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.

A few pages before the end of Mitchell’s novel, one of the narrators, a young composer, discloses the unusual structure of his musical “masterpiece” — at it happens, Cloud Atlas is originally the title of a piano sonata:

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year’s fragments into a ‘sextet for overlapping soloists’: piano, clarinet, ’cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in its own language of key, scale and colour. In the 1st set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the 2nd, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan’t know until it’s finished, and by then it’ll be too late, but it’s the 1st thing I think of when I wake, and the last thing I think of before I fall asleep. (Sceptre edition, p. 463)

This simple, yet entirely original idea is, by way of metaphor, the one that governs the whole novel. Mitchell interlocks six stories into a A-B-C-D-E-F/F’-E’-D’-C’-B’-A’ Matryoshka / palindromic series. A creative and surprising device that could put Mitchell almost on par with Nabokov, Calvino and Borges.

These six stories are written in different genres: seafaring adventure, spy fiction, science fiction, comedy, etc. Should we try to unravel the symmetrical mosaic of the whole sextet and consider each of these six novellas individually, much of the charm and effect of Mitchell’s novel would probably vanish. The fifth story, titled “An Orison of Sonmi~451”, written as a sci-fi novella (loosely inspired by Soylent Green) is powerful enough and would make an excellent stand-alone; but the rest of the lot can sometimes feel a bit uneven.

Still, interwoven as they are, and spanning across continents and centuries, they map out at their core a vast polyphony on the unrelenting oppression and exploitation of human beings by other human beings. According to Mitchell, it is everywhere and ever-present: on distant colonies, in art and trade, within political and industrial endeavours, in the treatment of vulnerable people, in social inequality. As says one of the characters, probably alluding to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche:

The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. (p. 461)

All this is, one way or another, the many manifestations of universal cannibalism. Or, to put it in an aphoristic manner: “The Weak are Meat the Strong do Eat.” (p. 508)

Yet, Mitchell truly shines as a writer in his ability to give each story “its own language of key, scale and colour”. In other words, he is a true virtuoso of mannerism, able to emulate just as well the style of writing of a 19th-century American mariner (cf. Moby-Dick) or the sci-fi neologisms-ridden lingo of a late-21th-century Korean clone, and every widely different type of language in-between, just as convincingly and with just as much knack and chameleonic finesse. Coming from someone who suffered from a stammer and had a hard time expressing himself as a child, this ability to bend the English language every which way (sometimes almost to the limit of readability) is nothing short of a stroke of wizardry.

Cloud Atlas is probably Mitchell’s most famous novel, thanks to the 2012 movie adaptation directed by the Wachowskis, with (among others) Tom Hanks and Halle Berry — it is still in my to-watch list. By the way, Mitchell also worked on the TV Series Sense8 with the same directors. While the LGBT+ themes come undoubtedly from the Wachowskis themselves, the idea of individuals interconnected across great distances is certainly David Mitchell’s trademark. Better still than the series, though, Cloud Atlas masterfully illustrates this concept.

So, is this whole thing “revolutionary or gimmicky?” Shan’t know until you’ve read it, and by then it’ll be too late. For my money, it’s probably somewhere in the middle, but I did enjoy this intricate, playful, stimulating novel tremendously.

9/25/17: watched the movie second time. Emotionally stirring and I felt deep connection with each character. Superb. The book reads like like the movie, but in ultra-slow motion, for me. Ha. :-). Also wanted to mention I listen to this instrumental by Paul Cardall when I go through some grieving over a recent divorce. It brings back vivid memories in decaying pathways of my brain. Life and Death. If the Cloud Atlas Sextet came into reality, I imagine it as this (don't think it's a sextet though, but not a music expert): https://youtu.be/lAmyLScoBUM. See what you think of it?

Second read: 8/31/17 (start)

Oh, man. What a beautiful work of literature. I almost read it again but gave it to a friend to read instead. I've owned a copy of this twice. The first time I gave it to someone who never gave it back. I found another copy for a buck a couple years later at the Dollar Tree. The irony of the Karmic message in the book. I love this book. It has a special place in my heart.
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Original Review:

FIVE PLUS, ONE OF THE BEST OF THE BEST!!!!

I went to the bookstore last Friday to pick a book I placed on hold, and went to search for another specific book, but the shelves didn’t have it. For fun, I decided to look at the shelves, browse a bit, and my eyes saw a magnetic sight. At the top of this book, it said, “Cloud.” The picture on the front drew me like a marionette tugs a puppet.

Tom Hanks has futuristic tribal tattoos on the side of his face and he looks perplexed in a side view. Below him and to his left Holly Berry in a brown coat and scarf peers to her left in paranoia. Under her a man in a V-neck sweater and tie smiles confidently and looks somewhere we can’t see. Below and to that man’s left stands an older woman with similar tribal tattoos on her face like Mr. Hanks, and in futuristic Druid-like white garb. To the woman’s left a bigger size picture of a man in a top-hat captions a face of resonant thought. Under him an old man smiles on the telephone. To the man’s right a small Korean girl in a small white, sleeveless dress sits on a stone pavement staring in the distance; her face holds distress and depression over a collar of metal around her neck. To the respective lefts of the old woman, the Korean girl and the confident man sits a young man at a piano, playing in deep and content thought.

