A basket case when it comes to storytelling form: six interrelated stories (in different narrative style and different genres) happening centuries in between. If you list the chapters in sequence, this is how the relationship looks like, main themes, and how the main characters are related to each other:

1a The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (1st part) - diary - sea adventure; racism - 16th century - in a vessel Prophetess afloat the Pacific Ocean
2a Letters from Zedelghem (1st part) - epistolary - adultery; music - year 1931 - in a old English house called Zedelghem
3a Half-Lives - The First Luisa Rey Mystery (1st part) - mystery/thriller - about an undisclosed danger of a nuclear plant - 60's
4a The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (1st part) - 3rd px - comedy - rivalry in literary world - current
5a An Orison of Sonmi-451 (1st part) - recorded interview - sci-fi/dystopian; love story - futuristic
6 Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After - tribal war; father-son - ultra-futuristic
5b An Orison of Sonmi-451 (2nd part) - clone Sonmi watching a movie of Cavendish
4b The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (2nd part) - Tim has the MS of Luisa Rey
3b Half-Lives - The First Luisa Rey Mystery (2nd part) - Luisa has RF's letters
2b Letters from Zedelghem (2nd part) - Robert Frobisher takes interest on Ewing's diary
1b The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (2nd part) - setting goes back to the Prophetess with Adam Ewing surviving from a parasitic infection.

Notice the circular pattern: the narration started with the diary being written on a vessel called Prophetess then it went to 6 other settings (time and place) before going back to the same vessel afloat the Pacific Ocean.

It's a league on its own. There is nothing quite similar to it. If Scheherazade told 1001 stories, Mitchell limited the number to 6 but made his main character in each reincarnation of one person. It is similar to Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days (2005) it's just that the Cunningham novel has only one setting, i.e., New York, while this one of Mitchell has various: 1. New Zealand; 2. London; 3 & 4. US; 5. Korea and 6. Hawaii. And the fact that Cloud Atlas was published earlier (2004) makes it the original compared to Specimen Days.

This is definitely one of my memorable reads. Reasons: (1) Longer time to finish since I had to understand 6 different stories each of them in different style, genre, theme, setting (place and time) and set of characters. This for me proves the talent and versatility of David Mitchell. Who would have risked writing in a genre one is not comfortable writing about? The voice is different too. Adam Ewing used old-fashioned English that I had to open my Lexicon dictionary to adjust to his writing while I almost failed to understand the 6th story (Zachry) because of the contracted (apostrophe replacing letters); (2) The 5 stories were split into two parts with even the 1st story ending its first part with a hanging sentence about the character Raphael. You have to recall what happened in the first part of each of the 5 stories for you to understand their second part; (3) You have to pay attention to the interlink points of the 10 half stories as you progress as Mitchell's intention is for you to follow the stories through its main character in 6 persons that is made possible because of the concept of reincarnation.

My only criticism is that it seems to be too gimmicky that its message is drowned by unusual form and convoluted plot and subplots. It is like living a big mansion with many rooms so you almost don't see your loved ones anymore. It is like a big story with no meaning. True that I appreciate the effort and the novel storytelling form but at the end of the day, most of us want to either be entertained (escape literature) or our lives enriched. (meaningful literature). Although some stories are indeed entertaining (Timothy Cavendish) or emotional (Sonmi-451), others are just somewhere in between but not really leaving a mark. Adam Ewing for example tried to tell the story of Mariori genocide by the existing tribe Maori with the indirect consent by the European colonizers but it did not have the sincerity Chinua Achebe was able to deliver in his landmark novel Arrow of God. Ditto to the period adultery of Jocasta and her bisexual lover, Robert Frobisher. I felt that the danger of having the lovers discovered is not as engaging as let's say between Lady Chatterly and her lover. In short, some of the characters seem to be caricatures instead of individuals that the readers can relate with. Or maybe I was just overwhelmed by the form that I no longer have time to appreciate the characters and to fully understand the message.

Nevertheless, for this novel's original form and Mitchell's incomparable creativity as a writer, this novel deserves those stars! In fact, I feel I little guilty not clicking the last star. I just felt too unequipped to tackle a brilliant novel like this. Maybe I should go back to this book someday and give it another try. In fact, this is the first book I read where I have to write on the pages for me to remember not only each and every character but more importantly the events and the interlinks. I apologize in advance to my brother who will later read my copy. I just could not help myself.

My all-time favourite book, complex and deeply humane
“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty” - Solzhenitsyn

General
Rereading an all time favourite is daunting in a way (what if it disappoints?!), but already on the first page of Cloud Atlas I noted something I hadn’t before, making the experience not just a warm bath, but also new and fresh.

Adam Ewing meets Henry Goose on a cannibal beach on the Chatham islands, far of the coast of New Zealand. And here Henry is collecting human teeth to go into Victorian mouths, harvesting literally the remains of the weak being preyed on by the strong.

I didn’t remember that the central Cloud Atlas themes of exploitation, power, betrayal and morality already came back so quickly in the starting pages of the first story. Also I am happy to have read parts of the book for the first time in English.
Finally, after having read Nietzsche for the first time this year, I noted how Cloud Atlas is a humane answer to the "Will to Power" themes in his work, casually quoted by characters in various part of the story.

You need to be into science fiction and interconnected stories, but than Cloud Atlas is very rewarding in my opinion.

