Ghostwritten is David Mitchell’s debut novel. I’ve previously read and loved Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and Black Swan Green wasn’t bad either. I’m pretty impressed by this one, too.

As in both Cloud Atlas and TTAoJdZ, the structure of the story plays an important role. It’s a mosaic of a book: a novel, and at the same time a collection of 9 short stories (plus an epilogue). Each story stands on its own, but they are also all linked to each other by some minor event or character, and together they make up a larger story. At the very end we are confronted with major events that would never have occurred if the preceding chain of chance meetings had been broken at some point. It’s a kind of “butterfly flaps its wings in Siberia, causes hurricane in Gulf of Mexico” idea: everything is interconnected and small events can have a large effect.

And just like in those two books, this one employs wildly differing people, genres and voices for the different parts: from an old lady tending to a tea-shop on a holy mountain in China, to a courtesan-turned-art thief in St. Petersburg. That last one, the story in St. Petersburg, kept jarring me with names and behaviour that were not quite right for a Russian, and a US reviewer had a similar issue with the New York story. Perhaps Mitchell was a bit too ambitious when trying to cover everything from Irish islands to Mongolia. But luckily I am far less familiar than he is with all the other places, except London, so I had no such problems with the rest of the book.

The ending itself was a bit clichéd, and the next to last chapter (on a small island off the Irish coast) too full of pseudoscientific talk about quantum uncertainty and amateur philosophy.

It is nevertheless a very good book, though slightly weaker than Cloud Atlas, which it most closely resembles. One advantage of this mosaic setup is that I can remember the best stories for their own merits, without contamination from the shortcomings of the weaker ones.

I suppose Mitchell had this idea of small stories making up a larger one and is now trying to perfect it in subsequent books, approaching it from various angles. This is his first attempt, and he only gets better with practice.

Amazon US, Amazon UK, Adlibris.

Another night of substandard sleep for Adrian and myself: he woke at five and couldn’t get back into proper sleep afterwards. He almost-slept, but the moment I stopped patting him, he’d start crying and waking. So I patted him, off and on, until 6:40, at which point he woke nevertheless, and Eric got up with him so I could get another hour’s sleep.

Apart from the ongoing crying, likely teething-related, we had a very ordinary Wednesday. Playgroup, supermarket, deep long naps in the stroller.

I started embroidering a flower and butterfly motif on Ingrid’s new jeans. We both thought they looked a bit boring without any decoration, and I’ve been looking for a suitably small crafty project for a while now.

We had snow this morning, as mentioned before, and the weather improved only marginally during the day: a few degrees above freezing, and raining off and on. Yuck.

Nevertheless we went out to Vällingby to return some jeans I bought for Ingrid last week.

On the way out I stopped by the Desigual store in KFem because I like to look at their clothes. Desigual (and Odd Molly, another of my favourites) make lovely clothes that I really really like. I’m normally a “less is more” kind of gal but Desigual’s clothes are so happy that that philosophy goes right out of the window. But I almost never buy any of their clothes. They are always great in all sorts of ways but the colours are not quite right for me. Or they look great on the rack but not on me. Or they really look and feel lovely but they’re impractical or hard to care for – silky tunics that require lots of ironing, or dressy tops that I would rarely find the opportunity to wear. And they are expensive. Really expensive. If they were cheap I might buy them anyway, despite those buts, but not at those prices. And then, today – 30% off all Desigual clothes! And a lovely top that fit me! The first time I’ve found something there that I could not just covet but wear. Even with 30% off it wasn’t exactly cheap but I couldn’t let the opportunity pass.

Adrian is teething AGAIN. (So that’s why he slept so badly and cried so much during the night.) It seems to bother him a lot more than Ingrid’s teeth did. This time, wise after previous experiences, I dosed him with paracetamol as soon as I was sure it was teething, and then ibuprofen in the evening when that dose ran out, so the day didn’t turn out too bad. But good god I am tired of this. If he is to get 16 teeth in about a year (6 months to 18 months of age) and will spend two to three days crying for each of them, that means over 30 days of crying, or about a tenth of that year. I wish he could get them all at once, in a week of serious crying, say, but then it would be over and done with.