I had the same feeling I had when I watched this Spielberg television show in 1985 called “Amazing Stories,” and they were just that to my seven year old mind. I remembered the story of this old man who kept talking about a train, a ghost train. They lived on an open field of farmland, and this ghost train comes at the end, and the story builds suspense as you wonder if it will come, and then the sounds of a train echo in the distance and into the little boy’s ear as he sleeps in bed. The feeling I had then replicated when I saw this book, so I picked it up. I read the back of it:

EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED
“’David Mitchell is, clearly, a genius…’ –The New York Times Book Review”
“ A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles and genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco, and Phillip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.”
“’One of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it? Modern classics…’ – David Eggers

After reading this I checked Goodreads on my iPhone and saw a lineup of five and four stars from my friends. I took it with me and bought it. I couldn’t stop reading it. This is one of the best books I have ever read in my life. I absolutely adore it. Before I get into the basic story, let me describe the outline to you. I haven’t seen the movie, and I’ve heard it doesn’t hold up to the book well, but the movie is, I believe, structured chronologically. The book resembles a doll with many smaller dolls within. You open one and take out the next, open that and take out the smaller one. In other words, he lays it out like this: 1a, 2a, 3a, 4a, 5a, 6, 5b, 4b, 3b, 2b, 1b. His point in doing this ties in with themes interwoven throughout. He refers to time and events through one of his characters as “the ancient future.” Mitchell, in an interview I read, claimed to be a modern Buddhist, and reincarnation and enslavement to a meaningless cycle of births and deaths mingle with the connection of these stories.

He describes the story structure through one of his characters. I read it a few times and still only begin to grasp the depths:
“One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each ‘shell’ (the present) encased inside a nest of ‘shells’ (previous lives) 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 call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual furture.”

With this in mind, I’ll outline a brief synopsis of each story. 1) THE PACIFIC JOURNAL OF ADAM EWING: A man rides across the ocean on a boat and becomes sick with a parasitic worm in his brain. A doctor works with him to ease and heal the pain. He meets a runaway slave, and spares his life and his secret. 2) LETTERS FROM ZEDELGHEM: A musician offers his supremely talented services to a famed and established musician stricken with syphilis. A love triangle emerge involving the man serving, the famed one’s wife, and eventually one unexpected other. 3) HALF-LIVES: THE FIRST LUISA REY MYSTERY: A woman reporter uncovers a big-name corporate secret and searches for the proof documents, at the threat of her life. She becomes involved in an action-packed adventure. 4) THE GHASTLY ORDEAL OF TIMOTHY CAVENDISH: A man with an acute and wonderful sense of humor strikes up some hot publishing deals, but when some people come to collect what they believe rightfully theirs, Timothy must pay or die. He flees, and is outwitted by his vengeful brother when he finds himself enslaved in a nursing home. 5) AN ORISON OF SONMI-451: A genetically engineered human being interviews with a documentarian in the future. She unfolds her story of escape from the slavery of corporate control, longing to escape her human-created destiny (slavery) and to expose what she has discovered of atrocious corporate crimes. This disturbing story echoes from Huxley and reveals a fresh perspective of the horrifying future of humanity. 6) SLOOSHA’S CROSSIN’ AN’ EV’RYTHIN’ AFTER: This challenging story comes from a leader of a future tribe set in Hawaii, and the challenge comes in understanding the accent of his English. A tribe wars another murderous tribe to keep peace, and worships a god named Sonmi. A Prescient comes to study, observe and build relationships with the tribe.

Every story ends with an exciting and unexpected climax. The stories form a novel because of the interconnected themes. Each main character struggles to overcome humanity’s tendency to enslave other humans. Technology and knowledge increase. Humanity’s taking more than “giant leaps” these days. However, something underlying in our natures never improves. We are selfish beings to the core, and only love and truth, not knowledge and technological advancement can cure our marred existence. The deep and beautiful philosophy connects like a thread of arguments, a simulacra of philosophical pleadings to the reader, bound by the chain of lives revealed with a sign – a birthmark on the shoulder, a comet, which, in the end, becomes a sun with six rays on the final main character.

Again, Cloud Atlas moved me, shook me, challenged me even in my own paradigm of religious beliefs. I loved this book, and plan to read it many times again. David Mitchell has earned the fourth spot on my favorite authors list, between C.S. Lewis and Ray Bradbury. I’ve already spent fourteen dollars on his latest release (The Bone Clocks). I plan on reading that soon, and may end up reading all his works within a short period.