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Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

4.18 · rating details · 19,714 ratings · 3,199 reviews

From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists 2003” issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope.

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-war...more

Paperback, 509 pages

Published August 17th 2004 by Random House Trade Paperbacks (first published 2003)

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Jun 10, 2010

Ken-ichi rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: escape, snoot, favorites

This, Sir, is a Novel. I don't think I've read anything so surprisingly excellent since Jonathan Strange Mr Norell. Actually, I have. What I meant to say is that I've read nothing so marvelously epic since then. As usual, my attempts to explain it to people have met with polite nods and changed subjects, but let me try: the book is like 6 perfect little novellas, arranged as Russian matroyshka dolls, and as you read, you bore in, and bore back out. Each doll is a different period in time, the o...moreThis, Sir, is a Novel. I don't think I've read anything so surprisingly excellent since Jonathan Strange Mr Norell. Actually, I have. What I meant to say is that I've read nothing so marvelously epic since then. As usual, my attempts to explain it to people have met with polite nods and changed subjects, but let me try: the book is like 6 perfect little novellas, arranged as Russian matroyshka dolls, and as you read, you bore in, and bore back out. Each doll is a different period in time, the outermost being in the early 19th century, the latest being somewhere around 2200 (I think). Four of the six are out and out genre pieces: historical maritime fiction, crime novel, dystopian scifi, and post-apocalyptic scifi, with all their various tropes rendered with loving affection. But they are just written, so, well that they are simply irresistible. I only wish I could find single genre novels that were as perfectly crafted as a single portion of this book. The pieces placed in the 1930s and the present day are also wonderful, but certainly aren't the type of fare I normally seek out.

But yes, exceedingly well written. What's it about? Well, there's the the journal of an American notary returning home from the Chatham Islands aboard a morally suspect ship in the 1830s; a young quasi-rake of a composer cuckolding an older colleague while helping him write new works, who documents his dalliances and mishaps in letters to his former lover; there's a true-story thriller about a Californian journalist in the 1970s attempting to out a corrupt and deadly energy company for squelching a safety report damning their new nuclear energy plant; the soon-to-be-filmed chronicles of a publisher in the present day whose attempts to escape the extortionist cronies of his gangster star author land him in a Draconian nursing home from which he cannot escape; there's the not-too-distant future testimony of a Korean clone bred for service in a fast food joint but who, via the machinations of forces many and penumbral, gains full consciousness; and finally (in the sweet and creamy middle) the Huck Finnish tale of a post-apocalyptic Hawaiian "primitive" and the "civilized" researcher sent to study his society. Whew! The characters of each story find themselves reading their predecessor, and sometimes characters overlap a very, very little. Each story features a character with the same birth mark, and they all seem to experience deja vu from characters in other stories. See? Now it sounds corny. But I swear to you, it is cool.

I guess the book is primarily about the will to power. Slavery and subjugation, small personal cruelties, corporate greed. It's sort of like the anti-Fountainhead, except much more fun to read. I don't know. Dissecting fiction about giant apes comes much more naturally to me. Please read this book so, at the very least, you can explain it to me.(less)

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Apr 14, 2011

mp rated it

Shelves: reviewed

WOW. With my vocab-deficit, I can't find the perfect word to express how reading Cloud Atlas felt. I will put spectacular as a placeholder. It has been quite some time since I read something this exciting.

So. The thing about Cloud Atlas is that everything explaining the central theme of the novel is embedded, in very clear words, within the novel, but rather in-conspicuously. Mitchell does not try to expound his theory anywhere, he does not hold a laser pointer attracting the reader'...moreWOW. With my vocab-deficit, I can't find the perfect word to express how reading Cloud Atlas felt. I will put spectacular as a placeholder. It has been quite some time since I read something this exciting.

So. The thing about Cloud Atlas is that everything explaining the central theme of the novel is embedded, in very clear words, within the novel, but rather in-conspicuously. Mitchell does not try to expound his theory anywhere, he does not hold a laser pointer attracting the reader's attention to the heart of the matter.
I can easily pull out a couple of quotes from the novel, which would perfectly summarize what, for me, is the essence of the book. Most of those quotes appear to be just another thing that one of the characters said. Seen within the scope of the individual stories where these quotes appear, they wouldn't amount to much. It is only when you look at the complete map that Mitchell has laid out, that they begin to be meaningful. However, unless the reader has already developed a vague understanding of what Mitchell is trying to tell us, one could walk by those sentences/dialogues unsuspectingly. You need to know what you are looking for, to be able to notice them. And figuring this out makes the reading experience entirely wonderful and intellectually engaging. Which is why I am refraining from including any quotes giving away the theme.

I suppose everyone has already heard enough about how Cloud Atlas consists of six different stories and how it is structured in an innovative manner. These six stories are very different from each other, yet they belong very much together. Mitchell connects these stories in various ways and at multiple levels. There are some direct connections which Mitchell spells out for everyone. He even mentions a few things which mirror the form of the novel itself. Then the stories are sprinkled with numerous subtle hints which give one delight if discovered, but do not take away much if not. And at last there are connections at a conceptual level which bind and unify the entire thing.

Sadly, an undiscerning reader may not notice much going on beyond the structure of the novel and perhaps label it as gimmicky. One of the characters in the novel itself brings up the question about whether this form is revolutionary or gimmicky, with respect to a musical composition that he is writing. In my opinion, the form is well justified and does a marvelous job at putting the point across. However, this form itself could also be held responsible for obfuscating the main point by diverting a reader's attention.

Each of the six stories is largely plot-driven and exceedingly well written. As Mitchell moves from one time period to another, the story's setting, tone, language, characterization etc. changes drastically. He captures each time period perfectly. There are authors who sound the same in their different novels. And here we have Mitchell who sounds like six different authors within one novel and proves to be an expert at each of the six styles. Each story is interesting enough to be read and enjoyed as a stand-alone novella. But the whole is definitely more than the sum of the parts, by an astonishing amount.(less)

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Jan 21, 2012

karen rated it

**okay - i have actually written a "review" for this book, all you early bird voters! feel free to take back your picture-votes if you hate my words (and by "feel free," i mean "don't you dare!!")**

why have i never read this book before??

observe:

do you see how it is wedged into a teetering, lode-bearing stack of books??

removing it was a tricky business, indeed, but i succeeded, and i am finally ...more

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Jan 21, 2012

oriana rated it

Shelves: read-2009, why-werent-you-better, too-smart-for-their-own-good

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. There's no doubt that David Mitchell is incredibly talented, and Cloud Atlas is a superior achievement. It was stylistically inventive, intellectually daring, etc etc, just like all the critics and reviewers promised. But ultimately it sort of left me cold, and I found myself wondering (often) what all of that effort was really for.

There are two unfortunate things that at the onset contributed strongly to this book not knocking me on my ass. The first was the insane amount of anticip...moreThere's no doubt that David Mitchell is incredibly talented, and Cloud Atlas is a superior achievement. It was stylistically inventive, intellectually daring, etc etc, just like all the critics and reviewers promised. But ultimately it sort of left me cold, and I found myself wondering (often) what all of that effort was really for.

There are two unfortunate things that at the onset contributed strongly to this book not knocking me on my ass. The first was the insane amount of anticipation I had going into it, as I had been told by countless people that this book was amazing, astonishing, etc., and so I think it was set up to be unable to live up to all that. The second is the impossibility of ignoring comparisons to Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. I know that it's a little unfair, but Mitchell simply cannot compete with Calvino, and I couldn't stop thinking about Traveller while reading, and so my whole experience of Cloud Atlas was tarnished by that.

