Tag Archives: The Master and Margarita

If you read enough books, you’re bound to come across at least one author who touches your spirit in ways that rustle (or rock) your Tree of Life in a forever-poignant manner. If you’re lucky, said author will still be amongst the living. And if you’ve got destiny smiling down upon you, fate will intervene and you’ll get to meet that same author in the flesh. Such was my good fortune almost 20 years ago, when I spent a little time with the novelist David Mitchell in his adopted homeland of Ireland.

For me, it all started with the opening line of his first novel: “Who was blowing on the nape of my neck?” This was before David had achieved worldwide literary fame through Cloud Atlas (2004) and he was just finishing up his time teaching in Japan. By chance — pure, unadulterated chance — I came across a book called Ghostwritten (1999) while surfing this relatively new invention called the internet. This was also before the advent of social media, when the internet was still spelled with a capital “I,” cell phones had a neat new feature called “texting,” and email addresses were still dominated by the likes of Yahoo and Hotmail.

I mailed a handwritten letter to David’s publishing house after finishing Ghostwritten (for the first of three times) and asked if they would be kind enough to forward it to David himself. Some months later, I discovered, they had not only forwarded my letter to him, but he had replied to me — with a handwritten letter of his own. And thus our correspondence began.

To have watched his literary evolution this past quarter-century has been both mind-blowing and heart-warming: mind-blowing because you (and by “you,” I mean me) realize he’s this real-life towering figure of literature you’ve witnessed morph into a master wordsmith and purveyor of ever-more intricate plots and narrative structures over the years; heart-warming because you (again, me) know first-hand that he is not only an author who has seismically altered the bedrock of your life but also a man who is perhaps the best any of us could aspire to be: humane, empathetic, and deeply thoughtful.

This is all my prelude to marking the 20th anniversary of the publication of Cloud Atlas, one of those books that, like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and The Master and Margarita, turns your world on its head.

Gabrielle Zevin, of recent mega-fame from her latest novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, penned a lovely homage to Cloud Atlas not long ago in The Guardian titled “Cloud Atlas at 20: What makes a novel tattoo-worthy?” If you haven’t read the book yet, Zevin gives a quick overview, but mostly it’s about recalling why for her — and so many of us — this book is so special. One part she wrote, in particular, jumped out at me when I was reading the article:

It is because Mitchell is the kind of writer we want to be, and Cloud Atlas is the kind of book we want to write. It represents the possibilities for fiction – that there are new stories and new ways to tell them, that there will be readers for these new stories if only we can manage to be as brilliant as Mitchell.

When I flew out to Ireland all those years ago, I know now that I felt very much like that at the time. I suppose my real fortune was in learning not that David Mitchell was in fact a real person, but in discovering that he is just as brilliant and engaging as his indefatigably creative works of fiction. For those of us who find comfort in the hallowed pages of literature, that was nothing less than life-affirming.