Structure and plot
The structure of Cloud Atlas is famously experimental, like a Russian doll. Five stories, in various times and styles, are cut in the middle (making this sentence in the second story rather tongue in the cheek: "A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”), all leading to a sixth central story that is told fully, after which we get to know the conclusion to the other five stories.

The first story revolves around the diary of Adam Ewing, a notary on his way back to San Francisco after finishing business in Australia. He reflects on the rapid societal and ecological collapse of the indigenous population of the Chatham islands, triggered first by the Westeners and then Maori who move in as slavers to the peaceful Moriori. It seems that the civilised are powerless versus this demise:
“Imagine a bleeding calf is trashing in sharkinfested shallows. What to do - stay out of the water or try to stay the jaws of the sharks? Such was our choice.”
Also racism and greed are rampant on the ship he is travelling on, partly due to the gold rush of the 1850’s getting started in California, and the appearance of a surprise passenger.

The second story starts with the flight of the empoverished Robert Frobisher to Belgium in the interbellum. A music student, disinherited aristocrat and more then a bit of a conman, he narrates through letters how he helps the famous composer Vyvyan Ayrs create the Cloud Atlas Sextet. He soon also strikes up relationships with the other residents in Chateu Zedelghem and turns out to be bisexual:
“Why is it I never met a boy I couldn’t twist around my finger (not only my finger) but the women of Zedelghem seem to best me every time."

The third story jumps to the 1970’s with Luisa Rey, a investigative journalist who meets an elderly Rufus Sixsmith, the recipient of the letters of Frobisher. Its written as a thriller and my least favourite part of Cloud Atlas since it really conforms to the genre in both story (with a tragic backstory for Luisa’s father as a police officer annex reporter with a heart of gold) and in rather plain language.
However also here Mitchell slides in some philosophical ponderings about power and morality, like:
“But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that’s... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We’ll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless universe - but only our toes.”
Or:
“Like Grimaldi says, every conscience has an off-switch hidden somewhere.”
And:
“Too cowardly to be a warrior, but not enough of a coward to lie down and roll over like a good doggy.”

Timothy Cavendish, an elderly and indebted publisher, his early 2000’s story is hilarious and starts with a bang. Literally. A book he published becomes an overnight hit when the author grabs a literary critic and throws him to his death at a cocktailparty.
Because his author is clearly not afraid of law and order, and due to the large demand of money, Timothy is forced to run. He is hindered by the privatised train network of the UK and unbeknowst to himself lands at an elderly care home as a hiding place. Its like The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared but with a much more politically incorrect main character. As a publisher he also has the manuscript of the thriller of Luisa Rey with him.

Sonmi-451 her futuristic dystopian interrogation is my favourite from the Cloud Atlas parts. She is a genetically engineered server in a kind of Korean McDonalds, working 19 hour shifts on a drug called Soap, to get to retirement after 12 years. Her world is very small and restrictive, initially only dreams and later the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen are an escape of her reality:
“... my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.”
As an experiment her and an other server their intelligence is allowed to grow, and she discovers the horrors of her world, which she narrates to a historian in an Orison (a metal egg with a holographic projector).
And as always awareness does not bring happiness, illustrated elonquently by her co-server Yoona-939:
“Happy you call us? I would end my life now, but all the knives in this prison are plastic.”
And:
“Is happiness the absence of deprivation? If so, servers are, as purebloods like to believe, the happiest stratum in the corpocracy. But if happiness is the conquest of adversity, or the sensation of being valued and fulfilled, then of all Nea So Copros’ slaves we are surely the most miserable.”
Her story of a rise to knowledge, coupled with the casually blatant cruelties to (genetically engineered) people, touched me. As do her careful words, from her quoting Seneca against her executioners, to sounding like Yoda and Marx within a few pages.

Sloosha Crossing is a story even further in the future, where on Hawaii a few civilised tribes, after the collapse of civilization, trade with more scientifically advanced seapeople. Zachary the goatherder narrates his story in broken English and needs to face three prophecies and challenges to his character. Along the way he is guided by his belief in Sonmi, who is now seen as a goddess and her orison that survived the Fall. Also he wrestles with a (imagined?) devil while climbing Mauna Kea, where the beautiful observation “Souls cross the skies of time, like clouds cross skies of the world” comes to him.

Off course then we are then only halfway through the book and we still need to get the conclusion of all the other five stories.

Interrelations
The stories within Cloud Atlas grip together tightly theme wise, and in each of the narratives it is clear what the link is with the preceding and following story.

But also in more casual references, each story has multiple links to the other stories.
A few I noted are listed below, it felt like a “find Wally puzzle” to me, with a little pang anytime I noted one:
- Vyvyan Aurs dreams up the basis of Cloud Atlas Sextet while dreaming of the restaurant Sonmi-451 works in, while Luisa listens to the music in 1975.
- Frobisher, Luisa Rey, Sonmi-451 and Meronym from Slusha’s Crossing have the same comet shaped birthmark, hinting at reincarnation being at play.
- On Swanneke, the place of the powerplant from Luisa’s time, a tribe of horsemen live in Zachary’s time.
- When travelling, Timothy Cavendish his train comes close to the parental home of Frobisher.
- Both Sonmi-451 and Frobisher feed ducks at a pivotal moment in their life.
- Cavendish his brother meets a carp in a rather unfortunate way while for Sonmi-451 the carp is a pivotal part of her escape.
- The Prophetess from Ewing’s time can be visited in the harbour of Luisa’s town.
- The powerplant of Luisa Rey’s time and the wombtanks of Sonmi-451 have the same name.

