Member Reviews
"All times and all stories being one and the same in the end"
I was beyond excited to be able to read this book early considering I adore "All the light we cannot see". I don't even know where to start, I love the fact that it gives you hope for this world, instead of scaring you into thinking about the bad it gives you this hope for a better world no matter what. I love the multiple timelines and characters from them, I fell in love with the wording and the quotes and cannot wait to read them again.
Oooh boy, I'd been looking forward to this novel for SO LONG after loving Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See. And while I try to be careful not to go into any novel expecting it to just fill the shoes of the author's previous works, this one was ultimately a disappointment for me. Doerr is an incredible writer whose sentences and paragraphs are stunners unto themselves, but the interlinking stories/timelines/character arcs here never gelled in a way that made sense, and it ultimately felt a drudge to get through. That said, there are folks who adored this structure, so it may well have been a case of "it's not the book, it's the reader" here; definitely worth considering if you're a Doerr fan and/or like speculative fiction with strange structures!
I am a huge Anthony Doerr fan and this book does not disappoint. My efforts to describe his writing keep falling short because how do you write a strong description of writing that is this good? You'll just have to endure my pedestrian efforts.
Cloud Cuckoo Land is three stories in one. Firstly, life in ancient times full of tyranny, war, oppression and hope. Second, it is the story of modern life filled with difficult parenting, lunatic terrorists and kind librarians. Third it is a tale of a time in the future when we live in space pods, using AI and other technologies to provide knowledge, entertainment and safety but where people still experience the same emotional needs for love and freedom.
Doerr manages to develop these stories in parallel and then to magically weave them together. And when I say magically, that’s exactly what I mean. This book is sheer genius.
Oh my goodness, what an amazing journey through time! We start with Konstance, who is journeying through space to a distant planet. We go back in time to 2020 to Seymour, who is an angry 17 year old, and Zeno, an elderly war veteran. Finally, we go to 1400’s Turkey to Anna and Omeir, two children who flee the attack on Constantinople. All three seemingly unrelated stories are linked by a book - Cloud Cuckoo Land. Doerr weaves these three stories together beautifully. This was a great book for people who love books!
My "Booktalk with Diana Korte" podcast interview with Anthony Doerr and his CLOUD CUCKOO LAND says it all for me. Here it is--https://open.spotify.com/episode/7mOqy6FkCBSteWnimKjAnc
It's pretty much impossible not to compare this book to Anthony Doerr's previous work "All the Light We Cannot See." It's one of my favorite books of all time, so I knew it would be hard to live up to. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, I see the same beautiful prose, scene building and unique characters. However, it took me a really long time to ground myself in the story. The time-hopping was so severe and I was over halfway through the book before I had any idea what the story was about. I would still say that I enjoyed reading it — but the plotline is just so bizarre that I don't think it will make any favorites lists. The surprise at the end really knocked this up from a 3 to a 4-star, though. He still remains a must-read author for me.
Intricate plotting reflects realistic (Idaho, immigrants, Korean War, environmental activism), historical (the fall of the Byzantine empire and the rise of the Ottoman empire), and sci-fi (a space community rocketing through space to a new planet due to environmental disasters on earth) all with the themes of environmental destruction and the possible collapse of civilization. Timelines are tied together by the ancient Greek story of Aethon,who seeks a utopian paradise in the sky. This is definitely more complex than Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, but timelines are easy to follow, and the time spent with this novel was extremely rewarding. Excellent choice for book clubs!
Thank you to Netgalley and Scribner for the privilege of reading this book.
Darn it. I just didn't love this book. Despite all of the rave reviews, I'm giving it two stars because it was just too much. Too long. Too much back and forth plot details. Too many characters and points of view. It did not entertain. I know I'm in the minority here, but I just cannot go cuckoo over this one. Too dystopian perhaps? I'm generally not a fantasy fiction gal.
At any rate, I'm grateful for the advanced copy of the book from Scribner via the NetGalley app.
It is about the quest for fantasylands or heaven by all of us. This book could be seen as a collection of short stories with each character narrating (Anna, Omeir, Zeno, Seymour, and Konstance) a different time (15th C, the 1950s, Korean War, 2020, and the future) and place (Constantinople, Idaho, and Outer Space) in a connected story. What links all the people, places, and time periods is Antonius Diogenes writes a story (Cloud Cuckoo Land) around the first century C.E. narrated by Aethon. He longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise. The different people, time periods, and places were all a bit overwhelming to me. Then one of the people in Bookclub said to watch for the owl and it would all start connecting. She was right! Another said to watch for the librarians and what they recommend to the characters as well as what the characters find in libraries. This really does make sense! And yet another said to pay attention to the healing power of storytelling, not just for those they read the story to but also the storyteller themselves!
