Yesterday I read my new book, ‚Cloud Atlas‘ by David Mitchell, on the bus. It is divided into several parts, the first one being the diary of an American returning from an island in the Pacific in eighteenhundredsomething. The last sentence of that chapter goes like this:

Reading my entry for 15th October, when first I met Rafael

Then it stops. Mid-sentence. Not even a hint of a trail-off or anything. The next page is blank. Then the next part starts.

What… are you kidding me? This is not a sentence. This is not even a non-sentence. I bought the book for 3,50 Euro as a ‚faulty copy‘¹, but I thought that meant that it the cover was a bit damaged or some of the pages had folds or something. I’m sure that doesn’t usually imply pages missing.

Anyway, I already made plans to ask people for my missing page on my blog and read on anyway.

Then I came to this sentence:

To my great annoyance, the pages cease, mid-sentence, some forty pages later, where the binding is worn through.

Oh. Oooooh. I get it. That isn’t a faulty print I have here. It’s on purpose.
Very clever, David Mitchell. Very, very clever. And a bit annoying, too. Just like you wrote there yourself.

—
¹Correct English term for books that are cheaper because they have some faults. I’ll offer the German word in return (in case you ever need it): Mängelexemplar. It even has a fancy umlaut.

This entry was posted on Donnerstag, April 6th, 2006 at 11:29 pm and is filed under On Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or