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.

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.

I'll keep it spoiler-free at the risk of being vague.

I recommend going into Cloud Atlas without knowing too much about Cloud Atlas. If you're already familiar with the novel's structure, then Mitchell's repeated, explicit attempts to bash the concept into your skull will be tedious. Nonetheless, there is a beauty to some of the more subtle and nuanced connections between the stories. I don't mean to bash the book with my two-star rating, as I do genuinely believe, in accordance with Goodreads rating guidelines, that “it was ok.”

There is a lot to chew on in Cloud Atlas: religion, immortality, oppression, discrimination, capitalism, metaphysics, and more. (Mitchell has some genuinely interesting ideas about some of these topics.) Plato, Nietzsche, Freud, and Solzhenitsyn are all there too, in addition to other thinkers whose influence I am perhaps too ignorant to notice. It's debatable whether the heavy thematic concepts are a good match for the pulpy or comedic tones of certain sections, but that might be a matter of personal preference. (In different ways Mitchell seems to paradoxically take his concept both too seriously and not seriously enough.) In contrast with my desire for greater subtlety in other aspects of the work, I wish that some examples of prejudice within Cloud Atlas had received more explicit challenges. While the characters' racism is generally addressed, some men in the story express a misogynistic sentiment that in my view Mitchell doesn't adequately explore, in my opinion.

A flawed work for sure, but at least a thought-provoking one. If this “genre” of interconnected storytelling had more time to mature, I wager that it could be a vehicle for some genuine masterworks, but the pool of writers capable of writing in such different styles as Mitchell does is probably rather small. Frustrating in some respects, and not a life-changing work of literature (at least not for me). Perhaps my expectations were too high, but it's a book that has stuck in my mind, and that has to count for something.

I can recognize the skill and care that went into crafting six different styles of narrative, but I wasn't drawn in by the stories very much. The Sonmi tale was the most engaging, but it was a bit silly and concluded with something akin to “it was all a dream,” which I always find annoying. Don't get me invested in a character and a story, then invalidate the whole story at the end!

The rest of the stories I just couldn't generate much interest in, and the central tale's use of phonetic dialect was so obnoxious I skipped most of it.

I'm also not sure this is a novel, so much as six slightly related short stories. The overarching theme that allegedly connects them seems fairly shallow to me, and the mechanisms by which they refer to each other also pull the old, “Ha, it's not real” trick that is so irritating to me.

In short, I can see why people like this, but it didn't work for me at all.

A great book, a bit tough to get through at times but very well written. The story comprises the lives of 6 people in different ages and different places. The concept that is we are all connected in some way, however remote. The funny and hilarious was well balanced with the sad and serious.

The difficulty in the book lies exactly in the brilliance. In every different story a different style is used. Great and ingenious, but a bit of a speedbump as well. Everytime you get into one of the stories, the next one starts. You do get rewarded though after half of the book the stories make sense and interlock nicely.

Will pick up another Mitchell soon. This is a great writer.

Loosely connected short stories that wrap around or are “nested.” (Matryoshka dolls are specifically called out in one of the stories.)

Some of them are more fun to read than others; “Letters from Zedelghem,” “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” and “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” were the most entertaining. The first one because of the self delusional and self-destructive nature of the character and the other two because they were just great stories in their own way. The central story, “Sloosha's Crossin' an' Evrythin' After,' ‘ was a challenge because of the dialect.

Mitchell is certainly talented. He wrote each story in their respective style and voice convincingly.

If you're really into books where a fancy, non-traditional structure is used, I can recommend The Islanders by Christopher Priest, Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, and 4-3-2-1 by Paul Auster.

The last section, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” got a little preachy at the end when Adam wrote out the message in his journal, basically that humans have to believe we can rise above the predatory and selfish. If you'd been reading the book this far, you probably already got that point as it is present in some way or other in each story with varying degrees of subtlety.

“Spent the fortnight gone in the music room,” writes Robert Frobisher in a letter to Rufus Sixsmith, “reworking my year's fragments into a ‘sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in its own language of key, scale and colour. In the 1st set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the 2nd, each interruption is recontinued, in order.”

The story, structured in six parts, about how this story came to be in the first place. Caught in the middle are some very interesting characters, some more than others, and the world is governed by a definite determinist sense of cosmic fate. Each in its own language and color; all of this is expertly written, even when it's “mediocre”, as in the pulp story that is Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, or The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.