Let's go back. This book, like Traveller, is written sort of like a set of interlocking parentheses, with six totally separate storylines beginning one after the other, going for a while, and then breaking off at climactic points. Then, at the end of the sixth storyline, the fifth is brought back, starting at the previous cliffhanger and continuing until its conclusion, then the same with the fourth, the third, etc. Each of these storylines is extremely different in tone, style, and character – we have the travel journal of an American in Australia in like the 1600s (maybe; I'm awful with history); then letters from a British composer in Brussels to his former lover; then a sort of thriller about a young journalist in California in the sixties trying to unravel a dastardly corporate cover-up involving nuclear testing facilities; then a present-day caper story; then a dystopian-future piece told over the course of a long interview with a woman who has been sentenced to death; then a crazy post-apocalyptic oral history.

So two things here: First, let me again stress that Mitchell is extremely skilled. He does each of these drastically different things with aplomb, and is equally imaginative and able to completely immerse the reader in each one. Each has not only its own setting and story type and narrator and characters, but also its own complete language (the latter two using completely different made-up sci-fi speak). That is utterly astonishing, and Mitchell deserves due respect for it. And second: a book of this nature is excellent for helping one crystallize one's preferences, by which I mean that as someone who dislikes post-apocalyptic sci-fi nearly as much as historical fiction, it's no surprise that I liked the British composer and the American caper far more than the rest. (And I did like them, lots; if I could rate those sections alone, they'd get five stars easily.)

And it is true that Mitchell does a bit of work connecting these vastly varied stories – in storyline two, for example, the letter-writer finds half the manuscript of storyline one in an attic, and at the end of the end of his story, he plans to read the second half, which he'd found much later. But here is the crux of the non-external reason I didn't like this book as much as I wanted to: these connections were tenuous at best. It's true that there are feeble attempts to weave things together a bit further, such as a recurring comet-shaped birthmark and some vague hints that a character from one story remembers a piece of music from another story (which even this is meta-ly discredited, actually), but that wasn't nearly enough for me. I just never really understood what made Mitchell stick these specific stories together, other than to be very very clever.

And this is where the comparison to Traveller hurts Cloud Atlas the most, IMO. With Calvino, every story is constantly reinforcing and augmenting (or obfuscating) the others, everything woven tighter and tighter, not to mention threaded throughout and tied firmly with an overarching ur-story. But Mitchell does none, or barely any, of this, and so the whole thing begins to feel just like an intellectual exercise, rather than an emotionally connected whole, and lord knows I need my literary meta-experimentation to be emotional. (less)

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Aug 20, 2007

Larissa rated it

Shelves: 2007, read-by-recommendation

First and foremost, this is a book about form. Four of the five stories are broken in half, each one ‘nesting’ (thanks, Chabon) inside the other until we get to the apex of the novel in one complete, contained story. It’s an intriguing project for many reasons. Firstly, there are the more formal experiments that are taking place: Mitchell sets up his stories to question a reader’s sense of how a story is told—how we deal with chronology, the ways in which readers organize elements of plot and ch...moreFirst and foremost, this is a book about form. Four of the five stories are broken in half, each one ‘nesting’ (thanks, Chabon) inside the other until we get to the apex of the novel in one complete, contained story. It’s an intriguing project for many reasons. Firstly, there are the more formal experiments that are taking place: Mitchell sets up his stories to question a reader’s sense of how a story is told—how we deal with chronology, the ways in which readers organize elements of plot and character, and what obligation the author has to guide the reader through new information. (Mitchell tends to drop us in headlong—no preface for what sort of world we are entering or how it is related to the one which preceded it.)

But what is really interesting about the way Mitchell sets up his book is the way the characters and stories end up relating to each other. Each story makes an appearance in the next one, becoming a minor element in an ever-expanding, ever-widening plot arch. Mitchell has a lot of freedom with this given that his subject matter is somewhat fanciful and blankly fictional all the way through. Where in a stridently ‘factual’ and ‘realistic’ novel readers may find the process of one story becoming a book in the next, which then becomes a movie in the one after that, a bit convenient and cheesey—the feeling of invention in Cloud Atlas allows for such literary devices without seeming cheap. (I did think the final stretch was a bit silly—a little too Brave New World dystopia-laden for me, but otherwise was rather pleased with the linkages.) This is something that I believe fantasy and sci-fi writers generally are allowed more freedom with—look at the Harry Potter series—the woman literally pulls plot devices out of a hat, and more power to her. Because that is (at least to me) what really puts the spark in truly ‘fictional fiction.’ You don’t have to constantly tell yourself to Suspend Your Disbelief because you did so at the beginning.

The other thing that is interesting about this is that you start reconsidering the ‘What’ of the thing. If Character A is reading letters from Character B, but Character A is a fictional person in another novel—what is the ‘real’ story? Where did these ‘fake’ fictions get generated? As each story expands, it throws the last into question, merely by reframing our sense of ‘real’ and ‘not real.’ The fact that this matters to any of us when we set out to read a fictional novel is, perhaps, one of my biggest literary ticks.

One seemingly small thing that really irked me by the end of the book: I hate it when authors use their characters to make commentaries on the quality of their fiction. At worst, this is a cheap absolution for a writer who isn’t willing to really defend a choice he has made in a work, and at best it’s cute editorial winking that I don’t need. I know that such meta-commentary is part of the dialog, per se, but I fail to see its true usefulness. If you’ve put your story out there, it should stay out there, and it no longer needs your commentary. Don’t patronize me.

Lastly, in a novel that has ‘come unstuck in time,’ where events intermingle and expand and contract with a fluidity that you don’t often see, I was a little disappointed at the sentimentality that this connection seemed to inspire in the writing. Call me a cynic, but I think novels lose their punch when they try to Really Matter. Suffice to say that honing in on the 20/20 hindsight/unacknowledged foresight of history, on the inevitability of humanity’s ironic destruction is pretty unnecessary in a novel that has spent so much thoughtful, patient time and effort doing just that. Once we have the god’s eye view perspective of time repeating, further discussion almost strikes one as prosaic and simplistic. To my mind, just the fact that there is a connection is enough in and of itself.(less)

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Sep 28, 2011

Lou rated it

Shelves: july-read

David Mitchell writes in a really masterful style of writing with an excellent command of the English language. This story is split into different interlacing parables. There are six different testaments that span several centuries each one breaks a period of time and space. The stories are very interesting but I found as the stories went by nearer to second half of the book I was not immersed enough into the story. So if it lacks in anything this novel is some gripping and immersing element, so...moreDavid Mitchell writes in a really masterful style of writing with an excellent command of the English language. This story is split into different interlacing parables. There are six different testaments that span several centuries each one breaks a period of time and space. The stories are very interesting but I found as the stories went by nearer to second half of the book I was not immersed enough into the story. So if it lacks in anything this novel is some gripping and immersing element, sometimes I found I did not care enough for the characters due to the changing of testaments, where in one straight testament you would build the audience and glue and bond them to certain characters. But then again that was probably the authors set out task to write in this way, a technique used by Italo Calvino, actually this story written in a similar fashion to one I have read called Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.
I loved the character Timothy Cavendish a very English old school character had very funny insight into the world. I loved his take on the underground and London.
"Over an hour later London shunted itself southwards, taking the Curse of the Brother Hoggins with it. Commuters, these hapless souls who enter a lottery of death twice daily on Britain's decrepit railways, packed the dirty train. Aeroplanes circled in holding patterns over Heathrow, densely as gnats over a summer puddle. Too much matter in this ruddy city."

You will find some really good passages in this story, works of a skilled writer. The novel needs a re-read for me to grasp the whole picture better.

Excerpts
"Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides … I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds."

"He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!” Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"

"Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I’ve stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again."

“We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offences just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”

http://more2read.com/?review=cloud-atlas...
(less)

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Aug 02, 2007

Carolyn rated it

I think people sometimes toss around the idea that something they've read or seen or heard has "changed" them. I almost never come away from something feeling changed, at least not in any way that I can immediately sense. But after I'd finished Cloud Atlas, I had this bizarre, unshakable feeling of being more connected than I was before I'd read it, not just to the people around me, but to those who'd gone before me, and those who will come after me as well.