An amazing story of several very well-developed characters through a thousand year period of time. All of the stories center around a book discovered by each of the characters in each is their time periods. Very complicated story that comes together in the end. B
This book was a little hard to follow. It skipped around a lot. It got better the 2nd half. I was excited because I really liked All The Light.
I admit when I first began to read this book I got a little confused. It seemed bit disjointed. But, since I absolutely loved Anthony Doerr’s previous book All the Light We Cannot See, I gave it a second chance and started over. The reader who pays attention at the outset - something I didn’t do the first time around - will be rewarded with an imaginative tale which weaves together characters across time, with an ancient text the common factor. This is a book about a book, with libraries occupying a prominent place in the settings and interconnected stories. None of the characters can be considered privileged or even fortunate, enduring economic, social, physical, or life-threatening hardships. But just as the ancient text endures, so do they.
Cloud Cuckoo Land is not a run-of-the-mill novel. It is a work of creativity and rich descriptions, transporting the reader across time and geography. It is worth the effort required to engage at the beginning.
I was given an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.
Wow wow! This book took me a minute to get my bearings, as there are several different time lines, and I didn’t know that going into it. But I became very invested in all the characters and cared deeply about each of their stories. All of which were connected, in some way, by an ancient text. This book is so imaginative and beautifully written, I loved it.
Wanted to read this book since I loved All the Light We Cannot See. Then a buddy read popped up with #notyomamasbookclub and move this book up to the top of the list. At 640 pages it was definitely an investment in time.
Five characters give their stories to this book, on multiple timelines, with the thread of an ancient story tying them altogether. The story does not follow a linear timeline for each character, hopping around from beginning of their life, to the end, to the middle. The ancient timeline encompasses two characters, Anna and Omeir; modern timeline, Seymour and Zeno; and the future timeline, Konstance.
I am rating this book 5⭐. Let's get that out of the way first. This book was an investment in focus and time. It took me 17 days to read. I will not tell you this was a page turner or that you will like it. This is not a book for everyone. It is a human interest story of characters, with flaws both physical and mental, that struggle through their lives in their time. It is a slowly developing tale of what binds us, no matter the time period, or problem. Thank you to Anthony Doerr for another awesome work.
Doerr has a way with his prose -- it's what made his last book such a home-run for so many people -- but he's not David Mitchell. This tri-partite structure that's so popular now is not for everyone and I kept feeling like I was seeing the seams all over this instead of falling through it organically. Still, it's a good beach read and that's all it needs to be.
Published by Scribner on September 28, 2021
Anthony Doerr tells this story in multiple time frames. Each chapter begins with fragments of a story written by Antonius Diogenes, a second century storyteller. The title of Diogenes’ story translates as Cloud Cuckoo Land. The rest of the book bounces around in time. The segments are connected by Diogenes’ story. That connection reminds us of the importance of books and the ease with which, in the long stretch of time, knowledge is lost. We believe that everything will last “but that is only because of the extreme brevity of our own lives.” Cities “come and go like anthills.” “The houses of the rich burn as quick as any other.” From ancient works and the ruins of the past, we might discover lost knowledge that will help us understand how our present came into existence. We might also learn something about the universality of human experience.
Diogenes’ story tells of Aethon’s “journey to a utopian city in the sky.” The story was supposedly written on wooden slates that Diogenes discovered in Aethon’s tomb. Diogenes claimed to have transcribed the slates onto papyrus and had the transcripts delivered to his ailing niece, an entertainment designed to encourage her recovery.
Centuries later, as the Saracens prepare to sack Constantinople, a girl named Anna is ransacking a hidden trove of manuscripts, delivering them to monks who hope to find a book that contains the entire world. Anna believes Diogenes’ codex fits that description when it speaks of “a place of golden towers stacked on clouds, redshanks, quails, moorhens, and cuckoos, where rivers of broth gushed from spigots.”
North of Constantinople, Omeir was born with a facial deformity that makes his village regard him as a djinn. His grandfather cannot find it in himself to leave the baby to die. Omeir turns into a gentle child who raises and loves two oxen before he and his oxen are drafted to attack Constantinople. Omeir’s path eventually intersects Anna’s. Diogenes’ book, once important only to Anna, now becomes important to Omeir.
Zeno Ninis is a prisoner of war in Korea during the early 1950s, where he meets and falls in love with a scholar named Rex. Zeno learns root words in Greek from Rex, including a particularly telling phrase that translates as: “That’s what the gods do. They spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.”
Seymour Stuhlman is a child in Lakeport, Idaho in the mid-2010s. Birds are losing their Lakeport habitat to developers who replace forests with parking lots. One of those birds was an owl Seymour knew as Trustyfriend. Medication is the adult answer to Seymour’s perception of the doomed world in which he lives, but Seymour has a bent for subversion that neither medication nor prison will change. His eventual purpose in life is to undo the lies that corporate America tells people who prefer a clean and cheerful world to the one they have created.
