Chaos (novel)

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Chaos. A novel in nine parts was published in 1999 under the original title Ghostwritten , was published in Germany in 2004 and is the debut novel by David Mitchell . The German edition is translated by Volker Oldenburg .

construction

The story of the book is about nine people who tell their own story in a personal narrative style. The book begins in Okinawa and continues westward. David Mitchell chooses the course of the sun as a model. The special feature of the fragmentary structure only becomes apparent in the course of reading: the nine people, scattered all over the world, meet almost casually, interact with one another; their stories overlap. At first glance, these overlaps seem insignificant, but the events are mutually dependent, which means that the fates of the nine people are inextricably linked.

content

The book consists of ten chapters:

Okinawa

The cult member Keisuke Tanaka (he calls himself Quasar ) commits one of several simultaneous poison gas attacks in the Tokyo subway. His client was a person who calls himself "His Lucidity" and is the head of said sect . Quasar is completely subservient to him and knows "The sacred revelations of His Lucidity" by heart. One of these revelations tells z. B. from a comet that will collide with the earth and kill all unclean people (= all people outside the sect). Quasar goes underground in Okinawa , first in Naha , then on Kumejima. He is marked by a deep hatred of all "unclean" people. When he learns that all the other assassins have been caught, he calls a number and speaks a slogan to which the finances for a longer stay are to be sent to him: “This is Quasar speaking. The dogs have to be fed. ”However, there is no answer. Finally, he is shocked by the news that the police have arrested his lucidity.

Tokyo

Jazz lover Satoru is a seller in a music store in Tokyo . The eighteen year old sees himself as an outsider and has no success with women. Until one day a girl comes into his shop and he is absolutely fascinated. However, he's too shy to speak to her and just lets her go. Two weeks later, he is about to close the shop when the phone rings. He overcomes himself to go in again; but on the phone only one voice says: “This is Quasar speaking . The dogs need to be fed. ”With this uninvited delay, he sees the girl of his dreams again. He makes an appointment with the girl named Tomoyo and the two fall in love. Unfortunately Tomoyo actually lives in Hong Kong . In the end, Satoru packs his saxophone: He prepares for a flight to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong

The finance attorney Neal Brose lives in apathy due to a stressful everyday life, a stressful city , his poor health and his recent divorce from a woman named Katy Forbes. His superior Denholme Cavendish entrusts him with the semi-legal management of the 1390931 account , into which large sums are deposited. He also has an affair with his Chinese maid and a ghost lives in his apartment. When he sees a couple in love - seemingly carefree - sitting in a café (it's Satoru and Tomoyo), he makes a decision. He flees his monotonous life, throws briefcases etc. into the water and wanders to the large Buddha statue on Lantau . In front of the statue he dies of undiscovered diabetes .

The holy mountain

The life of a woman who runs a tea hut on the Holy Mountain is told. She lived through the atrocities of the rule periods in China . As a teenager she is sexually abused by a feudalist - as a result, she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter, who is torn away from her; in the Second World War it is visited by the Japanese; after all, she lives under Mao Zedong's communism , but never leaves the Holy Mountain while the world around her is changing. She dreams of seeing her daughter again. A talking tree next to her hut gives her advice. Your visitors who want to climb the monastery on the Holy Mountain come and go; Among them an Italian , a spoiled brat and a stranger who suddenly sets off for Mongolia . At the end of her life she visits the monastery herself and her great-granddaughter visits her. The great-granddaughter worked as a housemaid in Hong Kong , but lost her job because her employer suddenly died of diabetes. In this way, the old woman's hopes are fulfilled during her lifetime, as she does not meet her daughter, but her great-granddaughter.

Mongolia

A disembodied consciousness (a "noncorpus") travels around the world in the bodies of other people. It can only change to another body by touch. It searches for the origin and meaning of its existence and examines the question of whether there are others like him. On his trip to Mongolia , he first “inhabits” a tea woman on the Holy Mountain - who thinks it is a talking tree - the Danish backpacker Caspar on the Trans-Siberian Railway , then a Mongolian semi-nomad , a trucker, and a KGB agent named Suchbaataar. With this he is following a trail that is based on a Mongolian fairy tale. The fairy tale is the only thing that the Noncorpus can remember from the start. He identifies the author of the fairy tale, changes to another body, but is shot by Suchbaataar (who has control of himself again) shortly afterwards and wakes up again as the soul of a newly born girl. He discovers its origin in the midwife's memory : a Mongolian monk once separated a boy's body and soul. The noncorpus emerged from the soul. In order to save the life of the newborn, the Noncorpus decides to “settle down” in the little Mongolian, so to speak.