In my opinion, t...moreI think people sometimes toss around the idea that something they've read or seen or heard has "changed" them. I almost never come away from something feeling changed, at least not in any way that I can immediately sense. But after I'd finished Cloud Atlas, I had this bizarre, unshakable feeling of being more connected than I was before I'd read it, not just to the people around me, but to those who'd gone before me, and those who will come after me as well.

In my opinion, this is a work of pure genius. There's certainly a clever gimmick to the novel's structure, but it isn't just cleverness for the sake of cleverness. While it can be fascinating and pleasurable to discover the ways in which Mitchell's novel fits together, the structure is also crucial to the novel's thematic concerns and to its emotional power. Of course, given the diversity of voices in the novel, readers will almost invariably come away enjoying some more than others. I enjoyed all but one of them to greater or lesser degrees--one character I started out detesting was, by the end, my favorite, and there was one story that I never cared for and felt I just had to get through it to get back to the good stuff.

There's so much going on in this book that no little review I might throw together and toss up on a website is going to do it justice, so I'm not even going to try. Primarily, it's about different types of storytelling--oral tradition, pulp fiction, journal writing and so on--and how stories can both empower us and hold power over us. (In one of the stories, missionaries on an island in the Pacific in the 1850s intertwine Christianity with the use of tobacco, addicting the native people and giving the missionaries added control.) But more than just being incredibly stimulating on an intellectual level, the novel is extremely engaging emotionally. Like the virtuosic piece of music that plays such a crucial role in the narrative, like the clouds from which both the piece and the novel take their names, the narrative, and the emotions it creates, are constantly changing shape. And like I said, by the time I was done travelling through this novel, I genuinely felt like I'd been changed, too.

(I went into this book knowing quite little, and I think it made the whole experience a lot more enjoyable, so I'd strongly advise anyone who is considering reading it to avoid looking at summaries or reviews that go into much detail about the plot or structure of the book.)(less)

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Jul 26, 2010

Patrick Brown rated it

Recommended to Patrick by: Ken-ichi

It feels odd to write a review of a book that so many people have already read and praised. Nevertheless, I will try.

Cloud Atlas is an impressive, at times astounding novel, combining the best elements of post-modern metafiction with straightforward, page-turning genre fare. Comprised of six novellas, each cut into two pieces and told in chronological and then reverse-chronological order, the book manages the delicate feat of changing pace, tone, and setting multiple times while sti...moreIt feels odd to write a review of a book that so many people have already read and praised. Nevertheless, I will try.

Cloud Atlas is an impressive, at times astounding novel, combining the best elements of post-modern metafiction with straightforward, page-turning genre fare. Comprised of six novellas, each cut into two pieces and told in chronological and then reverse-chronological order, the book manages the delicate feat of changing pace, tone, and setting multiple times while still engaging the reader at every turn.

Common themes unite the six stories -- slavery and freedom, cruelty and human decency, and the cyclical nature of time (particularly as expressed through reincarnation) -- as well as certain planted elements (a common birthmark, certain unique turns of phrase that echo throughout). I found the planted birthmarks and whatnot to be bit tedious, but otherwise, I thought the subtle repetition was masterful. "A crocodile of..." as used to describe a group a children was especially striking.

My favorite section of the book, or rather, the section I found most fascinating, was the last section, chronologically speaking, called "Sloosha's Crossin' and Everything After." Narrated by a goat-herder living in post-apocalyptic (and hence primitive) Hawaii, the story involves a prolonged visit by a woman from an itinerant band of people called the Prescients who maintain a knowledge of the technology of the pre-apocalypse world. I was particularly interested in how the goat-herder told the story, and in the little strange turn the story took at the end.

Cloud Atlas is a book for anyone who enjoys both thinking about narrative as much as reading it. It contains fictions within fictions within fictions, and each of its worlds and characters is a living, breathing soul. To think this book languished on my shelves for years before I gave it a chance. I had wrongly lumped it in with the byzantine work of Thomas Pynchon and William T. Vollmann. Don't make the same mistake I did. This is a big, impressive, thoughtful novel that wouldn't be out of place on the beach. Read it today.(less)

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Dec 22, 2010

John rated it

Shelves: 2010, historical-fiction, sf-fantasy, the-sea

Cloud Atlas is a novel of novellas: six long stories set centuries apart that, on their own, would stand as dazzling, pitch-perfect prose masterpieces, but intertwined as they are here form a dizzying, and somewhat heartbreaking mosaic of disparate lives.

Structurally, there is a beautiful symmetry to Mitchell’s arrangement of these six tales. The first five of the six novellas are interrupted mid-way through by the subsequent novella, and only the sixth is given continuously in it...moreCloud Atlas is a novel of novellas: six long stories set centuries apart that, on their own, would stand as dazzling, pitch-perfect prose masterpieces, but intertwined as they are here form a dizzying, and somewhat heartbreaking mosaic of disparate lives.

Structurally, there is a beautiful symmetry to Mitchell’s arrangement of these six tales. The first five of the six novellas are interrupted mid-way through by the subsequent novella, and only the sixth is given continuously in its entirety. After the sixth novella, we work our way backwards, reading the last half of the first five novellas in descending order, until we finally get to the completion of the first story. The novellas are arranged in ascending chronological order, starting (and ending) with the journal of Adam Ewing, a 19th century notary from San Francisco who is abroad in the Chatham Islands looking for the beneficiary of a will, and culminating with a post-collapse science fiction tale set in a neo-primitive far-future Hawaii.

There are subtler symmetries here, too: the name of the protagonist from the first story is Adam (get it?), that of the last story is Zach’ry (A thru Z). Hawaii features in a number of the stories, sometimes overtly, sometimes less so, as do characters with comet-shaped birth marks (coincidentally, the Hawaiian archipelago is comet-shaped, too). In addition to the overt connections between these stories (the protagonist of the second is reading the journal of the first, and the recipient of his letters precipitates the mystery of the third story, etc.), each story touches on the theme of human striving, overreach, and the predatory nature of humanity and our institutions (the corpocracy of the fifth story, “An Orison of Sonmi~451”, is probably the most overt instance of this theme).

Mitchell has a poet’s ear for language, and he has a deft sense of genre: the two science fictional sections successfully make copious use of well-established wide-ranging SF tropes (corporate totalitarianism, gene-ripped clones, post-apocalyptic society, etc.); one section (“Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery”) is written in the style of a contemporary paperback thriller (indeed, in a subsequent section one of the characters who runs a publishing house is reading the manuscript of it and assessing its commercial viability), and it is thrilling; and “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” has the feel of a 19th Century tropical adventure novel in the same vein as Typee and William Hope Hodgeson's Captain Gault stories.

I had some fun picking out the other writers who were clearly inspirations for some of these stories: “An Orison of Sonmi~451” is somewhat Philip K. Dickian (though way better written); “Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After,” the post-collapse story, is reminiscent of Riddley Walker; and the second section, “Letters from Zedelghem,” is full of Nabokovian astringency that reminded me a little of Pale Fire. And the overall structure of the novel has its roots deep in If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and Labrynths.

And, like Nabokov, it's hard to tell whether any of the narrators deserve your trust: all the stories, with one exception, are first-person narratives, either journal entries, letters, interviews, or monologue, and there are times when we are warned not to give too much credence to what we've just read (Sonmi~451 refers to hair-line cracks in her story, and indeed these cracks are everywhere). Reader: be on your toes!

