesson about more than a few of the character speechs.

His style grates on me sometimes as well, with characters' thinking descriptions in a most writerly fashion. Noticed this as well in Cloud Atlas, but it mattered less.

i loved the new one, even the mystical mountain demon part

i liked no9dream, pinefox

Feel like for all the formal ambition he's p workman like, he could afford to be more outragous or something, I'm all spread yr wings and fly David mitchell - like riffing off if on a winters night a traveler but finishing the stories is kind of oddly in opposition to the sprit of the thing - don't get me wrong it's still p awesome in its own way I just found it k frustrating

eh i think IOAWNAT is the wrong referent here, obviously its a forerunner to this but what hes doing is grounded a lot more in sci-fi/fantasy than it is in postmodern text games

that being said he doesnt "finish the stories" in ghostwritten, maybe youd like it more?

Isnt cloud atlas a direct ionawnat reference tho

i dunno

I didn't like winter's night and I loved Cloud Atlas

yes, he says CA idea was taken from WNight, but from my POV he has taken something and vastly improved on it.

Presumably that is possible to do and many instances could be found - eg Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, or whatever (nothing against Haley)

omg you're the only one, pinefox! besides me! who doesn't like if on a winter's night! <3!

Crazy talk!

i like his novels a lot but am also biased cuz ive interviewed a couple of times and he was just super intelligent and engaged and fun to talk to and once took like an extra hour just to chat w/ me abt like japanese music and nabakov, and was really encouraging and kind abt my own writing

'ghostwritten' is his best book, i think, although there are stretches of 'cloud atlas' that are incredible i think some of the sections really lag, also hes better at beginning than ending mb

hes kindof a storyteller at heart tho, i think, like he cares abt his characters and what happens to them, it makes his more fractured stories less inventive/clever but also nicer to read cuz theyre not just chess pieces or w/e. when i talked to him abt 'black swan green' he talked a lot abt 'realism' and caring abt truth which is kinda in opposition to calvino, sort of

My favorite part of Jacob de Zoet was the final section: the sea captain's ruminations.

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more here http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/07/25/cloud-atlas-photos-tom-hanks-halle-berry-exclusive-first-look/

long ass trailer http://www.joblo.com/video/player.php?video=cloud-atlas-long-trailer