Quotes
I always admire David Mitchell his wordcraft, even more apparent in the English original text then in the Dutch translation. His writing is snappy, sassy and clear.
Some of the quotes that stuck with me are:

"The greatest trepidation: I was not genomed to alter history I told the Unionman, who responded that no-one ever was."

"But what you allege is... Nightmarish.
It is, but the nightmarish is not necessary impossible."

"Do you regret the course of your life?
How can I? Regret implies a freely chosen, but erroneous action; free will plays no part in my story."

"Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory in indomitable"

"The Weak are Meat the Strong do Eat"

"He who would battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"

The book and the film
Book versus film, always a major contention area.
Actually I liked the film a lot, especially the soundtrack by Tom Tywker. The Frobisher storyline in the movie is in my opinion rendered in a much more emotional way than in the book, with the beautiful scene with all the falling china and the bathtub scene as highlights. My favourite story is less complex in the film, Sonmi-451 has much more time to grow as a character in the book (loved Bae Doona as actor I must say!).

But overall I feel the film captures the ideas of the book quite well, especially the reincarnation idea with actors playing various roles in the six stories, with a bit more of an overt happy ending then the book.

On re-reading in 2012...

I admit, the surpringsingly-and-terrifyingly-not-awful trailer for the upcoming movie adaptation of this book sent me plunging back into its hexapalindromic universe to re-solidify my own mental renditions of Frobisher's bicycle, Sonmi's soap packs, and Lousia's imaginary California, among other things. I emerge even more impressed with Mitchell's mimetic acrobatics, the book's deft allusive integument ("Is not ascent their sole salvation?" p. 512), the acrimonious satire ("if consumers are satisfied with their lives at any meaningful level [...] plutocracy is finished" p. 348), and, ultimately, the nakedly deliberate messages about humanity's will to power and our capacity for empathy re-re-re-re-re-reiterated in the second half. I kept wishing Lousia or Cavendish or someone one would say "Be excellent to each other. Party on, dudes!" but not wishing in a snarky cynical judgy kind of way! Because I actually think Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is pretty... excellent (and come to think of it, is also a story set in multiple time periods with strong musical undertones and a message of peace, love, and happiness...). This book grants me one of the greatest pleasures a book can: it restores profundity to a hackneyed truth. If you're not into Mitchell's prose, characters, or fancy-schmancy structure, though, you might just end up with the hackneyed bit.

One thing that still confuses me about this book is the role of the Frobisher story. The other five all deal directly with humanity's inclination toward subjugation that Dr. Goose summed up with his law, "the weak are meat the strong do eat," but the Zedelgem story is different. Robert is stealing from Ayrs in a very material way, but this theft is ancillary. His manipulation of Ayrs and the Crommelyncks, while selfish, is also not entirely one-sided. Ayrs and Frobisher are playing each other, almost equally, and not entirely for the purpose of self-aggrandizement but in the service of music, which they both seem to perceive as a force beyond their own persons. Jocasta is similarly playing Robert for pleasure but also for her husband. I suppose these battles of wills provide the tension that keeps the story flowing, but they still seem WAY different than Maori slave-makers and brainwashed fast food servant clones, and different in kind, not just in scale. I like the fact that it's different (I think the moral refrains in the latter half might have become a bit tiresome without it), but I wonder if there's a reason for its uniqueness. Perhaps Mitchell planned to play up the manipulation aspect but couldn't bring himself to fully damn a man with a quest so similar to his own.

Old review from 2006

This, Sir, is a Novel. I don't think I've read anything so surprisingly excellent since Jonathan Strange Mr Norell. Actually, I have. What I meant to say is that I've read nothing so marvelously epic since then. As usual, my attempts to explain it to people have met with polite nods and changed subjects, but let me try: the book is like 6 perfect little novellas, arranged as Russian matroyshka dolls, and as you read, you bore in, and bore back out. Each doll is a different period in time, the outermost being in the early 19th century, the latest being somewhere around 2200 (I think). Four of the six are out and out genre pieces: historical maritime fiction, crime novel, dystopian scifi, and post-apocalyptic scifi, with all their various tropes rendered with loving affection. But they are just written, so, well that they are simply irresistible. I only wish I could find single genre novels that were as perfectly crafted as a single portion of this book. The pieces placed in the 1930s and the present day are also wonderful, but certainly aren't the type of fare I normally seek out.

But yes, exceedingly well written. What's it about? Well, there's the the journal of an American notary returning home from the Chatham Islands aboard a morally suspect ship in the 1830s; a young quasi-rake of a composer cuckolding an older colleague while helping him write new works, who documents his dalliances and mishaps in letters to his former lover; there's a true-story thriller about a Californian journalist in the 1970s attempting to out a corrupt and deadly energy company for squelching a safety report damning their new nuclear energy plant; the soon-to-be-filmed chronicles of a publisher in the present day whose attempts to escape the extortionist cronies of his gangster star author land him in a Draconian nursing home from which he cannot escape; there's the not-too-distant future testimony of a Korean clone bred for service in a fast food joint but who, via the machinations of forces many and penumbral, gains full consciousness; and finally (in the sweet and creamy middle) the Huck Finnish tale of a post-apocalyptic Hawaiian "primitive" and the "civilized" researcher sent to study his society. Whew! The characters of each story find themselves reading their predecessor, and sometimes characters overlap a very, very little. Each story features a character with the same birth mark, and they all seem to experience deja vu from characters in other stories. See? Now it sounds corny. But I swear to you, it is cool.