Despite all the blurbs on the back of the book touting Mitchell as a master ventriloquist, these stories are more than just polished imitations of established masters; not only does Mitchell successfully summon a Nabokovian voice when he needs to, but he has produced a novel of Nabokovian heft: Cloud Atlas is every but the feat of raw virtuosity that Pale Fire is.(less)

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Jan 08, 2008

Dusty Myers rated it

This book can be called a matryoshka novel, delivering six compelling stories in six different locales and time periods, all accordion-folded into one another. This seems on the surface easy to do. Just come up with six novellas and put them in chronological order and then take the first five and chop them in half, delivering their conclusions in reverse order after the sixth story has been given in full.

Mitchell, though, has tied the form to the content such that when, say, Adam Ewi...moreThis book can be called a matryoshka novel, delivering six compelling stories in six different locales and time periods, all accordion-folded into one another. This seems on the surface easy to do. Just come up with six novellas and put them in chronological order and then take the first five and chop them in half, delivering their conclusions in reverse order after the sixth story has been given in full.

Mitchell, though, has tied the form to the content such that when, say, Adam Ewing's diary just ends midsentence in the book, we learn that this is because Robert Frobisher, who "stars" in the epistolary novella that follows, has been reading these diaries and cannot find the second half of his copy. So where we ended is where he ended. Likewise, when his letters stop and we move to the third story, we find that the man to whom these letters were written has saved only half of them. And so on and so on to the point where it's very hard to distinguish which stories contain the others and which are contained.

For those of us who find it very hard to suspend our passive delightful reading in order to suss out a book's subtext and purpose, Mitchell kindly lets us know what's up with his form in the final fourth of the novel. The past, one character argues, which is to say the actual past as the events happened, is harder to access the further away from it one goes. And we're always moving away from the past. Subsequently, any present attempts to reconstruct that past become "truer" than what actually happened, "truer" in terms of our belief, our faith in them. This also happens in the obverse, with respect to the future. Which brings us to the funny Simpsons joke about Tomorrowland: it's the way people from the 1950s envisioned 1983. Which is to say that in 1955, Tomorrowland was a truer vision of the future than the boring ground-based cars of the Eighties: "One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each 'shell' (the present) encased inside a nest of 'shells' (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of 'now' likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future" (393).

This is a great and new (to me, at least) idea, but it wasn't my favorite in the book. That would be its ideas about power and conquest, which permeate each of the six novellas in some fashion. Mitchell argues (or, to be more accurate, one of his characters [himself a liar and a thief but that doesn't necessarily discredit what he thinks] argues) that, geo-historically, it's been white people that have been the most hungry for power and have thus gone to the greatest lengths to attain it and keep it. Or, in the words of the character, "of all the world's races, our love—or rather our rapacity—for treasure, gold, spices & dominion, oh, most of all, sweet dominion, is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous!" (489).

It's a provocative thought, and at essence a racist one. It leads, though, to Adam Ewing deciding to live his life in such a way as to make the world hospitable to all races, even though he knows such a life will be lived in vain. So Cloud Atlas is the kind of book that's all Love Your Neighbor and Make Love Not War and All Men Are Created Equal, and because it really seems to mean each of these, the message never comes across as cloying or obvious.(less)

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Apr 07, 2008

Karen rated it

I enjoyed this book and its nesting stories very much and was left to ponder--what does it all mean? In my view (an perhaps no one else's!) Mitchell has re-interpreted Virgil's Aeneid to provide us a guiding myth for the destruction of Western civilization--just as Virgil provided the guiding myth for the foundation of Rome/Western civilization. Mitchell mirrors the construction of the Aeneid--the first six chapters tell of journeys, the last six of the acts of defiance/battle driven by the se...moreI enjoyed this book and its nesting stories very much and was left to ponder--what does it all mean? In my view (an perhaps no one else's!) Mitchell has re-interpreted Virgil's Aeneid to provide us a guiding myth for the destruction of Western civilization--just as Virgil provided the guiding myth for the foundation of Rome/Western civilization. Mitchell mirrors the construction of the Aeneid--the first six chapters tell of journeys, the last six of the acts of defiance/battle driven by the sense of duty of the main character in opposition to the prevailing self-interest of others. Virgil took loose tales and bound them into the Aeneid--Mitchell takes the Aeneid and unbinds it into loose tales---an allegory for Virgil's narrative of the building of a civilization and Mitchell's narrative of its destruction.

The disintegration of civilization is also conveyed in the movement of the narrative form from the most intimate to the least: journal to self; letters to lover; news article to public; screenplay to public; video interview to archive; also in the primary family relationships of the narrator from most intimate to least: wife/son; lover; parents; sibling; fellow snomis (family relationships also being a theme in the Aeneid); and finally in the nature of the challenge to the main character's sense of soulfulness/duty: religious principle; intellectual principle; societal institutions; family structure and finally basic human rights. At the end (middle) of the story, modern civilization has collapsed and a new soul-ful society is described with the most intimate of narratives (storytelling), relationships (family and tribe) and principles.

Aeneas' reaction to the painting of the sack of Troy: "sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt---these are the tears of things, and our mortality cuts to the heart" is quoted by a key character and started me on this interpretation. Isn't Mitchell challenging us to think about our own Troy? And while Virgil begins with an invocation "O Muse, recall to me the reasons...", Mitchell ends with a challenge to the reader: "He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain and his family must pay it along with him! and only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!" Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?""

Recommend it for the very engaging narratives and for its ability to make me think about what Mitchell is saying and how he is saying it.(less)

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Jul 03, 2007

Stephany fisher rated it

Recommends it for: Those who like a challenge

The Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell--recommended
This is a VERY long book. Mostly because it is several books in one. One of the professional reviewers compared it to a Russian nesting doll -- a very apt comparison. I enjoyed this book and intend to read it again in the future. It's difficult to even answer the question, "so what is this book about?" It's easier to describe the psychology, philosophy, and themes of the book than it is to describe the plot. I will do my best. The boo...moreThe Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell--recommended
This is a VERY long book. Mostly because it is several books in one. One of the professional reviewers compared it to a Russian nesting doll -- a very apt comparison. I enjoyed this book and intend to read it again in the future. It's difficult to even answer the question, "so what is this book about?" It's easier to describe the psychology, philosophy, and themes of the book than it is to describe the plot. I will do my best. The book follows several characters as time moves from the 19th century to a futuristic dystopian world with clones and all. It's like Roots meets Erin Brockovich meets Logan's Run meets Planet of the Apes. Needless to say there are a lot of Archetypes in this book. The different stories are woven together very intricately both in a six degrees of separation kind of way and through deeper connections. Mitchell's greatest talent is being able to switch personas so adeptly. Each section of the novel is told in varying dialects of the English language.

My one hesitancy is recommending this book is that each story present its own liguistic challenges for the reader, especially intensified by the manner in which Mitchell throws the reader into a story in the middle of the action. The reader is forced to solve a mini-mystery just to be able to figure out what's going on, who's who, and how this odd dialect can be deciphered. The book definitely moves along. It is fairly well paced, full of action and suspense, and intellectually stimulating (makes suduko look like tiddly winks).

The book's exploration of themes such as power, greed, repression, suffering, atonement, grace, and rebirth provide the backbone for this perhaps overly complex set of tales. The book is mythological, allegorical, spiritual. Stepping back, it does seem that it would be necessary to use several inter-related tales to fully explore these themes. The novellas become a tapestry of parables.

For those who don't like gimmics -- well, there is a fair amount of artistic gymnastics on display in this book. I don't know about you, but part of why I like watching Robin Williams is because he can switch character so effortlessly. David Mitchell shows precisely this sort of effortless perspective/persona/dialetic/plot shifting. Look, I'm not going to pull any punches. This book was a lot of work. I was exhausted after I finished reading it. That's why a second read will be rewarding. I will have worked out the logistics of the book and I will be able to concentrate on the rich themes, the beautifully drawn characters, and the philosophical questions posed. Most of my favorite works of "great" literature need to be read several times, after all. Any place worth staying to explore usually requires that you get the lay of the land first.

