ACTUAL BOOK

Not unlike one of my favorite books of all time, Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Ghostwritten is a loosely connected collection of nine stories.  Each of the stories is an independent tale with references and minor connections to at least one of the other stories in the book.  I tend to enjoy this device because it reads like your typical collection of short stories except that you get the occasional “a-ha” moment when you recognize a person or an event from an earlier story.  As with most short story collections, some of the individual narratives are better than others.  As a whole, the book flows well and you at least get the sense of an overarching theme, although I’m not sure that I’m smart enough to really understand what that theme was.  As with all of the other Mitchell books I’ve read, I very much enjoyed this novel, though not not as much as Cloud Atlas or The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.