“It is very rare,” writes Philip Hensher for Spectator, “to come across a novel so ruthlessly planned, and yet so unconfined by its formal decisions, so unpredictable in its direction, so convincing even at its strangest, so capable of doing anything to serve its extraordinary ends.” This is an acute observation. The way the stories grow out of and in each other, synecdochically, is masterful. This device is one of my favorites in all art, the means through which the art produced is not only justified but its creation commented on: the Cloud Atlas Sextet; Half-Lives inspires Cavendish to write his story to a screenplay that is later watched by Sonmi-451, whose narrative is later “seen” by Zachry in the orison.

It's brilliantly pieced together, where each layer contained is able to comment on the previous one – Frobisher commenting, for example, that he finds it amusing that Ewing doesn't realize he's being poisoned.

I devoured the book until the story started folding back into itself. Half-Lives and Cavendish were the parts where I saw my excitement wane. Zedelghem and Ewing's Pacific Diaries, however, offered a great sense of climax. The difficulty of writing this kind of prose is unfathomable – the ideas always tend to work as mere ideas, but when put to paper as a narrative, the likelihood of failure exponentially rises.For the most part Mitchell's creation is perfectly capable of avoiding any narrative snares. I want to read this again, and perhaps one day the individual stories from start to finish, just to see the kind of dramatic effect they carry in and of themselves.

5 October,
2014

This is a very unusual book.

It is made up of several separate stories, each utterly different in style and setting, that each end halfway through their narrative, only to be concluded in reverse order.

The opening story is written as the journal of a 19th century gentleman travelling through the Pacific Islands. This story breaks halfway through and we are presented with a series of letters from an aspiring composer in 1920s Belgium, who discovers and reads the Pacific Journal. The sequence of letters is broken off and we find the opening to a 1970 crime drama-novel in which we follow an intrepid reporter who, among other things finds, among the affects of a murder victim, the 1920s letters. This sequence continues, each story shedding light on the one that went before. There really is something for everyone here.

You may have heard a movie was made of this book. My advice – watch the trailer as it really gives the feel for the book...then go read the book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWnAqFyaQ5s

While you can just sit back and enjoy the humour, action and romance, there is a point to it all. This book really makes you think. Here is a section from the 19th Century Pacific Journal that I really loved because it is so beautiful and so true - I've edited it to remove plot/character sensitive stuff (ie. it's spoiler-free).

“ If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a Colosseum of confrontation, exploitation and bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being...You and I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage and our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?

Why? Because of this:- one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Is this the entropy written within our nature?

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth and claw, if we believe divers races and creeds can share this world...if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable and the riches of the Earth and it's Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make come to pass. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.

A life spent shaping a world I want my child to inherit, not one I fear my child shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth living...

I can hear my father-in-law's response... “He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain and his family must pay it with him! Only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!”

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”

This is a troublesome book to rate. It definitely proved to me that I really like Mitchell's writing, in particular when he goes “insufferable Frobisher”, but unlike Bone Clocks where i felt the whole was better with the parts I was not convinced of the same after finishing this book. I actually enjoyed the movie which i watched a week after finishing the book and it did clarify many points for me.

A phenomenal read. I'm a big fan of stories within stories, and this book's interwoven narrative is great fun to puzzle out. My favorite was certainly an Orison of Sonmi-451. I admit I had trouble at the beginning, and it took my a while to get the feel of what Mitchell was going for, but once I was a couple stories deep, I couldn't put the book down. My only criticism is that the warnings for modern society (especially in the Sonmi chapters which I forgive if only because I love a good robot rebellion), can feel a bit heavy-handed. The wealth of story more than makes up for the occasionally preachy tone.

I'm at a loss to put this in a genre. The Sonmi and Zachary chapters are science fiction, Ewing and Frobisher are historical fiction, the Luisa Rey and Timothy Cavendish are just straight up modern fiction. Something for everyone and I hope the upcoming movie does it justice. Tom Hanks is way too old to play Zachary though meaning they've rewritten that whole storyline. Doesn't fill me with faith.

Six loosely-intertwined stories, arranged like a Matryoshka doll, and spanning a period of centuries. The gimmick (which Mitchell has one of his characters call out as gimmicky!) is admittedly clever, but the complete lack of interesting, relatable characters or engaging plot starts to drag after the first few chapters.

This book came close to 5 stars, but i couldn't quite bring myself to do it. Then on the last page Mitchell blew past a cardinal that I can't really forgive him for. He started preaching at me. Probably the main theme of the book is the constancy of humans trying to dominate other humans. More succinctly it was an exploration of Nietzsche's “will to power”. This was shown from story to story with the nested novella's, but usually with one exception (ie, one person in each story who stood up against, or became enlightened enough to move past the will to power). All of this was fairly easily picked up throughout the book (in fact it wasn't that subtle at all), but at the very last page he literally spells this out for the reader. The last lines of the book are something to the effect of “everything you can do in this life is nothing but a drop in the ocean, but then what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?” This was in reference to Adam Eweing's impending life as an abolishionist in pre-civil war USA. Not only was the last line full of cheese, but any reader who could make all the way through the book would have known what Mitchell was driving at, and to have him state it so blatantly ruined the effect of the rest of the book, and substantially cheapened the experience over all.

