English novelist Mitchell takes Turkish readers to the clouds

A book consisting of six nested stories that transport the reader from the remote South Pacific in the 19th century to a distant, post-apocalyptic future, Mitchell's book was awarded the British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award and the Richard & Judy Book of the Year award, as well as being short-listed for the 2004 Booker Prize, Nebula Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, among others. The blockbusting tale was translated into Turkish by Bilge Nur Gündüz and published by Doğan Kitap.

Some critics define “Cloud Atlas” as your best work. Do you agree with them?

No. I need to believe that my latest book is my best work, otherwise I couldn't hand the manuscript in to my publishers without suffering attacks of conscience and a feeling of letting down my readers. It is true that “Cloud Atlas” is still my best-selling book, but sales don't paint the whole picture. It is my intention as a novelist to improve with age. Like whisky.

Reviews on Amazon.com demonstrate that American readers liked “Cloud Atlas” much more than British readers. Is this surprising for you?

There is a special ward in psychiatric hospitals for former novelists who became too concerned about their Amazon reviews and critical opinion, and I have no intention of becoming a long-term inmate in that ward. Years ago, in Amazon's early days, I found a review of Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece “The Great Gatsby” which read, “A good story, but not very well written.” That's like saying, “The Beatles are fairly good singers but isn't their songwriting abysmal?” Since that time I have avoided drawing conclusions from Amazon reviews, and I am a happier man because of it.

In one of your interviews, you refer to Italo Calvino's “If on a Winter's Night a Traveler” as an inspiration for your style. But it occurred to me that it mostly recalls the “Arabian Nights.” Like Scheherazade, you connect stories to each other perfectly. Are you familiar with the “Nights” or other Middle Eastern literary works?

“Arabian Nights” is a world classic, so I've been familiar with some of the tales from boyhood. Anyone who writes a large-scale, panoramic book will face the same problem -- how do you stop this giant, textual Frankenstein's creation from falling to bits as it lumbers onwards? The answer is to engineer a structure that is strong and well-muscled enough to support your hundreds of pages. The writer of such a book needs to pay close attention to the joints and continuity -- where should one section end and another begin, and why, and how this helps or hinders the flow of the overall story arc and pace, theme, character development and so on. “Arabian Nights” is a pioneer of this “narrative technology.”

I'm not a specialist in literature from the Middle East, so I know only the bigger names from this vast and diverse region: Naguib Mahfouz, Hisham Matar, Alaa Al-Aswany, and your own Orhan Pamuk and Yaşar Kemal. (Pamuk's memoir of his youth in İstanbul is a brilliant, haunting book.) I like Amos Oz's work, too. But that's not a very long and erudite list, I'm afraid. How I would like to have two lifetimes: one for living, and one just for reading.

In the novel, you discuss morality and colonialism, among other topics. It can be said that, to some extent, your style and the subjects the novel deals with remind the reader of Joseph Conrad and Hermann Melville. Are they your foremost literary masters?

Worthy literary gurus don't want disciples, and worthy literary disciples don't need gurus. But some writers mesmerize you, so you ache to master what they have mastered. Conrad and Melville I admire very much. Their work transcends their own periods in history -- an achievement which all novelists yearn to emulate, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, I believe. (The joke is, of course, we will be dead by the time history delivers its verdict.) Both Conrad and Melville have a very modern feel or ambience, and neither man wrote any junk.

That was my long answer to your question. My short answer is Chekhov. I read his stories every three or four years to reaffirm my faith in what literature is capable of being. He was a doctor, so he worked with people at the most fragile and sniveling hours of their lives, but also their bravest and most stoic, and somehow all this beats at the heart of his stories. (That is my latest attempt to understand why Chekhov is so life-affirming, but, to be truthful, I don't think I'll ever succeed.)

In all your novels, many stories and countries intertwine. You do this in a manner of trying to remake the traditional novel. Can one define David Mitchell as a novelist of the age of globalization?

Thank you for the honor your question pays me. Perhaps all artists are “pre-installed” with some desire to innovate -- why aspire to imitate our predecessors' glories? However, asking an author how he can be defined is a bit like asking a platypus if he minds being categorized as an oviparous mammal, or would prefer “amphibian” or “half-otter-half-duck.” The platypus would answer, “Ask a zoologist -- I'm too busy being a platypus to spend time thinking about such matters.” Me, I'm too busy trying to solve the problems in my next book to wonder about whether I have a place in the great conversation of literature, and what that place might be.

I was wondering, before writing the first sentence of the novel, were all the stories made up in your mind? Or did you decide to combine different stories that were written at different times into a novel?

The former. From the beginning, I had the idea of splitting a number of novellas into halves to form a novel. Originally I was going to have nine stories, not six, but by the third I realized that nine would snap the average reader's tolerance.

In the second chapter, “Letters From Zedelghem,” there are many eye-catching references to classical music. Is this a reflection of your passion for music or did you have to do a lot of research?

Of course, I love music -- don't all sane humans? -- and I'm curious about composers and musicians, but I have no musical training. In fact I cribbed most of the “Zedelghem” musicology from CD booklets and a book about the Anglo-American composer Frederick Delius. It's a novelist's job to create the illusion of mastery in whatever field our novels enter, but the key word is “illusion.” In English we have a saying, “A Jack of All Trades but a Master of None”: to know a little about many things, but not be an expert at any one thing. (I wonder what the Turkish equivalent is?) This saying fits most writers very well, and I envy the exceptions, like Chekhov. Primo Levi was an industrial chemist and the poet Wallace Stevens ran an insurance company.

Which of the characters in the novel would you define as your alter-ego?

All characters contain some of the writer's mental DNA, so I see elements of myself in all the heroes and all the villains. (My wife might say I am more like the villains and less like the heroes.) So “Cloud Atlas” has no single avatar which has more me in it than anyone else, but of course I did spend a lot of time with those “people” -- more time, in fact, than with my own family. A strange job, isn't it? A psychiatrist tries to understand real people, but a novelist seeks to understand non-existent people created by himself. Perhaps this makes us wise about humanity, but I have my doubts -- on bad days it feels that the “way of the novelist” leads not to self-knowledge or enlightenment, but to back-ache, debt and infamy.

A movie adaptation of “Cloud Atlas” will hit theaters next year. Tom Hanks and Susan Sarandon are among the cast. I guess this project was not unexpected for you, as the “The First Luisa Rey Mystery” chapter seems especially perfectly cut out for Hollywood. Did you contribute to the screenplay?

No, I didn't contribute to the screenplay -- it's a very different art form from the novel, and it would be arrogant to believe I would be good at both. The film is a labor of love for the directors -- the Waciowski siblings and Tom Tykwer -- and they have created a masterly script without needing any help from me. The film is shooting now and I have the highest hopes for it.