Playing Catch Up Again

Okay, fine, I'm not a very good blogger. I acknowledge this. I own this as part of my personality. Deal.

Let's talk about Cloud Atlas. I actually really want to, because this book was amazing. Amazing. I loved it. I need to find the librarian again who checked me out, since he said it was on of his favorite books, and I should tell him that now it is one of mine.

Basically, it is this sandwich of stories, starting with an explorer in the 19th century that felt Master and Commander-ish, then abruptly jumping to a composer in the 1930s who would be at home with Evelyn Waugh characters, then jumping to a thriller/mystery involving an investigative journalist and a nuclear plant, a semi-modern day story about a publisher's escape from a retirement home, a dystopian futuristic world with a clone for slave labor, and then a post-apocalyptic, almost stone-age like story. And then it loops back through all of them.

There is so much one could say about this, though clearly the first thing is, go read it! The description on the cover of the book calls it dazzling, and truly, that's such an apt word. It simply is dazzling. The way the different stories connect with each other, and what this says about the nature and role of stories, legends, and truth is fascinating. The most fun story was the composer one. It's quite hilarious, and also heartbreaking in light of one of the other stories. My favorite, though, was the second-to-last one. I know the final story is sort of the heart of the novel, but so many of the novel's themes seemed to really come out with this one, particularly relating to truth and how truth can have such a complex relationship with stories, legends, and truth as we perceive it.

The two main themes of the story are: rewriting/retelling of the past, and human beings willingness, sometimes eagerness, to enslave one another or exploit one another. Both permeate the various stories in interesting ways, and I'd love to write an exploration of how those two themes interact with each other. You could also do so many interesting academic papers comparing two of the stories. It would be great for a class, because you could all read the book, but everyone could pick whichever two they wanted for the comparison.

After this, I read Hawksmoor. This also played with time and typical narrative construction, since it involved an architect in the late 1700s and a modern CID Detective (okay, I'm too lazy to look up whether that is redundant; oh, the Brits). It was all right, but not a favorite. Basically, it was all about reason and the edges of human reason. And doesn't that sound like fun?