I guess the book is primarily about the will to power. Slavery and subjugation, small personal cruelties, corporate greed. It's sort of like the anti-Fountainhead, except much more fun to read. I don't know. Dissecting fiction about giant apes comes much more naturally to me. Please read this book so, at the very least, you can explain it to me.

See comments for a raise-the-eyebrows and dimple-the-cheeks discussion.

There's no doubt that David Mitchell is incredibly talented, and Cloud Atlas is a superior achievement. It was stylistically inventive, intellectually daring, etc etc, just like all the critics and reviewers promised. But ultimately it sort of left me cold, and I found myself wondering (often) what all of that effort was really for.

There are two unfortunate things that at the onset contributed strongly to this book not knocking me on my ass. The first was the insane amount of anticipation I had going into it, as I had been told by countless people that this book was amazing, astonishing, etc., and so I think it was set up to be unable to live up to all that. The second is the impossibility of ignoring comparisons to Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. I know that it's a little unfair, but Mitchell simply cannot compete with Calvino, and I couldn't stop thinking about Traveller while reading, and so my whole experience of Cloud Atlas was tarnished by that.

Let's go back. This book, like Traveller, is written sort of like a set of interlocking parentheses, with six totally separate storylines beginning one after the other, going for a while, and then breaking off at climactic points. Then, at the end of the sixth storyline, the fifth is brought back, starting at the previous cliffhanger and continuing until its conclusion, then the same with the fourth, the third, etc. Each of these storylines is extremely different in tone, style, and character – we have the travel journal of an American in Australia in like the 1600s (maybe; I'm awful with history); then letters from a British composer in Brussels to his former lover; then a sort of thriller about a young journalist in California in the sixties trying to unravel a dastardly corporate cover-up involving nuclear testing facilities; then a present-day caper story; then a dystopian-future piece told over the course of a long interview with a woman who has been sentenced to death; then a crazy post-apocalyptic oral history.

So two things here: First, let me again stress that Mitchell is extremely skilled. He does each of these drastically different things with aplomb, and is equally imaginative and able to completely immerse the reader in each one. Each has not only its own setting and story type and narrator and characters, but also its own complete language (the latter two using completely different made-up sci-fi speak). That is utterly astonishing, and Mitchell deserves due respect for it. And second: a book of this nature is excellent for helping one crystallize one's preferences, by which I mean that as someone who dislikes post-apocalyptic sci-fi nearly as much as historical fiction, it's no surprise that I liked the British composer and the American caper far more than the rest. (And I did like them, lots; if I could rate those sections alone, they'd get five stars easily.)

And it is true that Mitchell does a bit of work connecting these vastly varied stories – in storyline two, for example, the letter-writer finds half the manuscript of storyline one in an attic, and at the end of the end of his story, he plans to read the second half, which he'd found much later. But here is the crux of the non-external reason I didn't like this book as much as I wanted to: these connections were tenuous at best. It's true that there are feeble attempts to weave things together a bit further, such as a recurring comet-shaped birthmark and some vague hints that a character from one story remembers a piece of music from another story (which even this is meta-ly discredited, actually), but that wasn't nearly enough for me. I just never really understood what made Mitchell stick these specific stories together, other than to be very very clever.

And this is where the comparison to Traveller hurts Cloud Atlas the most, IMO. With Calvino, every story is constantly reinforcing and augmenting (or obfuscating) the others, everything woven tighter and tighter, not to mention threaded throughout and tied firmly with an overarching ur-story. But Mitchell does none, or barely any, of this, and so the whole thing begins to feel just like an intellectual exercise, rather than an emotionally connected whole, and lord knows I need my literary meta-experimentation to be emotional.

I had a friend when I was a kid who was a very talented pianist. One of the fun things he could do was take the Budweiser beer jingle and play it umpteen different ways. The first might sound like Bach; then he’d switch to Chopin. After that maybe it’d be a ragtime version, or blues, or bebop. His versatility went hand in hand with his virtuosity. After Cloud Atlas, I put David Mitchell in that same category. Nearly every review of this book talks about how innovative the structure is. The stories are told in different styles with different settings (including the future), first in chronological order, with each one referring to the one before it, then in reverse order until he’s back to the original tale. It’s long and sometimes dense, especially the future parts where it takes time to process the evolved (or devolved) dialogue, but it’s never boring.

And please don’t think of this book as only a gimmick. It has fresh ideas, recurring themes, and plenty of truths to tell. Plus, despite all the different voices and styles, the writing is always first rate. Unlike Christina Aguilera’s National Anthem, there were just the right number of notes. Literary merit often comes from not overdoing things, doesn’t it seem?

I suppose I run the risk of praising too effusively. To be honest, I liked some segments better than others. But I enjoyed them all. Even the sci-fi parts – typically not my thing – were done in an enlightening, entertaining way. It strikes me that most stories set in the future take vaguely disturbing trends from our own recent history and extrapolate them to unreasonable extremes. We’re then led on a rail to read into this what the cultural and moral implications are for this current path. Though you do get a bit of this in Cloud Atlas, it’s more subtle, and it touches on human issues that seem more foundational. It felt less manipulative, less deterministic.

