Did either of you read All The Light You Cannot See, Anthony Doerr, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize? Well, he’s published a new book, 622 pages worth, Cloud, Cuckoo Land. This novel tackles the fall of Constantinople to the sultan, Lakeport, Idaho, 1941-2022, and the future up to 2146. What weaves these disparate threads together? A romance in ancient Greece by Antonius Diogenes, The Wonders Beyond Thule. This manuscript in Greek is significant throughout the book.
Joanne in her reading retirement gave books a chapter and if she wasn’t engaged she went on to another book. Doerr, casting the beginnings of these three separate stories, took more that a chapter to engage me. It’s also so complicated that reading in it regularly, to keep clear the various parts, is also necessary. Persevering rewards the reader with fascinating narrative, beautiful prose and significant insights. Some examples...
Zeno, in Lakeport, Idaho, toward the end of his life which included time as a POW in Korea, now 86, thinks “In a life you accumulate so many memories, your mind constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequences, burying pain, but somehow by the time you’re this age you still end up dragging a monumental stack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.” P. 542
The character Seymour, who is obviously on the autism spectrum, who’s spent his life railing against natural destruction “...realizes that truth is infinitely more complicated, and that we are all beautiful, even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be part of the problem is to be human.” P. 568
Omeir, recruited to be part of the invasion of Constantinople, in old age as his memory sometime fails is described thus “Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.” P.. 585
The ultimate question of the book: which is better some Utopian perfection or daily life with its contrasts? It reminds me of something Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in Life Together, "God hates visionary dreaming."
I recommend this book for when the reader has time to seriously attend to it. Likely I’ll re-read it after a few months.
Takk for alt,
Al
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