Going back to the standard questions I ask myself when I'm done reading a book: Was it worth reading? Yes. This book is worth reading -- probably several times. Was it life changing? Probably. It made me look at how people's lives fit together, and it made me think about cycles of political power and social dynamics. I'm fairly certain the life-changes will be more profound when I read it again. Will it change the way I live? Maybe. I think it made me more environmentally aware and conscious. Whether I take steps to do anything about it is still up in the air. It may help me to understand human behavior a little better and therefore help me to react to situations involving power/greed/repression with a more deconstructed calm, intelligent, awareness rather than volatile emotion. Who would I recommend this book to? Those who like to read and don't mind working at it. Those who like artistic gymnastics. Those who like books and discussions involving philosophical and moral issues.
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Jan 02, 2008

David rated it

Recommends it for: fabricants and purebloods alike

About 50 pages from the end of the book, I found myself in line at Book People, about to purchase a fresh copy to give a visiting Jeni Wischmeyer as a gift. I noticed my friend Ian in line ahead of me, so I tapped him on the shoulder and initiated one of those awkward 30 second conversations that happen when you're waiting in a check-out line and invariably the person you're talking to is going to get summoned by a clerk and the conversation will be forced to a premature ending.

I ...moreAbout 50 pages from the end of the book, I found myself in line at Book People, about to purchase a fresh copy to give a visiting Jeni Wischmeyer as a gift. I noticed my friend Ian in line ahead of me, so I tapped him on the shoulder and initiated one of those awkward 30 second conversations that happen when you're waiting in a check-out line and invariably the person you're talking to is going to get summoned by a clerk and the conversation will be forced to a premature ending.

I gesticulated at Cloud Atlas, "Have you heard of this?"

"Who's the author, you said? David Mulholland?"

"David Mitchell! It's terrific. You should read it."

"What's it about?"

At this point, Ian was at the front of the queue, and I am really terrible at giving on-the-spot plot summaries. I mumbled about as pitiful of a pithy one-line recap as I could, "There's these six interweaving story-lines. Umm.." I trailed off and Ian was summoned to a cash register. "Nice seeing you, Dave!" I kicked myself repeatedly on the ride home.

So, right, there are these six stories that compose Cloud Atlas; you can even deduce this from the cover illustration. If you want to know more about what they are, I'm sure you can get more detail on Amazon. But what is striking about them is just how entertaining they are, in spite of some pretty radically different stylistic approaches, and how they are stitched together, structurally.

The book is like a narrative Matryoshka doll, though just a touch more complex. No, I'm not quite clever enough to come up with that on my own; one of Mitchell's characters uses that very metaphor in a moment of authorly self-consciousness, and I only recalled the name by googling for "Russian doll with Russian doll inside." The six stories are layered, moving forward in time from the 19th century to a gnarly post-apocalypse and then back again. And each of the six stories are delightfully good reads (though I struggled briefly with the guttural language of story #6's protagonist, a stark contrast to the genetically perfect speech of Sonmi~451).

I think Mitchell was just a touch overly self-aware about the potentially gimmicky structure of the book, but he didn't really need to be. There is something highly compelling about these subtle ways in which ones' actions can impact history, a theme consistently reinforced throughout the novel, binding the fictions together. And besides, the six stories are just damned good entertainment, and now I'm going to have to go out and find more David Mitchell to read.
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Jun 11, 2008

Kristopher Jansma rated it

Apologies again: this book did take me a while to finish, but I got through it finally over a week ago and just haven't been able to sit down and write up my thoughts until now. I've been doing a lot of my own writing these past few weeks and it's hard to justify stopping that (when it's going well) to read or play around online...

Anyway, Cloud Atlas turned out to be one of the most phenomenal books I've ever read, but I almost gave up on it after fifty pages. If my fiance's parents ...moreApologies again: this book did take me a while to finish, but I got through it finally over a week ago and just haven't been able to sit down and write up my thoughts until now. I've been doing a lot of my own writing these past few weeks and it's hard to justify stopping that (when it's going well) to read or play around online...

Anyway, Cloud Atlas turned out to be one of the most phenomenal books I've ever read, but I almost gave up on it after fifty pages. If my fiance's parents hadn't BOTH been telling me that it was the best book they'd read in the past year, I think I might never have pressed through the impenetrable opening section and gotten into it. Allow me to explain...

Cloud Atlas is basically six novellas, which don't appear at all connected at first, but eventually turn out to be quite integrally linked. The first section is called The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing and, if I may give an example of why I barely made it through... this is just from the first page...

"Had the doctor misplaced anything on that dismal shore? Could I render assistance? Dr. Goose shook his head, knotted loose his 'kerchief & displayed its contents with clear pride. 'Teeth, sir, are the enameled grails of the quest in hand. In days gone by this Arcadian strand was a cannibal's banqueting hall, yes, where the strong engorged themselves on the weak. The teeth, they spat out, as you or I would expel cherry stones. But these base molars, sir, shall be transmuted to gold & how? An artisan of Piccadilly who fashions denture sets for the nobility pays handsomely for human gnashers..."

It's a completely foreign world, and the language is so intentionally dated that it becomes exceedingly difficult to penetrate, and I found that after forty pages of this, all I really knew was that this guy, Adam Ewing, was on some Pacific Island, a long time ago, and that he and his crew were somehow involved in the slavery trade. But names, places, events... all sort of blurred together. And it leaves off in mid-sentence and moves to the next novella. But as I said, I'm glad I pressed on.

Novella two is called Letters from Zedelghem and is about a young composer (Frobisher) in the early 20th century who travels to apprentice with a master composer named Vyvyan Ayrs. V.A. (as he goes on to call him) is blind and needs someone to help him write down all his music, and through the course of several letters a nice little story develops, as Frobisher begins to have an affair with V.A.'s wife and the two composers begin to collaborate on a masterwork. The language is still tough, but not as bad... mostly tricky because Frobisher likes to abbreviate things (as you might if you were writing lots of long letters to the same guy - a friend named Sixsmith.) Then, almost as abruptly, the third novella begins, but finally after 80+ pages, we begin to see why these stories are all put together.

Novella three is called Half Lives: The First Luisa-Rey Mystery and from the very start we realize that one of it's main characters is... Rufus Sixsmith! The guy who all those letters from the last novella were going to. This one is set in the 1970s in California and written in the style of a pulp mystery about an evil nuclear power plant corporation, and is not only readable, but exceptionally smooth and fun... as a good pulp novel can be. Having made it this far, I was hooked, and excited to keep going along with something a bit easier to read.

I won't spoil the book by talking about the other three novellas, but I will make one observation about the overall structure, which you could figure out just by flipping through it (as I did). After getting to Novella #6 (Sloosha's Crossin' An Ev'rythin' After) you're only halfway through the book, and Mitchell takes us back through the second halves of the first 5 novellas, in reverse order, finally ending with the second part of Novella #1, The Pacific Journal. And he does manage to cleverly explain in each case, why the previous parts left off without finishing. It's hard to explain this, but I think it's important to know going in, so that you'll have the faith to stick with him through many seemingly insane authorial decisions. Most importantly, the arrangement of the novellas and the ultimate connections between them DOES repay the reader's efforts, and ultimately I put the book down feeling my head swimming with the sensation that I had just read something completely, eternally powerful.

Books like this are rare, and while I'd say it isn't quite beach reading, I actually read the bulk of it poolside, with a drink or two to ease my anxiety over the language. By the end I was so delighted and so excited I'd been able to penetrate the language, that I wanted to go back and re-read The Sound and The Fury. I still might. But I may have to read all of Mitchell's other books first.(less)

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Oct 10, 2009

Lisa Vegan rated it

Recommends it for: those who enjoy reading different genres and thought provoking books

Shelves: fiction, novels, speculative-fiction, gr-groups-buddies, reviewed, historical-fiction

This book takes a very dim view of human history and of human beings, although in each story challenges to this viewpoint do happen.