He gave us another taste of genre fiction in the form of a rather standard crime thriller set in California in the 70’s. As a stand-alone, this would have been good but not exceptional. But as a riff, it was a great complement to the rest. I’m telling you, this Mitchell guy is dead clever; the consummate guide. There’s never a wasted word, much less a wasted story line.

This is only my second book of his. (Black Swan Green was my first and I really liked that one, too.) Now I want to read the whole set, plus any interviews he’s done that might shed further light on this new creative force in the world, harnessed for his growing fan base to enjoy.

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.

Mostly historical fiction with a few sci-fi and fantasy elements mixed in. It's cleverly done and the overall effect is very interesting. David Mitchell has a wondrous way with words. Highly recommended.

I finished reading for the second time awhile ago, but ended up sitting on this "review" for some time now because I could not find anything to say, other than "highly recommended." This one of those books you have to experience for yourself. No review can can sum it up or give you an idea what's inside. How anyone think they could turn this into a big-budget star-studded movie is baffling to me. ("This book defies a lot of things, so let's turn it into a movie??" Because that always turn out amazing.)

So what is this book like? I'll try to give an overview. There are six novellas nested inside and each story is set in a different place and time period, with one set in a distant apocalyptic future, which isn't as strangely out of place as you'd think. There's a common thread woven through these six stories linking them to each other across time and space, and each story is told by a character from the next story. The writing is unique in that all characters have well-defined voices that reflect their time periods. Mitchell experiments with different styles and genres, and the result is six distinct stories that actually read like they're written by six different authors.

The beginning was slow for me though, mainly because it's fragmented and difficult to follow. It wasn't until I got to the second story that I could sort of grasp what was going on. During the first half of the book, I had to push myself to read on, which I'm glad I did, because when I reached the end of the sixth story and the beginning of the second half of the other stories, things started coming together methodically, almost magically, to form the big picture, and it was at that moment that I finally saw what Mitchell had been doing all along. And it's beautifully done. I'm still in awe.

There are so many quotable passages--Mitchell really does have a wondrous way with words--that I could fill this whole space with quotes, but I think these will do.

The mind abhors a vacancy and is wont to people it with phantoms.

[...]

People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.

[...]

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

[...]

To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you assume we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes.

I won this book from a Goodreads Giveaway and would like to thank the people at Random House for sending a copy.

* * * * *

UPDATE: May 2020

Really curious to see if I still feel the same way about this book as I did when first finishing it in 2014, aka a lifetime and a half ago in covid time.

REREAD:

Still a good read and an excellent experimental novel. For the past couple of months, I have been in the mood for short (or short-ish) fiction that I can gulp down in one or two sittings. No reason for it, really. Just what the mood called for. So I went through a number of novellas and and reread a few favorites. It was a mixed bag, all things considered. A few were great, many were fine, and a couple were duds, as to be expected. More importantly though, the rereads stood the test of time.

Cloud Atlas fits this short-fiction mood I'm in as it's a series of novellas "disguised" as a novel. For this reread, I went with the full-cast audiobook and found it to be a different reading experience than the novel. I wouldn't say it's better, just different and a bit more immersive. Each character has a different voice actor, so you always know who is speaking in each novella. That made the different plots easier to follow, especially near the end as they come together and you get the "big picture" of this very segmented, multifaceted story.

That said, I no longer love this book as much as the first time I read it. It's still a work of art and I fully appreciate the work that went into crafting it. However, it's not the kind of book I enjoy anymore, and I don't see myself picking it up again. I used to think that it was way back in 2014. In fact, I loved it back then and couldn't recommend it enough.

So what happened? A lot of things, but the main one being I'm no longer easily impressed by nice prose and clever plotting. A novel needs more than that to pull me in.

Sidenote: why does 2014 feel like it was so long ago? It's almost like it existed in an alternate timeline. I think it seems that way to me because of all the things that went down since then. I think they may have changed me on a fundamental level. Years from now, I have a feeling I'll look back at 2020 and say the same, except 2020 will change all of us on a cellular level.

* * * * *

Cross-posted at http://covers2covers.wordpress.com/20...

Αυτό το βιβλίο τεχνικώς ήταν καταπληκτικό, και η ιστορία σχεδόν τέλεια για τα δικά μου πρότυπα.
Έτσι θα προσπαθήσω να κάνω μια ανατομία του βιβλίου χωρίς να αναφέρω major spoilers.

Το βιβλίο είναι όπως ένα σεξτέτο (μουσικό σύνολο για έξι όργανα/φωνές) βλέπε κουαρτέτο (4)
Έτσι από μόνες τους οι ιστορίες είναι λες και κάτι λείπει. Μια ιστορία είναι ωραία (βιολί), άλλη μονότονη (κοντραμπάσο). Αλλά όταν τις ενώσεις φτιάχνεις μια μουσική σύνθεση προς τέρψη όλων των ειδών αναγνωστών.
Έχουμε δηλαδή ιστορικό, επιστολογραφικό, αστυνομικό θρίλερ, κωμωδία, δυστοπικό, μετα-αποκαλυπτικό είδος, όλα σε ένα βιβλίο.

