Anthony Doerr

I thoroughly enjoyed Doerr's *All the Light We Cannot See* but *Cloud Cuckoo Land* is considerably more ambitious in terms of its historical, genre, and philosophical scope. With a narrative spanning thousands of years and blending genres of thriller, historical fiction and science-fiction there is a lot to juggle here but Doerr blends it beautifully in what he describes in the afterword as an unabashed "paean to books." It is then, by extension, also a love letter to those who value books show more and especially those who have valued them sufficiently in the past to try and preserve them. As such, the book is timely for several reasons. Endless talk about "the cloud" and data centers blah blah blah has inured us to one of the fundamental facts about information (let alone that information aggregated into knowledge and then knowledge further refined into wisdom): its precarity. Human beings love to think that they can defeat time, but even our best efforts to do so have the odds stacked against them, something that Doerr captures beautifully in this passage: "The manuscript you brought us before?. . . .For it to reach us in this room, in this hour, the lines within it had to survive a dozen centuries. A scribe had to copy it, and a second scribe, decades later, had to recopy that copy, transform it from a scroll to a codex, and long after that second scribe's bones were in the earth, a third came along and recopied it again, and all this time the book was being hunted. One bad-tempered abbot, one clumsy friar, one invading barbarian, an overturned candle, a hungry worm--and all those centuries are undone." Every age thinks that it has improved on our ability to defeat time, to preserve everything forever. In the first flush of the information revolution this led to the impulse to digitize everything. But those efforts soon ran into the problem of proprietary formats, the restless innovation for innovation's sake of capitalism, that meant that some records were effectively unreadable as little as a decade later, when their print versions could still be read by virtually everyone. . .except that. flushed with digital hubris, we destroyed a lot of those originals. Now we are placing an almost religious level of faith in the cloud, in physical data centers that are no more immune to the ravages of human fury and time (EMP pulses, power grid collapses, civil war).

The artifacts themselves are of course nothing without people to safeguard them and interpret them and who try to make them accessible as widely as possible (another reason not to put our faith in data centers owned by private companies rather than public institutions). A great companion piece for this book is Susan Orlean's fantastic *The Library Book,* another love letter to libraries but more so to the often thankless work undertaken by librarians of all stripes. This is the second reason this book feels so timely. With libraries and librarians under sustained assault across the US from MAGA meatheads, this book is a reminder how much can be lost when we don't fight back against not just attempts to censor reading, but the barbarian crusades against the very infrastructure that makes the preservation and transmission of knowledge possible. show less

I'm rarely impressed with novels about writers, but novels about readers and their books ... we are all readers, and this is a book. It's about how we cling to stories and are inspired by them, how we value them to the point of preserving them through trials spanning centuries. Doerr goes as far back as the siege of Constantinople in reaching for examples, and emphasizes the inspiration theme in our present. It's hard to imagine any text that's existed to the present going missing from this show more point forward, now that we have achieved our electronic information age, but Doerr imagines exactly one such threat. I like these books that jump forward and backward in time, leaving you guessing how their scenes will eventually relate and then drawing the strings together in a tidy bow.

There's magic in smaller touches, for instance the repeated references to things like Scheria, mentioned in 1453 and again on that interstellar ride, that can only happen because books have survived. And in the deep sense of time being conveyed, as when the starship looks back on the fall of Constantinople as so long ago, and yet even its citizens already regarded the ancient Greeks as ancient. I don't frequently use the world "lovely", but there's a measure of loveliness in the dreamy way that the novel's opening chapters unfold, and it's reflected again in how it ends, like a flower that opens its petals in the morning and then closes at night.

One thing I might have done differently. As a google exercise I recommend trying "Did Islam preserve or destroy western knowledge?" and see what you get. It feels disingenuous to centrally profile an instance where their culture was a threat to its preservation while when looked at more generally the world is deeply in its debt, and when the miracle of literature's preservation is this novel's central theme. show less

I still have the very first library card that was ever issued in my name. I was just a little, bitty thing and I'm sure the card had restrictions on it as to what I was allowed to check out (as well as being tied to my mother's account). And even though I've had many others through the years, that first one remains very cherished. I now have enough books around me in my home to qualify as my own library so I don't often go to my local library anymore but I will never forget the wonderful show more feeling that libraries and books gave me as they opened up a whole new world beyond the one I was living in. Anthony Doerr too obviously feels this same reverence and thankfulness for libraries and books as is evidenced by his long and sprawling novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, which is first and foremost an ode to the way that stories sustain human beings and how librarians and other story tellers have kept those stories alive for centuries.