This book consists of what I thought of as 6 novellas or long short stories. They’re all interconnected into one big novel. The first five stories, all in chronological order, are told in part and after the sixth and final story, the rest of the book goes backward and finishes up the first five tales to their conclusions, so that story one starts and fin...more

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Dec 01, 2007

Martine rated it

Shelves: postmodern, modern-fiction, british, favourites, dystopia

Cloud Atlas was the most challenging book I read in 2006. It was also the most rewarding. A bravura literary performance if ever I saw one, Cloud Atlas weaves together six vastly different stories which are all, in a way, about story-telling. We start reading the journal of a nineteenth-century traveller, then move on to an English snob's letters from 1930s Belgium, a 1970s California thriller, a contemporary horror film of sorts and two tales from a dystopian future, one of which is written in ...more

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Dec 17, 2011

s.penkevich rated it

Recommends it for: Humanity

Shelves: metafiction, literary-pulp

“One may transcend any convention,” writes Mitchell’s 1930’s composer Robert Frobisher, “if only one can first conceive of doing so.” Cloud Atlas, the third novel by English novelist David Mitchell, is the author’s bare-knuckled blow to standard conventions and literature itself. Here you will encounter six stories, linked across time, that, like individual notes of a chord, each resonate together to form a greater message than just the sum of their parts. Using a style inspired by Calvino’s I...more

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Jun 22, 2011

Erik rated it

Shelves: of-great-delight, has-good-review

All too often high-end literature (i.e. Literature) suffers from a minuscule sense of scope. Take Woolf's To The Lighthouse. Certainly it is well written but at the end, I thought, So what? It is about one family's conflicts and idiosyncracies and is ultimately no more pertinent to me than Twilight.

Cloud Atlas does not so suffer. Its stories-within-a-story are both personal and grand; at its best, far-reaching epiphanies and insights into the nature of human civilization and societ...moreAll too often high-end literature (i.e. Literature) suffers from a minuscule sense of scope. Take Woolf's To The Lighthouse. Certainly it is well written but at the end, I thought, So what? It is about one family's conflicts and idiosyncracies and is ultimately no more pertinent to me than Twilight.

Cloud Atlas does not so suffer. Its stories-within-a-story are both personal and grand; at its best, far-reaching epiphanies and insights into the nature of human civilization and society are intertwined with deeply personal woes: one slave clone's desire for freedom and identity wrapped with revolution; one shepherd's sense of family shame and cowardice combined with genocide and apocalypse; a marginalized journalist's quest for integrity against the rising specter of unchecked corporotacracy.

In addition to an epic scope, David Mitchell writes with a beautifully insiduous magic, though the language, especially in one dialect-heavy section, often begins as off-putting. But in time, even this dense dialect takes on a life of its own - it seems genuinely authentic - and I feel myself there. THERE in the character's heads, THERE in a future which has not yet been written, THERE in a Victorian past. This level of immersion is very rare in books, but I think David Mitchell accomplished it.

If you haven't realized yet, I highly recommend this book. I can't even give you a genre because of its structure, which is like this: story A begins -> story B begins -> story C begins -> story D begins -> story E begins -> Story E ends -> story D ends -> story C ends -> story B ends -> story A ends. While the stories themselves are connected, I actually found several of the connections tenuous at best, contrived at worst. It doesn't really matter that much, however, because each story is unique and interesting in its own right. The first story feels like historical adventure, the next Victorian character drama, the next a corporate thriller, the next sci-fi, the next post-apocalypse.

The book is not an easy read, I will say that much. The apocalypse section in particular is narrated in a very heavy dialect and the opening historical adventure drops all sorts of names, places, and other specifics, often without explanation. But I was fine with this, ultimately. The difficulty is the price you pay - you cannot have a book this good be an easy read. I pay it gladly!(less)

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Jun 04, 2010

Neil Powell rated it

· review of another edition

Several short stories, that on their own are relatively weak. The author has linked them together tenuously with some mistakenly profound pseudo-religious nonsense and a tattoo. An interesting idea, let down by the poor quality of the writing. Pretentious twaddle of the highest order

This book seems to be one of those hoaxes to call out hack reviewers. I'm slightly puzzled by the fact that Mitchell hasn't come forward yet six years after publication.
He hits all the usual cliché...moreSeveral short stories, that on their own are relatively weak. The author has linked them together tenuously with some mistakenly profound pseudo-religious nonsense and a tattoo. An interesting idea, let down by the poor quality of the writing. Pretentious twaddle of the highest order

This book seems to be one of those hoaxes to call out hack reviewers. I'm slightly puzzled by the fact that Mitchell hasn't come forward yet six years after publication.
He hits all the usual clichés that are the hallmark of the "great" modern novel. The whole thing is a pretentious construction of six separate stories, with the protagonists in each being incarnations of each other, and ending up in possession of the story of the previous one in some way.

The first one is the story of some American lawyer on a ship in the Pacific some time in the 1850s. It's supposed to be a journal, but it's a hideously unconvincing one. If it wasn't intentional, I don't know why these pretentious cockpouches never seem to be able to manage a decent pastiche; it's as if actually reading anything they didn't write themselves is beneath them. Replacing every instance of "and" with "&", trying to use outdated vocabulary (incorrectly, most of the time; in the four pages where he repeatedly uses the word "kerchief" (before forgetting it exists again; some word-of-the-day calendar is probably responsible for that one), he inexplicably seems to be under the impression it's short for "handkerchief", and spells it with a prepended apostrophe), and just sprinkling racism over everything isn't good enough.
The fact that it's rife with anachronisms doesn't help.

The second story takes the form of letters written by an English twat in the 1930s, who moved to Belgium to escape debt. It's probably completely forgettable to non-Belgians, but a special kind of annoying to me. Mitchell managed to spell "Zedelgem" as "Zedelghem", which was indeed the correct spelling before the spelling reform of 1946, but uses the modern spelling for everything else. I don't know enough about the spelling reforms of French in the 20th century to say if he made the same mistake there, but I'm guessing he did.
Somewhere along the way this English twat finds the diary of the American twat for no good narrative reason, because that's what passes for plot coherence.

The third story is an attempt at an action spy thriller type novel set in 1975, the link with the previous one being the addressee of the letters, who passes them on to the protagonist of this one. It's as forgettable as the fourth one, which is something about some old guy who's sent the manuscript of this novel in the mail. Somewhere along the way a writer throws a reviewer off a balcony, I don't know.

The fifth is where he really shines: it's set in the unspecified future, and the world has turned into the tritest, most derivative dystopia imaginable. It has everything! Corporate overlords, genetically engineered slaves, cannibalism, giant totalitarian conspiracies, cutesy spelling gimmicks and neologisms, anything you could want! It's so horrifically transparent it makes Snow Crash look like a masterpiece. It's even set in Corea.

The final one is obviously the obligatory post-apocalyptic one, where the protagonist of the last one is worshipped like a goddess. It would be merely tedious if not for the ridiculous and completely unnecessary apostrophes everywhere, which render it actively obnoxious and pretty much unreadable. Initially, at least, because Mitchell doesn't have the attention span needed to keep it up for a whole chapter.

After that he goes through the entire list in reverse order again (because he *hates* you), and then at the very end he tries to make the obligatory vapid point (I forget what it was; something about drops in the ocean), slaps a suitably pretentious title onto the whole thing, and ships it off to his publishers and watches the money roll in.

