Resumo de Black Swan Green

For his marvelous fourth novel, Black Swan Green, David Mitchell
decided?in a way?to write a first novel. First novels are both justly and unjustly
maligned, Mitchell says. Justly, because first novels are written by beginners,
by definition. Unjustly because they have a lot of potential for inner
archaeology and because they are a chance to do youth through a lens relatively
untinted by age.

By turns a very funny and very moving novel about a 13-year-old boy growing
up in a village in Worcestershire in 1982, Black Swan Green is clearly
not the work of a beginner. In fact, Mitchell is one of the best young
novelists writing today. Two of his novels?Number9Dream and Cloud
Atlas?were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Cloud Atlas was also a
finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Arthur C.
Clarke Award. He is clearly a writer with great emotional and technical range.

We reached Mitchell at his office in the Netherlands Institute for Advanced
Studies, where at the furthest end of the furthest wing where we can do the
least damage, they have a room for a writer in residence. He has come to Holland, along with his
wife and their two young children, to research his next novel, which will have
a Dutch theme. For the last few years his family has lived in Ireland, where they own a house near the sea in
west Cork.
Before that Mitchell was a schoolteacher in Japan, where he met his wife, a
linguist.

Perhaps it shouldn''t be a surprise that even after three previous novels to
tint his lens, Mitchell manages to create such a fresh and refreshing portrait
of youth in Black Swan Green. But Jason Taylor, the 13-year-old
narrator, is a surprise?and a delight?as he relates in his own inimitable way
his adventures and misadventures in the backyards of the village of Black
Swan Green, his observations about the growing discord in his family, his
feuds with local bullies, his war with a stammer that makes him a magnet for
classmates'' mockery, his secretive attempts at poetry, his encounter with
gypsies at the edge of town and his growing sense of himself and the wider
world as he approaches his teenage years.

In creating the character of Jason, Mitchell also drew heavily from his own
inner archaeology. He says Black Swan Green is his most personal book. I
make the distinction that autobiographical is when you and everybody around you
is represented in the book. Personal is when you are represented in the book,
but the rest of the book is peopled by relatively fictional creations.

The war was one of the formative memories of my youth, Mitchell says. The
patriotism, the flags, the jubilation, as if it were a sporting event. It was
the last time that any young English boy could feel that he lived in a country
that kicked ass. The consequences of it and the truth of it?the stunning
expense, the miserable expense in terms of human life?didn''t come for months or
years. I also remember being surprised by how quickly it disappeared. So soon
afterward this thing that had been so momentous was no longer in the
newspapers. That was my first lesson in the shortness of the memories of
newspapers. How quickly the loudest mouths forget. Something that is a world
event on Monday can be not even a memory on Friday. I learned that from the Falklands.

According to Mitchell, 1982 was a gloomy time in England, with the economy in deep
recession. Some of that darkness seeps in at the edges of the story, as the
clouds of adult concerns filter in among Jason''s own adolescent concerns about
fitting in.

Mitchell says 1982 was also about the last year I felt I could get away with
writing an English pastoral novel where the rhythm of life is set by the land,
when the one-thousand-year-old rhythm of the countryside was still just about
alive. In a chapter called Bridle Path, the English landscape becomes,
essentially, the protagonist and Jason in his wanderings alongbridle path
perceives the tensions between the older ways of English life and the
encroaching American-style suburbs. It is the novel''s most beautiful chapter,
one in which all of the book''s themes are brought seamlessly together and
Mitchell''s ample talents are on full display.

Writing a novel is a great excuse to think as deeply as you can about a
particular plot of existence, of the world and of being alive, Mitchell says. When
I read a book I certainly don''t want to spend 300 pages in the presence of
someone I don''t care about. I think it comes down to the answer to two key
questions that all the books I love have in common: are there people who you
care about in it? Are you made to ask throughout the course of the narrative,
will they be OK? If the answer is yes, then the book just doesn''t let you go.
At some level, that''s what good writing is. It''s as simple as that.

Simple to say. Difficult to do. Unless you''re David Mitchell. And the book
is Black Swan Green.

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