I love it when a book teaches me about history.

"The Cloud Atlas" shines light over Alaska during the Second World War. Between November 1944 and April 1945, Japan launched more than 9,300 hydrogen balloons carrying bombs that were intended to cause damage in Northern America and cause terror in those countries. However due to extreme weather conditions, only about 300 balloon bombs were found or observed in North America and they killed six people and caused a small amount of damage.

This story is set up in a fictionalized Alaska and is told by a priest, Louis Beck, who during the war was a bomb disposal specialist. The story is told through flask backs during his time spend at Anchorage military camp while he says goodbye to his friend Ronnie, the shaman, who is dying and signed a DNR.
During his military training, Belk is send to Anchorage and works for Captain Gurley, a single-minded person whose only purpose is to track down the balloons coming over. He is very certain that the Japanese are planning some type of a conquest. He found a map which pins so many North American targets that even cities in Mexico are not safe. Captain Gurley lost a leg in an earlier bomb disposal accident and most likely suffers from PTSD.

As Belk and Gurley hunt for the balloon bombs, a Yup'ik woman, Lily, has her own plans with these 2. She came from a village into Anchorage where she fell in love with Saburo, a Japonese spy, and became a shaman. However, because being a shaman did not pay at all we turned to prostitution and fortune telling in order to earn a living. She needs Gurley's connection and his map in order to find Saburo. And she needs Belk's loyalty in order to have the means to go forwards. Through her powers she is able to lead them into the tick tundra were they discover a crashed balloon and a child.

The realistic elements blend beautifully with the magic of Lily, of the shamans, of the place and of the balloons themselves. As all of us, Belk faces the choice of fulfilling his mission or of saving his lover. While he fails in making a choice and destroying both of his 'missions' he hopes that others are capable of making a sacrifice.

During the book the motif of the woman who lost her child and cried so much that she brought it back to live is revisited over and over again. It is reiterated multiple times that death comes when it is silence that it should be embraced rather than feared.

2.7 - there was probably some attempt to conclude this with deep metaphorical meaning. But I became so disappointed in a too-long, far-flung love triangle, with way too much attempt to connect history and religion and native culture (by a white author), that I was just trying to finish it…painfully. The first hundred pages had hope, and maybe if you are just in for a poorly crafted adventure story with the crazy military captain and the magical native prostitute, then you might love it. Not me.

This story is about Japan's warfare technique to drop balloons in Alaska . . . it was a bit slow of a read. Each time I picked up the book I found it interesting but I wasn't always compelled to do so . . . and I didn't really get the ending. Interesting but disappointing.

The Cloud Atlas

I liked this book. I had a lot of curiosity about the balloons and the damage they did. I am also always curiosity the differing groups who populated our country be fore we came and our curious compulsion to destroy (obliterate) their culture.

I loved this book. It had characters as big as Alaska, where the story is set. The historical period of Alaska during WW II was a new one for me - I grew up in Fairbanks in the 70s and so I enjoyed reading about the frontier as a potential battleground, but what was especially wonderful about the book was the crazy triangle between Gurley, Belk, and Lily. I could hardly put it down.

I was so surprised how is it possible that such a good movie was based on a pretty boring book. Little did I know that I was reading a wrong book (I wanted to read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell). I have realized that after I read third of this book. The start is interesting, Alaska's secrets and shamans... and suddenly we are talking for hours about explosive balloons and it doesn't stop, the story is not progressing, just two characters discussing explosives

When I first started this book, I thought it was marvelous, wonderful, 4 stars at least, maybe 5. But the more I read, the more tedious the book became. It was like a vinyl record with a scratch. It would hit the scratch and repeat itself, over, and over, and over again. Louis abused by mad Gurly, Louis beguiled by enigmatic Lilly repeated over and over again. Parts of the book were still good, but it was too unrealistic for me - not the mystic parts, but the army parts. I don't see Gurly being allowed to do what he did in the army, and I don't see Louis having so much free time to wander around or so little free time he was expected to be at work instead of at meals or in bed.

Take a little-known fact of war, weave in a bit of romance and the back story of a military man trained in bomb disposal. Then set the novel in the breathtaking location of Alaska. Add to that an author mastered in the poetic phrase.

All of that should have culminated in a spellbinding story. But I was in the wrong frame of mind to appreciate the tale or the wide spectrum of characters introduced throughout.

Maybe I will give it a second shot next year.

Talk about characterization! Loved it.

I really liked this book and got much more in to it than I expected to.

Confusing it with Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, read this book, and am not sorry for that.
Interesting description of an aspect of WWII I was only vaguely aware of, the Japanese air balloons militarization. Has a strange supernatural aspect that I could do without.
But, although I didn't understand why it was needed, the supernatural aspect wasn't that awful and it added to a sense of doubt and not being sure of what is going on (which I liked) that I had throughout reading the book. I also liked the writing.

With an unapologetic vocabulary and depth of cultural references, Cloud Atlas is a delight. Depending on the reader it is a rich trove of rabbit holes or nostalgia of deep immersion in our world's heritage. The movie is a move from one room of detailed landscape to another, following a golden thread of life's inheritance paid forward to the next. The book is a walk from world to world, where each one unfolds the next.

The book creates a symphony of eaons around the simple melody that the subtle and tenuous threats of kindess, creativity, and inspiration can stretch between lives and have a larger impact than perhaps all the choices of leaders in history books. The authors brief soliloquy at the end speaks directly to the notion that making the assumption that humanity, that humans, that we ourselves can be better, and working to that end, can make all the difference. Ultimately this difference may end up determining the surviviability of our species as well as the survival of our humanity.