There's a story told from both sides of the siege of Constantinople in 1452. So Cloud Cuckoo Land is three stories in one, and it's like Doerr put them all in a blender and then drizzled parts of each out onto the page. But it's a long, needlessly complicated, questionably structured journey to arrive at the point: Stories are timeless.

To wit, I give you this lukewarm review of Anthony Doerr's much heralded new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land. But it's not always completely successful. These days, however, it seems like when writers are out of ideas (or just want to pander to readers) they write about books, or the power of storytelling, or the importance of literature, etc., etc. If you like this, read: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (Hodder & Stoughton, 2004, reissued 2019, $18.95, available here), another metafictional tale of six nested stories that stretch from an island in the South Pacific in the 19th century to a post-apocalyptic future.They used to say that when writers are out of ideas, they write about writers.

The library's exhaustive totality cannot make up for the real world that has been lost.Īmerican writer Anne Boyer wrote in her essay Take Up And Read: 'The world existed before books, and it always exists outside of them: that is, how a person should read is how a person must read, which is at least in duplicate, both always in this world and looking for another.'ĭoerr seeks to show how to read at the end of the world - both as a way out and a way in, all at once. No tree she sees in its virtual atlas 'possesses the meticulous, staggering complexity of a single lettuce leaf' in her father's real-life farm. The horror of Seymour's deed is compounded by it taking place in one such library, a space sanctified by selflessness.Īnd yet for Konstance, whose situation may strike too close to home for the pandemic-isolated reader, the digital library is ultimately not enough. Characters produce escapist chestnuts like 'Each of these books, child, is a door, a gateway to another place and time' or 'If it's told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap'.Īnna, in her oppressed life, daydreams of a library 'to last until the end of time', full of books 'free to anyone who can read them'.

Cloud cuckoo land review