Το βιβλίο μπορεί να χαρακτηριστεί εκτός από σεξτέτο και ως μια ομάδα μπάμπουσκες ή ματριόσκες Ανοίγεις / μοιράζεις τις πέντε πρώτες πριν φτάσεις στην πιο μικρή και τη μόνη που είναι ακέραιη, την 6η. Κάποτε θα τη βάλεις πίσω στη θέση της κλείνοντας τις ματριόσκες μία μία από την 5η μέχρι την 1η και έτσι ολοκληρώνεται η εικόνα.
Έτσι οι πρώτες πέντε ιστορίες είναι μοιρασμένες η μια από την επόμενη. Η 6 βρίσκεται στην μέση άθικτη, Όταν την ολοκληρώσεις αρχίσεις με τα δεύτερα μισά των άλλων ιστοριών και έτσι ολοκληρώνεις το βιβλίο.

Ένα διάγραμμα του βιβλίου:
1η ιστορία
Είδος: Ιστορικό σε ημερολογιακό στυλ
Χρόνος: Μέσα 19ου αιώνα
Τόπος: Ειρηνικός Ωκεανός.


2η ιστορία
Είδος: επιστολογραφικό
Χρόνος: Δεκαετία 1930
Τόπος: Βέλγιο


3η ιστορία
Είδος: αστυνομικό θρίλερ με αριθμημένα κεφάλαια στυλ Νταν Μπράουν και Μάικλ Κράιτον
Χρόνος: δεκαετία του 70.
Τόπος: Καλιφόρνια


4η ιστορία
Είδος: Χιούμορ Κωμωδία
Χρόνος: σήμερα (αρχές 21ου αιώνα)
Τόπος: Αγγλία


5η ιστορία
Είδος: Δυστοπικό σε στυλ συνέντευξης
Χρόνος: 2144
Τόπος: Φουτουριστική Κορέα


6η ιστορία
Είδος: Μετα-αποκαλυπτικό σε στυλ διήγησης γεγονότων
Χρόνος: 2321
Τόπος: Χαβάη

Αυτή η ιστορία μου θύμισε αυτό που είπε ο Αϊνστάιν
'I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.'
Και εδώ στη Χαβάη του 24ου αιώνα οι άνθρωποι είναι πρωτόγονοι. Ακόντια, σπάθες, άλογα, κανίβαλοι, πίστη στα είδωλα, άνθρωποι χωρισμένοι σε φυλές και μικρά χωριά.

Και εδώ ερχόμαστε στ’ αρνητικά του βιβλίου:
1] Αυτό το 6ο μέρος με δυσκόλεψε πολύ διότι τα αγγλικά ήταν όπως υποτίθεται πώς θ’ ακούγονται τ’ αγγλικά σε 3εις αιώνες και όντως ήθελε κάποια προσπάθεια να καταλάβεις τι έλεγε.

2] Το ότι ήταν οι ιστορίες μοιρασμένες στα δύο με ανάγκασε έτσι να διαβάζω ξανά τις 2 τελευταίες σελίδες του πρώτου μισού κάθε ιστορίας για να ξαναμπώ στο νόημα ξεκινόντας το 2ο μισό, ειδικά των 2 πρώτων ιστοριών που τις διάβασα πρώτες και τις ολοκλήρωσα τελευταίες. Ξέχασα ποιος ήταν ποιος, ξέχασα που με είχε αφήσει και πιστεύω ότι αν ήταν τέσσερις αντί έξι ιστορίες νομίζω δε θα υπήρχε τέτοιο πρόβλημα.

Αυτά τα αρνητικά, τώρα στα θετικά είναι επίσης το πόσο διακριτικά σχετίζονται μεταξύ τους οι ιστορίες. Μαθαίνουμε για την προηγούμενη ιστορία μέσω ενός υλικού, είτε αυτό είναι γράμματα, είτε χειρόγραφό, είτε μια ταινία, είτε ένα προσχέδιο μυθιστορήματος, είτε μια καταγραμμένη τηλεδιάσκεψη και ούτω καθεξής.
Υπάρχει και κάτι άλλο που ενώνει τις ιστορίες κάτι που σχετίζεται με μετενσάρκωση που αν δεν το διάβαζα εδώ κι εκεί (Wikipedia, κριτικές στο Goodreads) δε θα το έπαιρνα είδηση.
Δε θα πω τίποτα άλλο, απλά όταν το βρείτε είτε στα ελληνικά (εξαντλημένο), είτε στ’ αγγλικά διαβάστε το. Απλά να έχετε υπόψη τ’ αρνητικά για να ‘στε έτοιμοιοι πού λέει κι ο Σάκης, άσχετο.

Α, και πριν σας αφήσω θα βάλω τις ιστορίες κατά σειρά προτίμησης από πιο αγαπημένη/ενδιαφέρουσα στην λιγότερο.

Κωμωδία: 21ος αιώνας
Δυστοπία: 22ος αιώνας
Θρίλερ: 20ς αιώνας
Μετα-Αποκαλυπτικό: 24ος αιώνας
Ιστορικό: 19ος αιώνας
Επιστολογραφικό: 20ς αιώνας

Actual Rating: 4.5 Stars

This is the kind of book you want to pick up when you're ready to be totally absorbed in story. I mean, you need strap yourself in before you pick this up.

This is not a carefree or light read. My advice is to approach this when you're looking for something complicated & engaging where every little detail has the potential to mean something later on.

