Cloud Atlas

An excellent and well-crafted piece of fiction. Cloud Atlas isn't always the easiest to read, especially in its first and last chapter, but it's certainly worth reading. It's really hard to discuss this book without somehow spoiling something, especially given that pretty unique story structure, but I enjoyed ruminating about its themes on an unending recurrence of not just life but humanity, civilization, morality, and also the call to action of being a less selfish species. Of the different protagonists in this book, perhaps the one that really stuck with me the most is Sonmi, even though I had at first found her perspective hard to read. She's perhaps the most detached of the narrators, but because she is part of but othered at the same time, Sonmi gives some of the most astute and cutting insights into humanity's insatiable drive to consume at the expense of just about everything else, least of all one's conscience and morality.

A mesmerising read.

Don't be put off by the bad reviews for the movie adaptation. The novel itself is something else entirely and deserved better from Hollywood.

A series of interlinked stories ranging from the 19th Century through to a far distant future, Cloud Atlas is bursting with ideas. Starting with The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, Mitchell expounds on his themes of history repeating itself, of the actions we take in this life impacting upon the future, of love and destiny. Each story stops half way through until the middle story, like a set of Russian dolls, each revealing a new character, a new layer of meaning.

Mitchell adapts his writing style to suit each story: A 19th Century Journal; a set of letters written in the 1930's from an aspiring composer; a pulp thriller set in the early 70's; a fictional biography of a present day publisher; the testimony of a genetically engineered Korean clone; and finally the tale of a man living in Hawaii after the fall of civilisation.

This last tale was for me the hardest read, told as it was in a kind of pigeon English (or American!) and was the most obvious example of “history repeating”.

On the whole though I found Cloud Atlas to be a great read, by turns exciting and thought provoking. What does it all mean? That is open to interpretation, but a line towards the end, where Adam Ewing writes about his son, sort of summed it up for me: “A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson (his son) to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.”

Full review at sff book review

Six intertwined stories that range in time, setting and narrator as well as style and theme. I can't say I loved all of the stories but I did love how cleverly they were connected, how some stories connected back to the previous two tales and how each story concludes. Overall, this was an enjoyable book even though I would have hoped for a more glorious, big ending.
The most fun I got out of this was looking for all the little hints and clues as to how exactly every story connects to the one before and after. My favorite stories were Sonmi-451's and the Luisa Rey mystery. I did like most of Timothy Cavendish's story but with reservations. The other tales were harder to get through, either because David Mitchell chose a particularly difficult style (I'm not an English native speaker) or because I simply didn't care about the characters.

Overall, I'd recommend this to people who like fix-up novels and don't mind committing to a larger tale. It was utterly gratifying every time another connection was revealed and while the ending disappointed me a little, I'm very curious to see this incredibly creative novel as a film adaptation.