Anthony Doerr is the author of All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, and the Alex Award, and a #1 New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.
Set in Constantinople in the fifteenth century, in a small town in present-day Idaho, and on an interstellar ship decades from now, Anthony Doerr's gorgeous third novel is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story of children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope—and a book. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Doerr has created a magnificent tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness—with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us, and with those who will be here after we're gone. Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a 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. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five 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 the 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 sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet. Like Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light We Cannot See, Anna, Omeir, Seymour, Zeno, and Konstance are dreamers and outsiders who find resourcefulness and hope in the midst of gravest danger. Their lives are gloriously intertwined. Doerr's dazzling imagination transports us to worlds so dramatic and immersive that we forget, for a time, our own. Dedicated to "the librarians then, now, and in the years to come," Cloud Cuckoo Land is a beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship—of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart.
Everyone who has read All the Light We Cannot See has high expectations when they pick up Cloud Cuckoo Land, but I think that's the wrong way to approach this book. Cloud Cuckoo Land is nothing like All the Light We Cannot See, except in one important way: Doerr is able to completely capture the cadence of life and living. Brilliantly, Doerr does this through sound. I felt like I could hear absolutely everything—the distant gunshots, the conversation muffled by headphones, the wind whooshing past while one is running, the animal fear of being quarantined—and all because of a few images, a few choice words. He seems to put more emphasis on sound than images, and part of that may be because it's historical and dystopian—two genres where it can sometimes be difficult to visualize how people will live or lived. But if sounds remain near the same, then we can still be in the moment with them, as if we're right next to the characters and seeing the same things because we can hear them. Using this angle perfectly captures what it's like to be huddled in danger, to be wading through sources in the library, to be hungry and all the other things that we may have or may have not experienced.
Cloud Cuckoo Land is a layered story, rather than being stacked. Instead of telling the novel in timeline order, Doerr layers the stories of all his characters across time on top of one another, starting with each of their wonder with the story of Cloud Cuckoo Land to build the overall sense of wonder, instead of going from Anna's story to Omeir's story, to the next and the next. This narrative style makes for a much more engaging read, and also does more work overall to keep the reader invested in each of the characters. The vignette style of the novel also makes the stories move quick. Doerr gives up snapshot moments that build a life, focusing on the biggest moments that matter. The vignette style and the layered style work together to capture again this cadence of life, while also best portraying the characters and their connections to one another.
The story is also layered with the fictional version of Cloud Cuckoo Land, making this book, indeed, a book about books. Each of the five characters have the singular connection of the old Greek story Cloud Cuckoo Land. Finding the other connections between the five characters is even more rewarding, and wouldn't be possible without this book. The novel is divided into twenty-four chapters, each of them opening with fragments of one of the folios of the fictional Cloud Cuckoo Land. This book is a bright light in each of these character's lives, whether they really fully know it or not. They help show us that we can easily get invested in each of the individual characters' stories and their connection to the book, but also how intrigued we are to see how and why they overlap the way they do. What is most rewarding of all is reaching the ending, and realizing just how the book got from Constantinople to Zeno's hands, how a man in 2020 would have had access to this story to share with children when the last known time it was in human hands was in the 1400s,
The last note I want to talk about has a few spoilers, so I wouldn't read this paragraph if you haven't read the book yet! We know that Zeno's story in 2020 leads to a situation where him and five children are in a library with a bomb, but most of Zeno's story is the past that leads him to that moment. The kid who plants the bomb, too, also has a history we dive very deeply into, so much so that we feel sympathetic for him despite what we know he is going to do. Near the end of the book, we learn that Zeno actually dies protecting the five children and the library, but what I didn't understand is why we get that reveal before the book actually ends. It broke my heart, and I felt like maybe what Konstance uncovered (for indeed it was Konstance who reveals this shocking turn) was wrong, or planted. Yet, as we continue to finish the book and learn more about what Zeno's life was like near the end, we come closer and closer to our own conclusion that Zeno is exactly the kind of man to sacrifice himself to save the children, and the library. And once we come to that realization, and once we resign ourselves to never getting to see that moment, Doerr shares it in the epilogue, and it cuts off before it ever ends—a devastating ending that we had hoped wouldn't come to pass, but that had to, so that Konstance's story could come to be.
Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See is a definite must-read, and the entire publishing and bookish community will certainly be on top of any other Doerr book news once it is announced. Stay tuned for more from Doerr, and you can find more of my book reviews here.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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