Cloud Atlas

published	October 10th 2005 by Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books
first published	2004
binding	Audio Cassette
isbn	1844560708 (isbn13: 9781844560707)
ebook
literary awards	2004 Booker Prize Nominee; 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
description	It's hard not to become ensnared by words beginning with the letter B, when attempting to describe Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's third novel. I...more [close] It's hard not to become ensnared by words beginning with the letter B, when attempting to describe Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's third novel. It's a big book, for start, bold in scope and execution--a bravura literary performance, possibly. (Let's steer clear of breathtaking for now.) Then, of course, Mitchell was among Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and his second novel number9dreamwas shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Characters with birthmarks in the shape of comets are a motif; as are boats. Oh and one of the six narratives strands of the book--where coincidentally Robert Frobisher, a young composer, dreams up "a sextet for overlapping soloists" entitled Cloud Atlas--is set in Belgium, not far from Bruges. (See what I mean?) Structured rather akin to a Chinese puzzle or a set of Matrioshka dolls, there are dazzling shifts in genre and voice and the stories leak into each other with incidents and people being passed on like batons in a relay race. The 19th-century journals of an American notary in the Pacific that open the novel are subsequently unearthed 80 years later on by Frobisher in the library of the ageing, syphilitic maestro he's trying to fleece. Frobisher's waspish letters to his old Cambridge crony, Rufus Sexsmith, in turn surface when Rufus, (by the 1970s a leading nuclear scientist) is murdered. A novelistic account of the journalist Luisa Rey's investigation into Rufus' death finds its way to Timothy Cavendish, a London vanity publisher with an author who has an ingenious method of silencing a snide reviewer. And in a near-dystopian Blade Runner-esque future, a genetically engineered fast food waitress sees a movie based on Cavendish's unfortunate internment in a Hull retirement home. (Cavendish himself wonders how a director called Lars might wish to tackle his plight). All this is less tricky than it sounds, only the lone "Zachary" chapter, told in Pacific Islander dialect (all "dingos'n'ravens", "brekker" and "f'llowin'"s) is an exercise in style too far. Not all the threads quite connect but nonetheless Mitchell binds them into a quite spellbinding rumination on human nature, power, oppression, race, colonialism and consumerism. --Travis Elborough [close]
date added	05-21-07 edit book

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Kris rated it:

(review of isbn 0375507256)

06/11/08

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 hadn't B...more 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 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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Larissa rated it:

(review of isbn 0375507256)

08/20/07

Read in August, 2007

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 p...more 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 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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Stephany rated it:

(review of isbn 0375507256)

07/03/07

Read in April, 2006

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 book fo...more 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 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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Dan rated it:

(review of isbn 0375507256)

08/27/07

Read in August, 2007

recommends it for: tenacious readers

This book has 6 parts:

The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing - Set in the mid 19th century, this is the story of a lawyer from San Francisco, trying to make his way back from Australia to San Francisco. This story is told via Adam Ewing's entries in his journal.

Letters from Zedelghem - Set in Belgium in the early 1930s, this is the story of Robert Frobisher, a young British musician who was cast out of high society and ends up penniless, working as an apprentice of a famous musician. This s...more

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Dusty rated it:

(review of isbn 0375507256)

01/08/08

Read in December, 2008

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 Ewing's dia...more 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 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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Ken-ichi rated it:

(review of isbn 0340822783)

11/28/07

bookshelves: escape, snoot

Read in January, 2006

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,...more 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 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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Jessica rated it:

(review of isbn 0375507256)

06/23/08

Read in June, 2008

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 i...more 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 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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David rated it:

(review of isbn 0375507256)

01/02/08

Read in December, 2007

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 gesticul...more 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 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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Karen rated it:

(review of isbn 0375507256)

04/07/08

Read in April, 2008

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...more 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 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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Carolyn rated it:

(review of isbn 0375507256)

08/02/07

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, this is a...more 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, 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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Lissa rated it:

(review of isbn 0375507256)

09/26/07

Read in January, 2007

Cloud Atlas is David Mitchell's third book. It follows a similar pattern to his book Ghostwritten (which I read last year). Cloud Atlas is a series of stories, each narrated by a distinct invidial living in a different place and time. Each of the sections of the book is some kind of retelling - a diary, letter, interviews, a movie, etc. Each of the stories intersect each other in an obvious way (and a not quite so obvious way that I can't reveal without giving away the book.)

The book begins ...more Cloud Atlas is David Mitchell's third book. It follows a similar pattern to his book Ghostwritten (which I read last year). Cloud Atlas is a series of stories, each narrated by a distinct invidial living in a different place and time. Each of the sections of the book is some kind of retelling - a diary, letter, interviews, a movie, etc. Each of the stories intersect each other in an obvious way (and a not quite so obvious way that I can't reveal without giving away the book.)