The book is comprised of the stories of 6 different characters, all of which are related to each other in ways that may not be obvious from the get go.

I must mention that I had a really rough go of reading the opening section titled The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, but I implore you to keep reading if you happen to share in having that same experience.

The book picks up, I promise.

After it gets going, boy it gets going!

Each character has a beautifully distinctive presence in the novel. Mitchell expertly fashions each of them together into a final portrait that is mind-bending to say the least. I feel as though I need to reread this novel immediately just to try and pick up on all the things I'm sure I missed.

You'd have to be some kind of superhuman to notice every little thing this book has to offer the first time around. I'm sure there are impressive people somewhere who could achieve that, but I ain't one of them.

I would love to be inside the minds of folks who come up with stories like these. How much work does it take to craft something so subtle & intricate while maintaining a consistent idea throughout?

This book is an utter masterpiece.

Past that, it wouldn't be wise for me to go deeper into why this creative little book is so wonderful. That's how easy it would be to potentially spoil something, and this isn't a book you want to be spoiled for.

Just go in knowing that everything is important. Pay extra close attention for the best experience, and you will be rewarded!

This review and other reviews of mine can be found on Book Nest!

Buddy read this with my lovely bff Colette!

All my fears that this book would be a pretentious head-trip were initially reinforced when the first segment of the book ended abruptly. Right when I felt myself getting attached the main character, a Englishman aboard a merchant ship in the South Pacific circa 1830, I was moved into the mind of an unrelated character about 90 years later, a man escaping nefarious schemes in London to pursue an assistant position with a prominent modern composer in declining health. But once I came across mysterious and resonating links between the stories, I was able to relax and enjoy the ride. And a ride it is, skipping forward to stories in more contemporary times and eventually to a time of a dystopic society followed by a post-apocalyptic period where civilization is barely holding on.

Each of the six story settings represents a robust free-standing novella with engaging characters and distinctive (and marvelous) writing styles. Yet each repeats and elaborates themes central to human culture and history and each connects forward and backward with the other stories. If that reminds you of music, Mitchell lets his hair down at one point and has his musical character write to a friend about his work on a “sextet for overlapping soloists” which is a clear analogy to his book’s structure: “each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order.” His character’s humility about his experimental approach seems likely to reflect Mitchell’s own attitude about his creation: “Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan’t know until its finished, and by then it’ll be too late…”

I gather that the stories all have a lot to do with the nature of history and the history of human nature, with an overriding concern on the misery and devastation wreaked by the minority of wealthy societies and classes and races within cultures. This seems to mirror the current squaring off of the 1% haves and 99% have nots in the West and the thrust of Jared Diamond’s work on how disparities in control of resources arise and how their squandering contributes to collapse of societies. In the 19th century scenario, a venal character who benefits from colonialism quips that there are two laws of survival, the first being: “The weak are meat the strong do eat” and “The second law of survival states that there is no second law. Eat or be eaten. That’s it.” In the early 20th century story, the lead character predicts: “Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same faculties that’ll snuff out Homo sapiens before the century is out!” In the dystopian future, a revolutionary intellectual returns to the first theme: “in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only ‘rights’, the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.” By the postapocalypic movement, a wise elder recognizes with simple clarity that: “human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too” …”hunger that made Old Uns rip out the skies an’ boil up the seas an’ poison the soil with crazed atoms an’ donkey ‘bout with rotted seeds so new plagues was borned…”

Another key metaphor for the structure of the book and Mitchell’s exploration of history is that of a set of Russian matryoshka dolls, the ones with multiple figurines successively encased. A character in the 1970’s concerned with stopping implementation of an unsafe nuclear power system notes down a model of time as “an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each ‘shell’ (the present) encased inside a nest of ‘shells’ (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of ‘now’ likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I shall call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future.” This fascinating distinction between actual and virtual pasts and presents is explained by this character’s notes. Suffice it to say here that their divergence has to do with an individual or a society's beliefs, which can empower them to swim against the tide of disparity and destruction. Each lead character in the novel represents such a hero, and their combined stories make for a very satisfying and uplifting symphony.

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According to the Bible, man was created on the sixth day. It is the day that starts his labor for spiritual completeness. Six represents man’s spiritual imperfection. Six is a spiral, a flowing infinite curve, a recursion cycle. Cloud Atlas is a novel composed of six nested tales, with five of the six halved on either side of the only undivided tale, Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After. The halves start from 1849 to a post-apocalyptic far future, then reverts back to finishing their stories. A visual imagery would be:

1(2(3(4(5(Sloosha’s Crossing)5)4)3)2)1

The main character in each tale is the same reincarnated soul marked by a birthmark which resembles a comet, a solar system body that cyclically makes its appearance over Earth. The soul in each cycle goes through a suffering and redemption. The first tale starts around 1850 with Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, as Adam Ewing, an American notary, returns home to Hawaii from New Zealand after locating an Australian beneficiary of a will that was executed in California. His experience is recorded in a manuscript. The second tale is Letters from Zedelghem, which takes place in 1931 Belgium. Robert Frobisher, a bisexual English composer, records his experience via letters from Belgium to his lover Rufus Sixsmith, a physicist. He’s on the lam from his gambling debts and finds employment to a famous composer. The third tale is Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery in 1975 California. This thriller follows Luisa Rey, a journalist, as she investigates the cover up of shoddy safety at the nuclear reactor. The fourth tale takes place in contemporary England, The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. Timothy Cavendish, a 65 year old publisher, flees for his life from gangster brothers of his author client, over a contract dispute. The fifth tale, An Orison of Sonmi~451 is a dystopia that takes place in the Korea of the near future. In this world, corporate culture rules and fabricants, bioengineered clones, are used as slaves for the consumer populace. The fabricant Sonmi~451 gives testimony to her “ascension”, the achieving of consciousness. The fulcrum, Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After takes place in the far future, post-apocalyptic Hawaii. After the apocalypse, civilization reverted to tribal state. An old man named Zachary recounts his tale of his pairing with the woman Meronym, a left over from the former advance civilization, who helps fight the attack on his tribe by the Kona tribe.

