#70 REVIEW OF CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr 

For the first hundred or so pages I thought, “This is a mere rip-off of David Mitchell,” who has made connected characters across continents and eons a hallmark. Yet, while the structure may be derivative, the treatment of the themes and characters is certainly not. 

To say that Cloud Cuckoo Land is sprawling is the height of understatement. It spans three millennia from the distant past of the Greek fantasist Antonius Diogenes to the near future space journey of the child Konstance, weaving together additional stories of a 15^th C. Bulgarian boy and contemporary Greek girl, a 20^th C. gay American veteran of the Korean War and a 21^st C. adolescent product of the dying American dream amid burgeoning violence in the name of a cause. 

What separates Cloud Cuckoo Land from such Mitchell works as Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks is Doerr’s willing embrace of sentimentality without slush. Whereas Mitchell’s characters tend to be abstractions, Doerr’s are sympathetic flesh and blood. As in his breakout novel All the Light We Cannot See¸ Doerr has a deft ability to make the reader care about every character, even one as broken and convulsed as the eco-terrorist Seymour.  

Stories, along with the translators, archivists and librarians who preserve them, are ultimately what this book is about. As the erstwhile tutor Licinius says to Anna, “Books, like people, die. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”  

In writing a book as vast, riveting and ambitious as Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr has given it the hope of a deserved long life. As Diogenes writes in his epigram to his own Cloud Cuckoo Land, “Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you.” Not a treasure chest or a Pandora’s box or a genie’s lamp, but a book like this one.  

***** 

Tom Wells