Cloud Cuckoo Land
Author: Anthony Doerr
Publisher: Scribner
Date of Publication: September 2021
I am still catching my breath, emerging from this story. So my beginning offering is a collection of thoughts, harvested from my reading experience.
For the last 200 pages of Cloud Cuckoo Land, I felt as if I was preparing to fall. The story builds upon itself like a great tsunami, each word sucking me in reverse up to the crest of the wave.
We use the word “amateur” to refer to someone who is yet a fool in the field in which they play. Amateur has spiraled out from the Latin “amator,” lover, from “amare,” to love. To be a fool is to love is to do as we should and as we often must.
To know one thing is to be aware of ten other unknowns. Knowledge is power and knowledge is fear, and that is a dangerous combination.
To tell stories is not just a diversion, or a game, or a conjuring from rarefied air. Stories are survival, repeated survival. All of them, real or imagined, are underpinned by a hope that something formed through the words will capture and lift and submerge the reader in a whirl and depth of feeling that they have not yet experienced and may not yet comprehend. Maybe from that lack of solid knowledge, an amator will emerge, look onto the world anew.
And now, for the characters.
In the fifteenth century, an orphan named Anna lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople. She learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds what might be the last copy of a centuries-old book – the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the army that will lay siege to the city. His path and Anna’s will cross.
In the present day, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno rehearses children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege.
And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of paper the story of Aethon, told to her by her father.
They are grappling with adulthood in worlds in peril, and they find resilience, hope, and an improbable, improbably preserved story.
To create a character is an intimidating task. To create five different main characters, each with their own separate stories, is difficult on yet another improbable level. Like all the best storytellers, Doerr has a level of mastery that lets the reader disregard the effort and fully inhabit the tale. Each adventure, each setting, each nuance of those five characters, is so transfixingly tangible that they are near impossible to forget even over the course of 574 pages. The book does not feel burdened by the weight of the numerous times, tales, and emotions it recounts. Instead, it feels oddly, definitively, complete. The compendium of the characters’ collective lives creates a mounting sense of need to read the book, not simply to get to the end, but because the characters are quite literally the past, present, and future: Constantinople, modern-day Idaho, and interstellar odyssey. They are not always pretty people. They are always changing, and always seeking constants that will help them abide and preserve the places that make them. But they grow, and they hurt, and they love, and they come to feel so familiar that I grieved parting from them.
That delicious grief owes to Doerr’s gift for the linguistic mechanics of storytelling, allowing a collection of words to become a single current, one that carries and coheres. Each sentence is an artful, thoughtful construction that urges the reading of the next. Each paragraph or section within a chapter is a story in miniature. He leaves no detail up to chance, be it the weight that a name holds, the feeling a sound instills, the motion in a particular moment. The imagination of the book is directed by Doerr’s words instead of being contained by them. The links that ultimately appear between the stories his words create are firm enough to solidify the similarities between his characters’ trials, but light enough to let those stories exist independently as well. In that way, the shape and fluidity of the words compares to the structure of the book itself.
To those who enjoy fantasy, history, intrigue, and a dynamic invention, this book is for you. To the poets, the curious, the ones who feel everything frighteningly deeply, the existential thinkers, the adventurous, and the bold, this is for you as well. Please. Dig in.
- D. K. Nuray