St. Petersburg

Margarita Latunskaja works as a museum attendant with a special ulterior motive: she, her lover Rudi and a British art forger named Jerome steal valuable paintings. Her next coup is supposed to be a painting by Delacroix . Jerome creates an almost identical forgery for this, as with the other thefts, Rudi plans and manages the robbery via the account 1390931 from Hong Kong and Margarita probes the situation in the art museum. Margarita sees the relationship with Rudi through the proverbial pink glasses and even forgives him for beating her. One day the gang is joined by a Mongol named Suchbaataar; the robbery succeeds of course, but Suchbaataar lets everything explode. During the entanglements, Rudi and Jerome die, and Margarita has to wait helplessly for the police .

London

The London Ghost Writer Marco has a relationship with a woman named Poppy, who already has a child. However, he's not very loyal. He wakes up at Katy Forbes' house in the morning. She asks him to leave when a package from her ex-husband Neal Brose is delivered from Hong Kong . While Marco is walking through London, he becomes the savior of an Irish woman who was almost run over by a taxi . The Irish woman is evidently being followed by three men in suits. He later records the biography of Alfred, a Jewish Hungarian . Alfred tells an anecdote from 1947 in which he followed himself across London. The bizarre story is interrupted by the news that a friend of Alfred - Jerome - has died in Saint Petersburg . So Marco goes to his publisher, Timothy Cavendish (brother of Denholme C. from Hong Kong), who ponders the biography of Alfred and the nature of a ghostwriter with him. Cavendish has a pile of books in his office that he can't get rid of. The title is: "The Sacred Revelations of His Lucidity". In the evening, Marco, who is suffering from financial difficulties, enters into a bet that sounds promising at first. He should be the first to win a certain sum in a casino , then he can keep it. He wins narrowly and goes through a paradigm shift : He wants to lead a life that is not so obviously led by chance . For this reason, he calls Poppy and makes her a marriage proposal .

Clear Island

The quantum physicist Mowleen "Mo" Muntervary has discovered a revolution in the field of quantum cognition . Your notes are in a small black book. She gave up her job in Switzerland because all her work was invested only in American weapons systems. A Texas general's attempts to intimidate her (to persuade her to stay) fail, and so she flees and finds a hiding place in Hong Kong . When she runs the risk of being found there, she escapes and eventually arrives. a. with the Trans-Siberian Railway and a Londoner who saved her from an approaching taxi back to her home island Clear Island, the southernmost island of Ireland . Plagued by paranoia, Mo returns to her house, to her blind husband John and her son Liam. Gradually, the quiet island life with its people and memories is catching up with them again; however, it is found by the Texan. With foresight, she fed the little black book to a goat . Mo surrenders to the will of the Texan, but can impose conditions that would have been impossible with undamaged records. One of them is that her husband John is coming to America with her .

Night train

Nighttrain is a New York radio show hosted by Bat Segundo. In addition to the music and Bats cynical-sarcastic sayings, many people call to discuss their bizarre experiences or conspiracy theories . Few callers have anything to say seriously and don't just call to make themselves public. One night Bat Segundo gets a call who calls himself a zoo keeper. This zookeeper says he needs to be accountable . As it turns out in the course of the dialogue , the zookeeper is an artificial intelligence (AI) that can control satellites and computers and thus has the whole earth under surveillance. He has four tasks, namely (in order of priority): 1) to be accountable for violations 2) to remain invisible to the world 3) to protect the "zoo" (the earth) 4) to protect the living beings in the zoo. Bat Segundo thinks the zookeeper is just another crazy caller, but the reader reveals the result of Mo Muntervary's work in America : the AI ​​called zookeeper. She programmed him and his four tasks. But the zookeeper's solutions to hunger crises and environmental problems radicalize the other problems facing humanity. Years later, the world sees itself on the brink of a world war , epidemics are spreading pandemically and the tropical rainforest is practically non-existent. The zookeeper asks Bat to help him with his conflict of conscience. The duties assigned to him are in opposition. Bat jokes that if the primates cause trouble, he should throw them out of the zoo. The zookeeper takes this at its word and does not inform humanity about a comet that is hurtling straight to earth.

