I know CLZF said we would be gone for a while, and this post isn't to contradict him because indeed we will be, but I just wanted to give you all the chance to rave about this book if you have read it. And if you haven't already read it, then you should read it and come back and rave about it. Honestly, I think Cloud Atlas might be the best contemporary fiction I have ever read. Mitchell is an astounding writer. Multiple story lines, each as intriguing as the last, great depth of character every time. It's nearly impossible not to become completely attached. So much is packed in between the covers that you think he won't be able to pull it all off but he does and the end leaves your head spinning. So, rave or get to reading because this book is amazing.
7 comments:
I am opting to rave but I am posting something I already posted elsewhere. Is that cheating? Anyway, this is what I raved to a professor of mine who recently taught a class on contemporary fiction that takes place in colonial times...
I read it last year and absolutely loved it and recommended it to a friend, who is now reading it. So we have been talking about it for the past couple of weeks and I was reminded a bit of the class you told me about, the one in which you taught Mason and Dixon. The reason I love Cloud Atlas is that it is structured in a really unique way so as to take you from a couple of centuries ago to a post-apocalyptic future, the end of civilization so to speak, and back. Mitchell, obviously, is writing right now, and the first chapter of the book takes place in 18__ (can't remember the exact year) onboard a colonial exploration ship. It's written in journal form with a semi-difficult dialect and approaches the interaction between explorers and "native" peoples in the typical backward-looking way— as an age that has already historically passed. Obviously, the reader is informed by a post-colonial mentality and that's how we read the past (which I think is what your class focused on in some sense). However, one of the things that keeps the book really interesting is that each chapter is a completely different story. So, in chapter 2, we are in 19 th century Europe reading the correspondence of a narcissistic composer, chapter 3 in 1960s California reading a crime-pulp story of nuclear conspiracy, chapter 4 in more or less the present following the mishaps of a cynical retired British publisher who has been imprisoned in a nursing home and is oppressed by a dreary series of condescending people, chapter 5 following the interrogation of a "fabricant" (corporate slave race of clones) in futuristic South Korea who is being condemned for intellectual "ascension," and finally chapter 6 takes us to post-apocalyptic Hawaii in which "primitive" tribes (one of them ostensibly descended from fabricants and speaking in a Huck Finn-ish dialect) battle it out in paradise as one race tries to avoid the sticks and stones genocide on which the other side has their hearts set. But the real beauty of it is—each chapter ends when it is only halfway through. You only read the first half of each story before it suddenly skips to the next radically different chapter (which makes for frustrated but rapid reading). While this is indeed a clever little formal trick, I think it is also fundamental to understanding what the book means. In 2006, we are more or less halfway through the span of history that the book claims, but in taking us all the way through the fulfillment of all the nasty things that can happen when dangerous "civilizing" trends are carried out to their fullest potential, all of those little social and political kinks seem much bigger and darker. And THEN, Mitchell proceeds to rewind BACK through history, in reverse chronological order, to illuminate how each coming shadow in each segment prepares the next step to problems and atrocities, even annihilation, in a future already glimpsed. So, instead of just being informed by the context of the 21st century, the reader is informed by the whole scope of civilization, straight through the end of history (as we know it). The reason I love this is that by the time you finally get back to the explorer's journal in the 1800s, every little detail of his interaction with the peoples he encounters is filtered through the framework of what we now know about how power operates in the subtext of history and humans frame and destroy each other when they come together. And, well, you know me, I love a book like that.
By the way, AZF, did you ever come up with any back-up about that major kink in the plot? I forgot to look... But I am determined.
Sadly, no. But I'm sure there is an explanation, I just need to figure it out.
Here is A.S. Byatt's review of Cloud Atlas
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,1162871,00.html
I just finished this a week ago, and I liked it, thought it was very ambitious. I think the Frobisher and Somni characters were the strongest, I didn't think the others quite reached the same level.
i have almost finished it, and i like it a lot. the skill with which he writes all these different genres is really something. I especially love how he dumbs down the Luisa Rey chapters, as the story is told from the perspective of a writer's first book. I had the thought while i was reading that bit, that it wasn't as well written as the other chapters. Then you find out it's Hilary Hush's first manuscript. Awesome!
This is when those of you that haven't read this book should advert your eyes and post somewhere else. My bigest problem, that I couldn't (and still can't) solve when reading this book had to do with the Luisa Rey chapters. The meta-fiction throws me off; in the chapter following you find out its a manuscript but what does that do to the chapters the had come before? Does this make the first three sections part of her novel too? I really hope not! Does Mitchell do something to mend this that I didn't notice? Despite the fact that I love this book its a riff that I can't seem to mend and it screws up the objective of the book for me. Anyone have any ideas about this too soothe my aching love for Cloud Atlas?
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