The book begins with the Diary of Adam Ewing, an American notary living in the Chatham isles in the mid-1800s. Then we skip to Belgium in the 1920s with a series of letters from Robert Frobisher, a bi-sexual composer, to his friend Rufus Sixsmith. The third part is the story of Louisa Rey, a reporter in the 1970s who stumbles across problems with a nuclear reactors in Buenas Yerba, California. From there, the story takes us to Timothy Cavendish living in Britian in the present time. The next story is from Somni-495, a fabricant living in Korea in the not-so-distant future. Her story is in the form of an "orison", a sort of last testimony of her life set aside for the historical record. The final installment is told by Zachary Bailey, a member of the nine valleys in Hawaii. This is the more distant future, after the fall of humanity.

Each of the stories is interrupted by the next, once even in mid-sentence. Then, once the reader reached Zachary's future, the stories move backwards again, picking up where each one left off, and finishing them all.

The most interesting part of this book is reading the stories as they move back through time. This is a novel that can be enjoyed on a superficial level and on a much deeper level. It's easy to see the ways that the stories show each of the steps that humanity takes in order to come to that final conclusion. You could say that Cloud Atlas is really just one story of all of humanity.

The toughest part in this novel is probably Zachary's story, only because the author writes in a dialect for the entire part. Once I got used to it, the reading went faster, but getting used to it took some time. Overall, I found Ghostwritten to be more eloquently written, but the ways that the stories intersect in this book are far more complicated and fascinating....less

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Martine rated it:

(review of isbn 0375507256)

12/01/07

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

Read in November, 2006

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 ...more

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Rachel rated it:

(review of isbn 0375507256)

11/19/07

Read in April, 2003

recommends it for: ANYONE

This book currently holds the title of "The Best Book I Have Ever Read/contemporary fiction" I'm assuming (and even hoping) that one day it will be supplanted by another book even more wonderful, even as "Cloud Atlas" supplanted "Bel Canto" by Ann Patchett, and "Bel Canto" supplanted "The Hours" by Michael Cunningham and "The Hours" supplanted "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver. Before that, my reading disappears i...more This book currently holds the title of "The Best Book I Have Ever Read/contemporary fiction" I'm assuming (and even hoping) that one day it will be supplanted by another book even more wonderful, even as "Cloud Atlas" supplanted "Bel Canto" by Ann Patchett, and "Bel Canto" supplanted "The Hours" by Michael Cunningham and "The Hours" supplanted "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver. Before that, my reading disappears into an enthusiastic morass. It isn't often that one of my Bests is supplanted, but it happens over the course of 9 or 10 years.

Cloud Atlas is unlike any other book I've ever read. It's a series of loosely related short stories that move forward in time, from the South Pacific in the 1840s, to 1930s Europe, to a fictional Southern California town in the 1970s, to present-day England, to near-future South Korea, all the way to post-apocalyptic Hawaii in the fairly distant future. In the first half of the book, the stories move forward in time. Only one (the first) cuts off mid-sentence. The rest at least end with a period--but they end unresolved. Finally the book gets to the last story, post-apocalyptic Hawaii. That story is told more or less in full. THEN, the stories go back down through time. So, the story that was right BEFORE the Hawaii story picks up where it left off. Then back down through time, in a decresendo that ends back in the South Pacific in the 1840s, with the original character recovering from a series of misadventures and contemplating returning to the States to take up the fight to abolish slavery.

As I mentioned, the stories are loosely and tantalizingly related. But this isn't the kind of book with time travel or the kind of plot where every character links up (ie: so-and-so's son is now so-and-so's great-great grandfather) It's well-done--and, while I do enjoy sci-fi--this isn't really it. It's a story about the connections among all of us through time and through cultures.

The BEST part of this amazing book is actually the last page and a half (of the American paperback edition). I frequently read that page over and over, especially when I'm feeling discouraged. It is a such a triumphant ending--along with a profound lesson about life.

Some people have told me that they find "Cloud Atlas" dense and complicated. You may think the same thing--but I don't believe it to be inaccessible. ...less

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Turhan rated it:

(review of isbn 0375507256)

01/21/08

Read in March, 2008

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 o...more 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 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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Mayee rated it:

(review of isbn 0340822783)

06/14/07

Read in November, 2005

The narrative style and structure reminds me of what I can remember of my number9dream experience, narratives nestled in each other that create effects of deja vu, with the use of repetition, recurrence of names and places. This method is engrossing in an impressionistic, almost hallucinatory way -- Mitchell's an inheritor of the William S. Burroughs cut-up method, perhaps.

In Cloud Atlas, we have six different types of narratives (i.e. 19th century diary, early 20th century epi...more