REVIEW: Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
In a word, incredible. Also, an inadvertent railing against BookTok.
Executive Summary: (pulled from the “plot introduction” section on Wikipedia, rife with hyperlinks for your daily WikiWalk.)
Cloud Cuckoo Land is the story of five characters spanning eight centuries. In the fifteenth-century Byzantine Empire, Anna is a young seamstress living in Constantinople, and Omeir is a village boy conscripted into the Ottoman army, as they are preparing to take the city. In the present day, Zeno, a Korean War veteran, works in a library in Idaho translating Ancient Greek texts, while Seymour, a disturbed autistic youngster, becomes caught up with a group of ecoterrorists. In the twenty-second century, Konstance is a young girl aboard the Argos, a generation starship heading for a planet called Beta Oph2.
Their stories are bound by an Ancient Greek codex entitled Cloud Cuckoo Land that each of the five characters discover and find solace in. It is a fictional book written by real Greek novelist Antonius Diogenes in the second century, and tells the story of Aethon, a shepherd on a quest to find the fabled paradise in the sky. In his travels, he is transformed into a donkey, a sea bass, and finally a crow, which allows him to fly to the gates of the city in the clouds.
Content Warning: I’d rate this about a PG-16. There’s no graphic sex or violence, but the themes are very heavy and dealt out with a measured, but unapologetic hand. Death pervades the work: the threat of it, the fear of it, the acceptance of its inevitability. For some, even past versions of Mack, this would have been heavily upsetting. Proceed with caution.
Star Rating: I gave this five stars. Few modern authors write with such imagination and skill as Anthony Doerr. I believe he won the Pulitzer for All the Light We Cannot See. I, having checked, know that he did, in fact, receive the Pulitzer in 2015. I enjoyed this text more than All the Light We Cannot See, but I also gave that 5 stars on GoodReads. The star rating system is fundamentally broken. *shrug*
Review: This is spoiler-free! I promise.
Now, it has been four months since I have read this text. The lack of spoilers is primarily because I don’t remember all the specifics of the story. I only remember the major plot points, which, if you know any world history, should not ultimately surprise you.
(For example, I refer you to The Fall of Constantinople in 1453.)
I won’t divulge what happens to our beloved characters, though. For that, you must read the story.
My review consists mostly of an ode to the powers of writing-as-craft and editing-as-duty. Since COVID-19 really sank its teeth into the people of America, land of the ambitious and revolutionary, there was a shocking resurgence of reading as a pasttime. I mean, with all the bars, restaurants, and clubs closed, how were the extroverts going to dissociate from the pain and burden of consciousness?
The answer? Books.
Normally, I would be thrilled and excited about this. However, the quality of the books that have been lauded as “masterful” and “exciting” and “complex” and “awesome” are poorly written, hardly edited, romantic stories that are advertised by the tropes they fall into. I love pulp fiction with the rest of them. I’ve never called it Literature. Pulp fiction often takes the form of lovely, escapist novels or novellas. However, if I read one more BookTok book with an actual typo in it, I’m gonna lose my mind.
I mention this to say that I read Cloud Cuckoo Land immediately after finishing Fourth Wing. Forty-five pages into the work, I posted to GoodReads: “It is . . . wild . . . to read Anthony Doerr right after a BookTok book. God, this man can WRITE.”
Reading this book, at the time I did, in the manner I did, was akin to a hearty meat and potatoes meal after a long day at a carnival where I splurged on a singular bag of cotton candy. I loved the cotton candy and I enjoyed it when I ate it. But it left me unsatisfied, unsubstantiated, and regretful of the sugar hitting my empty stomach.
Sitting down with Cloud Cuckoo Land fed me. There’s no other way to put it.
Every sentence is crafted with intention and skill. Every paragraph advances the story, bit by bit, measure by measure. Not until you turn the final page does it become clear how tightly woven the tapestry of this novel is.
It has it all. Birth, death, love, heartbreak, political intrigue, science-fiction, fantasy, sacrifice, horror, redemption, existential dread. Normally, I hate narratives that jump through space and time. But the sheer quality of sentences, my God. I was weeping for the treasure that was a book labored over by an author and a team of editors.
It made me hopeful to read in a world that is content to sell us our Bread and Circuses and call it Fine Art. Maybe, perhaps, the craft of writing is not a dying art. There may be embers to stoke in that long-burning fire after all.
The characters were full-bodied, warm-blooded. I kept highlighting the Kindle copy I borrowed from the library, giddy over the sentence construction and the imagery that transported without being overwrought.
I mean:
But as he reconstructs Zeno’s translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.
He wonders at the mystery of how one god can manage the thoughts and terrors of so many.
“Some stories,” she says, “can be both false and true at the same time.”
Grandfather, Omeir thinks, already I have seen things I did not know how to dream.
The heart heals but never completely.
“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”
Turn a page, walk the lines of sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head.
These are sentences that just, I don’t know, bubbled up into the consciousness of Doerr?! What Divine Favor blessed him?
Reading this book made me remember why I fell in love with reading. Don’t get me wrong, I am entertained by BookTok and all her robust recommendations. But nothing many of those Wet Dreams of the Purveyors of World’s Finest Capitalism authors write compares to something like All The Light We Cannot See or Cloud Cuckoo Land. Nothing.