Weaving together five seemingly disparate stories ranging from the fifteenth century well into an imagined future, Doerr uses as his connective tissue, a fictional story written by Diogenes in the first century, the tale of Aethon searching for the magical, mystical, heaven-like Cloud Cuckoo Land. Each of the five people we subsequently follow through the pages comes to a connection with this story in some way. There's Anna in fifteenth century Constantinople. She's a rather unskilled seamstress working in a workshop but her heart is in the reading lessons she finagles from a teacher. Literacy opens the world to her. There's Omeir, a child born with a cleft palate and viewed as bad luck, whose family is cast out of their village because of his facial difference and the superstitions of the fifteenth century. Raised by his grandfather and suckled on the stories his grandfather tells, he becomes an oxen driver, raising two incredibly powerful beasts. There's Zeno who grows through the years from a child realizing his sexuality to a prisoner of war in Korea and finally to be an elderly man leading a school children's performance of the play of Cloud Cuckoo Land. There's Seymour who is pretty clearly neurodivergent and finds his peace in nature. He desperately grieves the devastation of nature that he sees all around him as developers eat up the places most important to him and he plots ways to fight back. And there's Konstance in the future. She was born on the space ship Argos that is traveling to another planet. She is an interim link in the chain of the future hope for humanity. She has never been unquestioning and her father cultivates her curiousity.

The threads of the different stories take a while to come together so the reader struggles to make sense of things in the beginning. The plot jumps from timeline to timeline in fairly short chapters which ultimately makes sense but is a major contribution to the initial struggle to sink into the story as a whole. Each of the plot lines is quite different, even those that take place in the same time period, but they all highlight the importance of story, the strength and resilience of human beings, and the power of those who keep or hold story for all of us. The writing is detailed and incredibly descriptive and Doerr does a fantastic job drawing time and place. There are portions of the book that have little to no action and so drag a bit and certain of the plot threads are more interesting than others (I personally had a fondness for Konstance's and Anna's early stories) but overall this is a far reaching, ambitious novel that lovers of literary fiction will devour. show less

Finished reading Cloud Cuckoo Land this morning and have to congratulate Anthony Doerr on another fantastic storytelling event. After having written All the Light We Cannot See, you would think it hard to follow up with another great tale of strangers who seem connected in mysterious ways. But he does so masterfully in a book that he describes as "intended as a paean to books,". The strange connection among these five or six narrators has to do with a book long lost and sketchily translated show more from the original Greek to tell the story of a shepherd who longs for a better life. The lost Greek prose tale Cloud Cuckoo Land, by the writer Antonius Diogenes, relating a shepherd’s journey to a utopian city in the sky, was probably written around the end of the first century C.E.
In the three threads of the novel, we read about the fall of Constantinople where a young girl slaves as a seamstress and sidelines at night to steal ancient manuscripts to sell in order to buy medicine for her sick sister. On the other side of the fortress we meet Omeir, a facially deformed boy who,(along with his twin oxen), is forced to join the sultan's troops on their way to defeat the Greek fortress.
In current day Idaho we read about a Korean Vet named Zeno Ninas, who learned Greek while a prisoner of war where he had fallen in love. He is helping direct a play, acted out by a small group of fifth graders when an environmental zealot shows up with explosive intentions.
And finally we follow a young girl , Konstance, who is sequestered in a room on a spaceship whose 66 year mission has been to travel to a livable new earth. She begins to research the story of the Cloud Cuckoo Land, whose stories were told to her by her father.
It sounds a bit far fetched or complicated to read but the multiple story lines and the wonderfully drawn characters come together nicely and we are left with a cherished reading experience by one of the country's most talented writers.

Lines:
The houses were built from the bones of wild griffins, and it was so cold that when the hairy wildmen who lived there spoke, their words froze and their companions would have to wait for spring to hear what had been said.

“That’s what the gods do,” he says, “they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.”

Mostly people from Boise, Portland, and eastern Oregon use them as vacation homes: they park boat trailers in the cul-de-sacs and drive twenty-thousand-dollar UTVs to town and hang college football flags from their balconies and on weekend nights they stand around backyard firepits laughing and urinating into the huckleberries while their kids shoot Roman candles into the stars.

‘He that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this—that he knows nothing yet.’

Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don’t know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we’re doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool’s errand. show less