Zeno’s story collides with Seymour’s in 2020. Seymour is apparently prepared to blow up the Lakeport library as Zeno is upstairs, directing a children’s play.
Konstance lives on a generation ship making its way to a distant planet after Earth has succumbed to environmental disaster. Konstance loses herself in the generation ship’s computer, discovering Earth’s history, before she is forced into isolation to avoid a rapidly spreading contagion. Konstance’s father had a book called Cloud Cuckoo Land, translated from the Greek by Zeno Ninis. In the ship’s virtual library, she searches for information about Zeno and begins to guess the truth about her isolated existence.
Diogenes’ tale links all the characters, illustrating the reality that history has unforeseeable impacts on the future, that people who history does not recall have played their role in shaping our present. The novel’s characters are imbued with the same qualities as Aethon. They persist. They take wrong turns but eventually right their course. They stand in awe of a world they don’t understand, but they strive to gain knowledge of their place within it. They might get lost, they might lose things, but they come to understand that “sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.” The characters are fighting not just to make sense of the world but to make sense of themselves.
Like his characters, Doerr’s prose is lively and surprising. He asks important questions: “Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we are young?” Why do we find it so hard to accept reality? Why do people want to conquer others when what they have is enough? Doerr gives the reader nutritious thoughts to chew upon, but he does so in the context of a story that gradually evolves from bewildering to astonishing.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
I had stopped reading this about a quarter in for months because I couldn’t get past the patchwork of stories—picked it up yesterday and couldn’t put it down again. A fantastic tapestry of coincidence and human-ness and hope and also deep pain but sheesh. I’d say stick with it, it’s worth it, even if (and this may be unpopular) I could have done without the transcription of cloud cuckoo land interspersed throughout. Wowow
This dedication by the author just speaks to my hear with this simple statement - "the librarians then, now, and in the years to come." With that dedication you jump into the book with 3 stories tying together an event (past, present and future). This definitely will be another bestseller and people will fall in love with the writing and storyline.
Truth be told I had a hard time with this book because there was so much detail in the settings, the characters and the back & forth of different timelines. I could not stay focused and I don't know how to rate this because nothing was wrong with storylines or writing but I felt like I was in college preparing for an exam and I needed to take copious notes to pass.
Thank you Scribner and NetGalley for giving me this opportunity to read an advance copy of this book.
If you're a fan of Jorge Luis Borges or of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, you'll enjoy the labyrinthine interconnectedness of this multiplot adventure which follows a diverse cast of characters across time and locale. It's a work of staggering invention. The lands visited include Constantinople under siege, a library, a land plucked from myth, a forest just prior to gentrification, a spaceship on its way to colonize a more habitable planet, and more. Doerr's characters are equally compelling: a clever orphan girl who is custodian to an ancient text; Omir, a youth with a cleft palate and a deep relationship with two oxen, Mountain and Tree; a shape-shifting mythological character, Aethon (generally in mule form); an octogenarian who learned to translate Greek while a prisoner-of-war; a neurodivergent young boy who befriends an owl; and a perceptive young girl who is orphaned on a spaceship as ai drives it toward a possibly habitable planet.
The writing is lush. You'll intuit the connections before they are revealed, but even in the reveal, the magic is not diminished.
The story is about siege--of cities, of the land, of libraries, of history--and the transcendent power of the human stories that results.
Highly recommended.
Cloud Cuckoo Land goes cuckoo (in a good way) with the postmodern, found novel structure -- shooting it back in time before House of Leaves/Don Quixote to Ancient Greece and an apocryphal book by Diogenes of the same name, telling the tale of a peasant named Aethon who undergoes an epic Odyssean journey of shape shifting, whale-ingesting, and flight to reach a paradise city in the clouds and possibly find the meaning of life.
This book is both a Holy Grail McGuffin and spiritual parallel guide for people in 3 different time periods -- people on either side of the siege on Constantinople in the 1400's, people around the present day (further entangled by their flashbacks) dealing with the impact of progress on the environment, and people in the far future escaping Earth as the last hope for humanity -- focusing on a young girl and the ship's AI.
The love of books and knowledge is a huge theme, and the characters' journeys and parallels to Aethon's ordeals are very intricately plotted as they search for purpose in their lives -- sometimes on the right track and sometimes misguided by people with selfish or malicious intent. A key theme is the discovery of how interconnected these polar opposites are, and whether to accept that and live in the real world or stay in paradise.
The book itself undergoes its own journey and transformation -- from a bound manuscript that people attempt to protect from the elements and age to the subject of translation/interpretation/reenactment, to an Easter egg hidden in an immersive virtual reality atlas of Earth at a point in time.
The book takes some effort (though not as much as the Ancient Greek one) to painstakingly put the pieces together and bring them to life, but is well worth it for the rich layers.