So yes, if this isn't a deliberate hoax, it's a violently shit novel and a new low in post-modern self-indulgence. I'm not at all surprised at the reviews it's received either way.(less)

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Apr 30, 2011

K.D. rated it

· review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2004-2006); Booker Prize Finalist

Shelves: 1001-core, challenging

A basket case when it comes to storytelling form: six interrelated stories (in different narrative style and different genres) happening centuries in between. If you list the chapters in sequence, this is how the relationship looks like, main themes, and how the main characters are related to each other:

1a The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (1st part) - diary - sea adventure; racism - 16th century - in a vessel Prophetess afloat the Pacific Ocean
2a Letters from Zedelghem (1st...more

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Sep 30, 2008

Choupette rated it

Recommends it for: People interested in conceptual fiction

Shelves: conceptual, dystopias-utopias-apocalyptic, historical-fiction, science-speculative-fiction, undeservedly-popular

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. A Good Concept is Not Enough: I have a feeling this may become my mantra. David Mitchell, take note.

Cloud Atlas has a very good concept, but is only mediocre-ly executed, in my opinion. It contains six interlocking stories which have been recorded in various media. In each consecutive story, the manuscript of the previous story is discovered. In this way Adam Ewing's Pacific Journal (his account of his time voyaging in the Pacific Ocean) is discovered by the aspiring composer Robert...more A Good Concept is Not Enough: I have a feeling this may become my mantra. David Mitchell, take note.

Cloud Atlas has a very good concept, but is only mediocre-ly executed, in my opinion. It contains six interlocking stories which have been recorded in various media. In each consecutive story, the manuscript of the previous story is discovered. In this way Adam Ewing's Pacific Journal (his account of his time voyaging in the Pacific Ocean) is discovered by the aspiring composer Robert Frobisher in the home of his mentor Vyvyan Ayrs in the Belgian countryside. Frobisher's letters to his British lover, Rufus Sixsmith, are discovered by a young journalist, Luisa Rey, as she investigates the mysterious death of the eminent physicist Rufus Sixsmith. Then Timothy Cavendish, a broke publisher, is given a copy of 'Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery' to edit and possibly publish. The film made of Timothy Cavendish's life is watched by the genetic fabricant Sonmi-451 in a dystopian Korea of some lost time of the future. In the final story, Sonmi-451 has been elevated to the status of a god by the people of a post-apocalyptic Hawaii. So you see how Mitchell has succeeded in his aim of creating a set of stories like a Babushka doll?

I love this concept, and maybe it spoils it for a reader to have it explained to them as I just did, because much of the pleasure from this book for me was watching as the patterns emerged, his aims revealing themselves gradually to me.

But I thought the individual stories were not particularly well-realised. The first two, of Adam Ewing and Robert Frobisher, were slightly above-average historical fiction, but not really anything special. The Luisa Rey story was a thoroughly unremarkable thriller. But I've yet to encounter a thriller that I don't find thoroughly unremarkable, so there you go. Timothy Cavendish was... meh. I couldn't bring myself to care. Sonmi-451's dystopia was dull. For me, dystopia has been explored so thoroughly by so many authors that it has to either explore profound moral and ethical dilemmas or to be radically different from every other, and this example of the genre did or was neither. And Sloosha's Crossin' and ev'rythin' that happ'nd after (the post-apocalyptic Hawaii story) was positively painful. Writing in a dialect is all very well, but it is so. hard. to. read. that it takes away any pleasure I could somehow have found in that rather uninteresting tale.

There were some interesting and relevant themes touched upon, such as the plight of the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands in Adam Ewing's Pacific Journal, and this general theme of dispossession by a more violent race was touched upon again in Sloosha's Crossin', but I didn't find that it was examined in enough depth to make it worthwhile.

One of the main problems with this book, in my opinion, was that, due to the constraints of the concept, the stories were necessarily short. For me, much of the wonder of a novel is the building of a storyline that arches over everything, dictating structure and form. This seems to me to be the thing that is most difficult to do well. Thanks to the concept, this book couldn't do that at all, so I had no opportunity to admire the storytelling prowess of the author, much as I do admire the concept very much.

Also, I don't really see why everyone makes such a big deal about the 'linguistic brilliance' of writing in different styles. Maybe I'm naive and/or big-headed, but I don't find it at all difficult to write pastiche, and this makes it difficult for me to admire it in anyone else because it doesn't seem like a difficult thing to do. As I said above, what I do find difficult is the over-arching plot thing, so maybe this is why this book completely failed to speak to me in any way.

Actually, many of the stories were quite entertaining in their own right, but the rapid switches between them were very irritating and broke up the flow too much.

In fact, after writing this review, I'm finding this book much more interesting, because it required me to examine a concept that seemed brilliant on the surface and discover its faults and weaknesses. One of my theories about art in general is that anything that forces me to think and examine my beliefs is a good thing, even if I don't like the work of art itself. I've spent longer thinking about Cloud Atlas than I do about most books, so I suppose I must take back much of what I've said and say instead that Cloud Atlas is, in some ways, an excellent book. (less)

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Jun 23, 2008

Jessica rated it

Shelves: modern-brit-lit

I've never heard of David Mitchell before, so I didn't know what to expect from this book. What a treat it turned out to be! This is hands-down one of the best books I have ever read. I can't help but feel that Mitchell has ruined me for other authors. What he does with the english language is simply astonishing.

Every facet of the novel was enthralling, from its unique structure to Mitchell's incredible dexterity with words. Divided into six stories, the book goes forward in time f...moreI've never heard of David Mitchell before, so I didn't know what to expect from this book. What a treat it turned out to be! This is hands-down one of the best books I have ever read. I can't help but feel that Mitchell has ruined me for other authors. What he does with the english language is simply astonishing.

Every facet of the novel was enthralling, from its unique structure to Mitchell's incredible dexterity with words. Divided into six stories, the book goes forward in time from the 1800's at the height of British colonialism to the savage world of post-apocalyptic Hawaii, then unexpectedly, travels backward to the beginning. Each part is written in a different format and varying writing styles: journal entries from a Melville-esque main character, letters from a philandering composer, a hard-boiled 1970s New York crime novella, a humorous memoir-turned-movie within the early 21st century, an interrogation in an Orwellian state, and a tale told through the oral tradition in the post-apocalyptic future. Each style is appropriate for the time period it embodies. Mitchell proves to be an excellent mimic, embodying the different voices of the characters flawlessly.

Mitchell doesn't shy away from the meta-references (which are always fun to catch), which are planted carefully throughout the book. In "Letters from Zedelghem," Frobisher is working feverishly on a composition that exists in "fragments...with its own language of key, scale, and color." He further elaborates that in "the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order." Self-consciously, he asks, "Revolutionary, or gimmicky?"

The enduring nature of war, the malleability of history and the human cost of imperialism and prejudice are only a few of the themes Mitchell explores with thoughtfulness and sensitivity. One of the characters in the book, Isaac Sachs muses, “The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + even more problematic to access + reconstruct; in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + even more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent.”

Perhaps Mitchell chose to write the novel as a collection of documents rather than as a straight narrative in order to bring to light this observation: that as the actual past recedes into the distance, all we have are the written records and the verbal testimonies of our experiences, the closest we can get to the actual past as it once was. Constructing a narrative about the past rather than allowing the documents to speak for themselves would only add another layer of artifice to the irretrievable past.

In sharp relief to its lofty themes, the book has moments of levity; it’s even laugh-out-loud funny in certain parts, especially in “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timoth Cavendish.” Told from the point-of-view of a bumbling British editor whose cadence and style is reminiscent of Nabokov. The twists in the novel warrant mention as well; there are some genuine surprises in each story, which I won’t spoil here.

Overall, an excellent book. I highly recommend it for someone looking for something challenging and different.

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Jan 21, 2008

Turhan Sarwar rated it

I don't remember what prevented me from reading Mitchell before, despite having another of his novels (Ghostwritten) on loan for several months. It was the opening, probably; Mitchell seems to begin with voices that I find mildly uninteresting, though I've only tried twice to read him.

