The Paris Review interviews David Mitchell in their new issue. An excerpt from their free excerpt:
INTERVIEWER I noticed this sentence in Number9Dream: “The cloud atlas turns its pages over.”
MITCHELL Wow, is that in Number9Dream? Then the phrase was haunting me earlier than I realized. “Cloud Atlas” is the name of a piece of music by the Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, who was Yoko Ono’s first husband. I bought the CD just because of that track’s beautiful title. It pleases me that Number9Dream is named after a piece of music by Yoko’s more famous husband, though I couldn’t duplicate the pattern indefinitely.
INTERVIEWER The epigraph to Number9Dream is from Don DeLillo: “It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.”
MITCHELL The best line in the book and it’s not even mine.
