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Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
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Mod
Rating: 4 stars
Review: I listened to the audio by Scott Brick (Narrator), Cassandra Campbell (Narrator), Kim Mai Guest (Narrator), Kirby Heyborne (Narrator), John Lee (Narrator), Richard Matthews (Narrator). The narration was well done. It is a story that spans many centuries, each section going forward is interrupted and the next begins. It has been described as nesting Russian dolls. The middle story completes itself and then the reader progresses back through the years to the first story told by Adam Ewing. The theme is of ‘man abusing and using others’. There is a morality aspect in the stories, mostly in the first section and there is science. The story can also be described as dystopian and reminded me of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Owell’s 1984 and We by Zamyatin. The author references Melville and others in the story. Italo Calvino was an interpretation for the layered plots only Mitchell makes the return jouney.
I enjoyed the book, the narration was good but I found it hard not to be distracted. I think this is a book to listen to while actually holding and reading along. The diction can be challenging (like A Clockwork Orange). By listening to the book it was harder to catch the connections between the stories but then some reviewers have criticized the book as failing to create the connections so maybe it wasn’t just me.
This was an excellent novel. I had my misgivings at first when it jumped from an ocean adventure in Polynesia to a bunch of letters narrating events one might expect from a very different sort of English novel. The abrupt switch into sci-fi was also unexpected, but once the various pieces started linking together the result was pretty cool, a sort of nesting-doll model for storytelling, and echoing the 1001 tales of Scheherazade. This book takes on several weighty topics, including big business's anti-environmental motivations, racism and the ways groups of people dehumanize other groups to justify enslavement or killing. I think my favorite part was the dystopia in the sci-fi segments and how differently bleak this book's post-apocalyptic society was, compared to other books I've read in such a setting.I had both the audiobook and a print copy. I enjoyed seeing how the print dialects translated into speech with the various readers. The reader for Sonmi, the soon-to-be executed clone woman, was especially good, and brought out the fact that the society in that story was in future Korea.
I gave this book 5 stars on Goodreads.
As others have said, this book has a bit of a slow start. Then, the very abrupt transition from the first story to the second is incredibly frustrating. However, once I got into the stories, I was intrigued to see where each would go and how each played a part in the next. By the time I got through the first half and into the second part of each story, I was truly enjoying it.
Mod
****
Six interlocking stories, embedded within each other like matriochkas, using different narrative styles and carrying one or many objects from one story to the other. A big (and somewhat pessimistic) reflection on human condition and how history often repeats itself in various ways. I am undecided as to whether the movie is better than the book or vice versa; but both are quite good.
Plus, a pre-apocalyptic society set in South Korea? Fuck yeah. I really need to see the movie because I can't imagine who/how/why someone read this and thought it would make a good film. I said more intelligent things about this while raving about it to a hasher I bumped into on the bus to Songtan on Saturday, but I'm overtired now and so this is what you get.