What seemed to be a foggy beginning for Cloud Atlas wasn't, it turns out. Ewing is pleasantly reminiscent of Crusoe and Ishmael, and so I agreed to push through what seemed like a smug imitation of nost...moreI don't remember what prevented me from reading Mitchell before, despite having another of his novels (Ghostwritten) on loan for several months. It was the opening, probably; Mitchell seems to begin with voices that I find mildly uninteresting, though I've only tried twice to read him.

What seemed to be a foggy beginning for Cloud Atlas wasn't, it turns out. Ewing is pleasantly reminiscent of Crusoe and Ishmael, and so I agreed to push through what seemed like a smug imitation of nostalgic-albeit-tedious travel narrative classics. The smugness revealed itself to be playfulness; by the time I arrived at the second, wholly unrelated chapter (different time, different voice), I was very ready to enjoy the gimmick of the book's structure. Note that "gimmick," here--given Mitchell's talent--can only be spoken with a tone of admiration; as the subsequent chapters began to neatly reference the previous chapters, I was hooked.

The book, because of its many voices, feels satisfyingly epic. Because of Mitchell's cunning, the book also feels whole, with its various plots interwoven, but not to excess. The connections that exist between chapters range from being wonderfully almost-believable (the half-journal holding up a bed-frame) to forgiveably underdeveloped (the reappearing, inexplicable comet).

What the critics say about Mitchell's ability to seamlessly jump from genre to genre seems spot-on. His imitative abilities are impeccable, due maybe to his frightening attention to "period detail" in word-choice. He also very successfully hides any underlying common voice of his own; I'm curious about what he sounds like when he writes as himself.

In the end, Mitchell avoided the major danger I sort of expected to come about from relying so heavily on elaborate genre-jumping: descending too frequently into a tongue-in-cheek mockery of the various genres being referenced. Cloud Atlas was particularly fun, I think, because Mitchell seems to hold quite a bit of fondness for the sources of his inspiration; he doesn't seem to mock, ever.(less)

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Jan 05, 2008

Rachel rated it

I found this to be a riveting page-turner. I would find excuses to stop what I was doing so I could read this book. I even read it when I was walking home from school, only looking up every few seconds to make sure I wasn't going to run in to anyone or when I was crossing the street.

Reviewer Ruth Franklin of The New Republic said it well:

"Every reader had a first love, most likely in childhood: a book that we could not get enough of, and guarded selfishly for fear that...more

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Jan 12, 2009

Emma Freeman rated it

Recommends it for: everyone

Cloud Atlas unfolded patiently, but with perfect pacing. I found myself becoming increasingly drawn into the many worlds, that are really one world, of the story, until I could think of nothing else but this book. It's been a long time since I read anything so engrossing, and I wish it wasn't over.
The theme, or "message", of the book, develops slowly and is not immediately apparent. What at first seem like disconnected and random stories about different characters inhabiting ent...more

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Nov 22, 2007

Anna rated it

This novel most certainly requires patience. A stream of 6 different narrative voices across a thousand years, the book deserts the reader in a Calvino-If-On-a-Winter's-Night-Traveler style, goading the reader into a building plot and then deserting him at its climax. Yet unlike Calvino's frustrating series of broken tales, Mitchell's contain two prominent similiarites that interweave the tales and proffer salvation to the battered reader.

And one only has to bear patience for 250 pag...more

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Aug 18, 2007

Jessica rated it

Shelves: stories

Not only is the structure of this book remarkable, but each interrelated short story (broken into two pieces, one part told in ascending chronological order, from the days of seafaring explorers, to 1930s Europe, to 1970s sci-fi-noir, to near future Korea, to post-apocalyptic Hawaii, and then back again) is itself a masterpiece of style and substance. It's hard to believe the very distinct voices and tone came from the same mind, and the interconnections seem organic, as if Mitchell discovered, ...more

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Jul 02, 2008

Ben rated it

Shelves: favorites, fiction, read-2008, science-fiction, literary-sf, own

Incredible. Very well written, unique, and fun. All six intertwined stories were excellent, and I was pleasantly surprised that two of them had science fiction elements to them. One is a future society of replicant slaves and the other is about a tribe of post-apocalyptic natives trying to survive in the now primitive, brutal world.

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Feb 04, 2012

Kid rated it

Shelves: fiction, sci-fi

This book is amazing.

I placed it alongside the two other books on my shelf reserved for "Best Sci-Fi Books I Have Read"

Neuromancer by William Gibson
Dune by Frank Herbert

David Mitchell's book can be loved and appreciated on several levels. Here's a breakdown of some of the traits that impressed me:

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

Mitchell takes six different stories and weaves them all together effortlessly in a nested structure. It s...more

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Jan 07, 2008

Nichole (Dirty H) rated it

Recommends it for: People with a brain!

Shelves: favorites, 1001-books

Stunning. This book was fantastic!

This book is one cohesive novel, written as a series of six short stories. Each story takes place in a different location and time period, and is written in a completely different style, narrative tone, etc. They are each individual, self-contained stories, and yet each one has a connection to the one before and after it and all six have little ties. We are given the first half of each story until we reach the sixth. The sixth is uninterrupted, and ...moreStunning. This book was fantastic!

This book is one cohesive novel, written as a series of six short stories. Each story takes place in a different location and time period, and is written in a completely different style, narrative tone, etc. They are each individual, self-contained stories, and yet each one has a connection to the one before and after it and all six have little ties. We are given the first half of each story until we reach the sixth. The sixth is uninterrupted, and then we go back in reverse order and get the second half of the first five. The book spans across centuries, beginning in 1850s and stretching to a post-apocalyptic world in the distant future. The author cleverly and poignantly stresses the overall themes of power, greed and prejudice and leaves you feeling awed and strangely hopeful.

Strengths: The themes are strong. The writing is excellent. Most writers these days are considered successful if they can write one captivating story and then re-sell it again and again after changing the title and character names. (And in all honestly, if it's entertaining enough, what's really wrong with that?) But Mitchell succeeds in writing six completely different stories in one book. Even if you don't enjoy the narrative or the message, you have to read this book if only to marvel at Mitchell's skill. He even takes a moment here and there to poke fun at his own plot devices.
My favorite story was the fifth. Even as just a short story in the context of a much larger novel, this piece is a strong piece of dysutopian fiction. This story is fascinating, compelling, heart-wrenching and deeply disturbing. It holds its own among such classics as 1984 and Brave New World. (Mitchell even mentions Orwell and Huxley, referring to them as 'optomists.')

Weaknesses: The only real weakness is that it can take awhile to get into. This isn't a light read (which is a good thing!). For me, it didn't really get rolling until the third story and I wasn't really hooked until the fifth. But once you get there, you will be unable to put it down. When I reached the last page, I closed the book and said "Wow."

Hopefully you'll take the opportunity to read this amazing novel and have the same reaction I did. (less)

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About David Mitchell

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

David Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England, raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Kent, studying for a degree in English and American Literature followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature.

He lived f...moreLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

David Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England, raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Kent, studying for a degree in English and American Literature followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature.

He lived for a year in Sicily, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England. After another stint in Japan, he currently lives in Ireland with his wife Keiko and their two children.

In an essay for Random House, Mitchell wrote:

"I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but until I came to Japan to live in 1994 I was too easily distracted to do much about it. I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but would I have become the same writer if I'd spent the last 6 years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself."

Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), moves around the globe, from Okinawa to Mongolia to pre-Millennial New York City, as nine narrators tell stories that interlock and intersect. The novel won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for best work of British literature written by an author under 35) and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.

His two subsequent novels, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2003, he was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. In 2007, Mitchell was listed among Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World.

Mitchell's American editor at Random House is novelist David Ebershoff. He lists John Banville, Muriel Spark, Haruki Murakami, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Russell Hoban, Italo Calvino, Peter Carey, George Orwell, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Wright, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Ursula K. Le Guin among his many literary influences.(less)

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