Besides the birthmark clue that links the characters, each tale is referenced in the next story. The destitute Frobisher finds Adam Ewing’s manuscript while looking for items to steal and sell from his employer’s library. Rufus Sixsmith, Frobisher’s physicist lover, shows up in the Luisa Rey segment as a key scientist in the investigation. She ended up with Frobisher’s letters to his lover. The publisher Timothy Cavendish received a manuscript titled “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery” for consideration. “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” was mentioned as “one of the greatest movies ever made” by Sonmi’s mentor, Hae-Joo. Zachry prays to Sonmi, who have attained an earth goddess status among the Valleysmen. The references continue with the crumbs leading back to Adam Ewing.

Nietzsche’s ideas are core to Cloud Atlas, referenced in the book as Ayrs’s “bible.” While the book explores the predatory nature of selection, it also embraces Nietzsche’s “amor fati”, or the acceptance of everything, beautiful and ugly. This is similar to the Zen philosophy of non-dualism. The theme of Cloud Atlas contains his idea of “eternal return”, which had its influence from ancient beliefs. The characters of this book go through a cycle of birth and death, sometimes with renunciation and insight that comes from the elevation of consciousness, as represented by Somni’s “ascension”. However, this soul passing is unlike the Buddhist cycle, which involves the karma and not the soul, with the goal of eliminating karma by achieving enlightenment. The splitting and forward/backward movement of time represents the illusory nature of time, of timelessness. Nietzsche’s idea was eloquently stated by Frobisher in his letter to Sixsmith, “...Nietzsche’s gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.”

The inevitable part of the cycle is the survival of the fittest. Survival comes not from high ideals, but from adaptability and the brute predatory nature. Eat or be eaten. Adapt or perish. Adam Ewing witnessed the enslavement of the peaceful Moriori people by the Māori. The Moriori have an ahimsa code to do no harm, which led them to mass destruction and enslavement by the Māori. Luisa Rey investigates a corporation’s criminal cover up of the safety of a nuclear reactor. Sonmi~451 lived her life as a slave fabricant for consumer use. The cycle leads back to the Pacific with the Kona attacking the Valleysmen, reminiscent of the Māori preying on the Moriori. As Dr. Henry Goose the physician in the Adam Ewing tale said, “...The weak are meat the strong do eat.” This was humorously illustrated when Cavendish discovered a “library”. The route was blocked by stacks of war memorial plaques with the heading “Lest We Forget.” The literary finds included Zane Grey’s books on the conquering of the wild west (and implicitly the preying on of Native Americans), the war novel All Quiet on the Western Front, and, most hilarious, No Meat for Me Please! However, while the first half of the tales illustrates a cruel fact of natural selection, the second half wraps up the tales with the power of redemption, as each of the characters come to a personal realization in this cyclical predatory game.

Cloud Atlas, however, is not a book that takes itself seriously. As I’m reading the book, I get a feeling that David Mitchell is paying homage to various tropes, genres, and literary styles in a playful way. An interview with David Mitchell in The Washington Post confirms that:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...

Ewing’s naïveté of the predatory events occurring on the ship reflects Herman Melville’s Captain Delano’s ignorance of the control of the ship by the slaves. The narration of both tales takes the reader along for the ignorant ride and the resultant revelations. The Luisa Rey story was mediocre but is reflective of the subpar paperback thrillers of the 70s. The brilliant Sonmi story has everything science fiction and dystopian thrown in, along with the bolts and wrench. The funniest section, the Timothy Cavendish story, is where Mitchell shows his tongue in cheek, with its satire on predator/prey as Cavendish was ashamed to be mugged by three teenage girls. The book even has the word “six” generously sprinkled throughout the book, the most prominent being the name of Frobisher’s lover, Sixsmith.

Cloud Atlas is a book that may be confusing to some, affected to some, or brilliant to others. Since my favorite postmodernist novel is House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, which is highly complex in its structure, Cloud Atlas seemed simplistic to me. Also, the individual stories do not make terrific writing on their own. However, the parts created an entertaining, original and thoughtful whole that I have to agree is brilliant, like the musical movements of Frobisher’s masterpiece, the Cloud Atlas Sextet.

Clouds Illusions?

I was belatedly drawn to read this book via the publicity for the film version, which I have not yet seen. I am usually put off by any sort of media hype, but I must reluctantly confess a huge appreciation for this tour de force of a novel. Each segment is a virtuoso performance of style and variation of the leitmotif that threads throughout, like the musical work of the title, illustrating the central theme of the abuse of power in all its forms, and man's inhumanity to man throughout the ages. Optimism for humanity's future is, however, suggested by the hint of karmic redemption.