Anton the Builder finished installed the new door and window in our bedroom and we moved back in. Now Eric is upstairs preparing Ingrid’s room so Anton can do the same there tomorrow and the day after. The photo here shows the new door (our room) next to the old one (Ingrid’s room): nice-looking solid wood vs. dreary dark veneer over chipboard. Plus the new ones are straight, well made and carefully installed, so they open and close without effort, whereas the current door to Ingrid’s room is so skewed that we have to leave it ajar, or otherwise she wouldn’t be able to get out of the room at night.

The builders are invading “our” half of the house again. This time the bottom floor is OK but they are replacing both the window and the door in our bedroom, as well as doing some electrical work up there. Installing doors and windows is dusty, dirty work, since it means cutting and screwing into drywall, so we’ve removed all bedding, clothes etc from the bedroom, and crammed it into Ingrid’s already-cramped bedroom. Tonight I will be sleeping on a mattress on the floor in Ingrid’s room, and Adrian will be on a cot mattress that we just barely managed to squeeze in beside mine. Total remaining free floor area: about enough to put both feet down, between the door and my mattress. It remains to be seen whether anyone in that room will actually get any sleep. Eric, who will be sleeping on the living room floor, gets the best deal.

Today was Estonian playgroup day. Even though the event itself takes two hours (10 to 12) it takes up well over half of our Sunday. First we have to make sure we don’t dawdle over breakfast. Next I have to either get Adrian to sleep in the sling, or keep him awake until it’s time to leave so he can sleep in the stroller. Then it takes us about an hour to get there (walk/cycle, train, metro, walk). Afterwards, eat a snack (sandwiches from the cafe for Ingrid, packed milk-free sandwiches for me). Then about an hour to get home, usually a bit more since I cannot time it with the train schedule. Finally a late lunch when we get home. By this time it’s usually three o’clock.

Ingrid was in a bad mood on the way home, pretty much from the start. It began with the usual “my legs are tired” and then everything seemed to make things worse. By final part of the journey, walking and cycling home from the station, she was snapping at me all the time.

And then she cycled into me. I could feel her cycling right behind me, almost touching my heel. I don’t know if she wanted to hit me or if she was just seeing how much such snapping at my heels would annoy me. In any case she did cycle onto my foot, and it wasn’t an unfortunate accident. I was totally mad at her, grabbed her bike and carried it home, and declared it off limits for the rest of the day. She, not the least bit repentant, kept yelling at me about how she couldn’t possibly walk home and how she wanted her bike.

The bike curfew (or whatever I should call it) was easy to explain: if she cannot use it sensibly without hurting people around her, she is not allowed to use it.

But what I was really mad about was how she just thought I’d forget about this and be all cuddly and want to hold her hand to comfort her (because she was upset about having to walk). She more or less deliberately runs me over and then she’s the one who wants comforting?

We had a talk about it afterwards. She doesn’t like to talk about upsetting stuff but we did it anyway. I believe that she fundamentally doesn’t “get” empathy yet. She hears that I sound hurt/upset/angry but doesn’t seem to understand how I feel. It’s as if she thought I’m just putting on an act. She doesn’t understand why you should say you’re sorry when you hurt someone. We don’t hurt each other very often at home – she is not a hitter, I don’t hit her, we don’t have many painful accidents – so perhaps she doesn’t get much practice. I know the staff at preschool try to teach the kids to apologize when they’ve hurt each other, which they certainly do with reasonable frequency, but it doesn’t look like she’s gotten the point. She apologizes for ridiculous small accidents – for spilling juice on the table, for dropping a spoon – but not for the big stuff. I explained the purpose of apologies but I’m not sure how much of a difference it can make if basic empathy is lacking.