Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

Hardcover, 2006

Library's rating

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Read but unowned

Description

Fiction. Literature. HTML:By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize Selected by Time as One of the Ten Best Books of the Year | A New York Times Notable Book | Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post Book World, The Christian Science Monitor, Rocky Mountain News, and Kirkus Reviews | A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist | Winner of the ALA Alex Award | Finalist for the Costa Novel Award From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new. Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys� games on a frozen lake; of �nightcreeping� through the summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled thrills of the Falklands War and its human toll; of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend, Ross Wilcox; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian emigr� who is both more and less than she appears; of Jason�s search to replace his dead grandfather�s irreplaceable smashed watch before the crime is discovered; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first Duran Duran LPs, and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher�s recession; of Gypsies camping in the woods and the hysteria they inspire; and, even closer to home, of a slow-motion divorce in four seasons. Pointed, funny, profound, left-field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell�s subtlest and most effective achievement to date. Praise for Black Swan Green �[David Mitchell has created] one of the most endearing, smart, and funny young narrators ever to rise up from the pages of a novel. . . . The always fresh and brilliant writing will carry readers back to their own childhoods. . . . This enchanting novel makes us remember exactly what it was like.��The Boston Globe �[David Mitchell is a] prodigiously daring and imaginative young writer. . . . As in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Herman Melville, one feels the roof of the narrative lifted off and oneself in thrall.��Time.… (more)

Media reviews

The Believer

Fleshing out such elementary wisdom is what coming-of-age novels are about. No doubt, that label will make some grimace and others wax nostalgic, but this novel is OK with caressing its traditional parameters. It settles for the sparks of verisimilitude instead of the fireworks of reinvention,

while transmitting the uncomfortably comfortable sensation of smacking into the participants in one’s young life.

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The New York Times

Mitchell is so good at inhabiting other voices that halfway through his ambitious "Cloud Atlas" (2004) — the characters include a 19th-century traveler in the Chatham Islands and a genetically engineered slave in a futuristic Korean dystopia — I began to suspect that Mitchell himself might

actually be a noncorpum, a spirit who has commandeered the body of a young Englishman to type out its books. Anxious, perhaps, about being mistaken for a supernatural being, Mitchell set himself a different sort of challenge in his brilliant new novel, "Black Swan Green." The book, set almost exclusively in a village of that name in quiet, provincial Worcestershire, follows 13-year-old Jason Taylor through 13 months, each folded into a storylike chapter. . . . In Jason, Mitchell creates an evocative yet authentically adolescent voice, an achievement even more impressive than the ventriloquism of his earlier books.

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