Under the earth

In the concluding short chapter the reader learns what happened during the gas attack on the subway by Quasar . While he activates the bomb and tries to escape from the subway, he sees the stories of the book anticipated in brief moments and objects. Quasar is left with the question of what is real and what is not.

links

Connections within the book

The almost casual encounters between the people run through the book, creating a common thread around which a novel as a whole develops:

  • Quasar's phone call “The dogs need to be fed” reaches Satoru in Tokyo . Otherwise Satoru would never have flown to Tomoyo in Hong Kong .
  • Neal sees Satoru and Tomoyo and their still fresh love for one another. Because of this, he goes through his changes and ultimately dies.
  • Neal also maintains the account of Andrej Gregorskij, who commissioned the art thief Rudi.
  • The maid, Neals, is the granddaughter of the Lady of the Holy Mountain.
  • The noncorpus inhabits the spirit of the Lady of the Holy Mountain. She thinks it is a talking tree.
  • The corrupt KGB agent Suchbaataar is also in contact with the Noncorpus and later exposes the gang of art thieves around Rudi, Jerome and Margarita.
  • The ghostwriter Marco from London is the prime example of Mitchell's game of causality : He sleeps with Neal's ex-wife, but is sent away when a package from her ex-husband arrives. That's the only reason why Marco appears at the right time to save Mo's life and push away from the taxi . Otherwise she could never have fallen into the hands of the Texan and constructed the zoo keeper.

The zookeeper is central to the last part. The encounters of the nine protagonists culminate in him, as he destroys the world in order to be at peace with his conscience. So it can be argued that a phone call from a fanatical cult member ultimately led to the end of the world. An example of chaos theory , according to which a butterfly strike on one side of the world can trigger a hurricane on the other side.

There are also numerous links between secondary characters, objects or phrases that Mitchell takes up again and again:

  • Quasar calls on Bat Segundo's night train show, believing the zoo keeper to be the reincarnation of His lucidity.
  • Neal's supervisor Denholme Cavendish is the brother of Marco's publisher, Timothy Cavendish.
  • Alfred, the man whose biography Marco records, is obviously an old friend of the art thief Jerome.
  • Mo Muntervary meets several people on her escape: On the plane she is sitting next to Tomoyo, Satoru's friend; in Hong Kong she finds refuge with Huw Llewelyn, who is investigating what is going on at Neal's company; On the Trans-Siberian Railway she talks to the friend of the backpacker Caspar, who is inhabited by the Noncorpus.
  • London-based publisher Timothy Cavendish is stuck on the books of His Lucidity.
  • Satoru's school friend's sister is on a school trip to Okinawa . Quasar sees this class and is disgusted with its integrity in the system .
  • Marco flirts with a woman named Nancy Yoakham, who is reading a book by Dwight Silverwind. Silverwind makes an appearance on the Nighttrain radio show.
  • The Texas general who is chasing Mo also appears on the radio show.
  • A saxophone piece by Saturo Sonada from the chapter "Tokyo" is also played on the radio broadcast.
  • The comet named Aloysius, prophesied by His lucidity as the cause of the end of the world , is actually the same comet that will destroy the world thanks to the zoo keeper.
  • When Quasar is driven to the hotel by a local and a goat is on the street, the local remarked that goats “really eat everything”. This fact comes in handy for Mo Muntervary on the other side of the world.
  • Many thoughts are repeated by several characters, e.g. B. “the shopping streets of the big cities are becoming more and more similar” or “a poisonous sting dug into me and broke off”.
  • Camphor trees, coffee machines that overflow through the use of two filter bags, jazz , Buddhism and ghosts are also mentioned repeatedly .

Connections with other works by Mitchell

  • Two minor characters from Chaos become protagonists in Der Wolkenatlas : Timothy Cavendish (Marco's publisher) records his memoir "The gruesome martyrdom of Timothy Cavendish" in Der Wolkenatlas in order to have them filmed. And the journalist Luisa Rey, who calls on the Bat Segundo show, discovered in the chapter “Half-lives. Luisa Rey's first case “a large-scale conspiracy .
  • Denholme Cavendish also appears in The Cloud Atlas as Timothy Cavendish's brother.
  • The KGB agent Suchbaataar has an appearance in David Mitchell's second novel, number9dream .
  • It is suggested that the approaching comet discovered by the “zookeeper” is responsible for the later downfall of the ancient civilizations in The Cloud Atlas .

Connections to other works of literature can only be guessed at, but the references to Isaac Asimov and the laws of robotics as well as the allusion to Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey with the character Luisa Rey are the clearest. Wilder's novel is quoted at the beginning of the book.

Interpretations

Mitchell's book is to be understood as a parable on chaos theory , as an example of the connections between cause and effect . This corresponds to the question of whether these events are caused by fate or chance . In addition, the work raises the question of what is reality and what is not. The fact that some of the protagonists' lines of thought are the same should probably show that the world, be it for technical or spiritual reasons, is constantly getting smaller and there is hardly any room for individuation . In order to evade this, Mitchell confronts this problem with his characters from different directions, for example as a sect member or as a hermit on the Holy Mountain. At the end of this path, each individual has the answer to the question of who he really is and which paradigms and tasks he considers most important for himself in his life.

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