In summary. Good book, clever ideas and use of various voices. The sermon at the end ruined the message it was trying to preach.

I definitely enjoyed this book. As a huge fan of “If on a winter's night a traveler” by Italo Calvino, the idea of interrupted stories is not a bad one for me. And what a perk to get to see them finished. The nested nature of the second halves was elegant and enjoyable. I wrestled with whether I would classify this book as “important” as some have said. It's themes are well expressed and its issues well defined but rarely was I shocked by them. However I was always entertained enough by the stories not to have minded. And then there was Robert Frobisher. Without spoiling anything, I can only say the end of his story moved me. And provoked new thoughts in me. And I feel, was important. And that's not to take away from the other stories which are magnificent. It's a book well worth reading.

Slavery comes in many forms. Cloud Atlas takes a harsh look at some of the ways we humans have found to dominate others: physical subjugation is the most well-known, but there are many present-day aspects we don't see.... or like to pretend we don't see.Hard to get into, but once it grabbed me (~100 pages in) I couldn't put it down. Many of my hot-button issues: bullies, treachery, corporatism, freedom. Homages to [b:Flowers for Algernon 18373 Flowers for Algernon Daniel Keyes http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327870353s/18373.jpg 3337594] and [b:One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 332613 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1348083651s/332613.jpg 2100252] and perhaps even the [b:Aeneid 12914 The Aeneid Virgil http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1349032842s/12914.jpg 288738]. Multiple works in one, disparate voices woven together in a sometimes-jarring but overall satisfying way.I read Cloud Atlas before watching the trailer. I'm glad I did: Hollywood appears to have latched onto the interconnectedness theme, the (literal) story arc, a gimmick I found effective but merely as a storytelling device. Not as a focus. And the reincarnation hoohaw, well, I took that as a wink to the reader; the trailer makes it more prominent than I think it deserves. I hope the film producers aren't missing the point. Or perhaps I'm the one who didn't get it? Maybe it is a story of reincarnation and spaceships and explosions and chases? Am I seeing shapes where there are none? Maybe I should sip some McWine and stop thinking so much.

Executive Summary: I went back and forth on rating this a 3 or 4 (In fact I slept on it). I decided to settle on a 3. I liked this book. In fact I rather enjoyed a few of the stories quite a bit. I just didn't LOVE this book.

This is a book that makes you think. In my opinion though, it made me think too much, and didn't allow me to simply be swept up in the enjoyment of it. I think that's what kept it from being a “Really Like” rather than a “Like”

I will say to anyone struggling to start this book, try to give it to the halfway point, it's worth it.

Full Review

I read this for my book club, though if they hadn't read it, I would have on my own. It's not in my recent wheelhouse of Fantasy (and to a lesser degree Sci-Fi). I'll admit that I hadn't heard of it before seeing it was the basis for the new Wachowskis film.

It's a series of short stories that tie together with underlying themes. This is the kind of book that can lead to deep philosophical discussion. I generally don't like that.

I enjoy books that challenge my thinking or leave me to ponder, but usually prefer reading for escapism. I feel that I'd have to read this book multiple times to fully grasp everything. Some people may look at that as a positive. I on the other-hand have too many other books to read, to consider re-reading.

Maybe through discussion I'll come to a better understanding. I generally consider myself to be an intelligent person, but this is the sort of book that makes me feel dumb.

I enjoyed 5/6 stories. I didn't particularly care for the first: The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing. It's style/story really made this book both start and end slow.

My favorite stories were actually the 2 with the female protagonists: An Orison of Sonmi~451 and Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery.

I did like how each story not only changed time periods, but it changed both it's style and it's “genre”. At the same time there are certain themes throughout that tie things together. The changes could be jarring at first, but once I got into the next story a little it was fine.

This book started off really slowly for me. Once I got into the later stories (Luisa Rey onwards) and through the Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After, the second half of the book just flew by.

As I think on this book/discuss it more and end up raising my rating some. We'll see. I'm also curious to see how the movie adaption works out.

Pros: brilliant writing, a set of interconnected stories with thought provoking messages

Con: each story is interrupted to tell the first half of the next, when you get back to it you've forgotten minor details that are important in understanding the novel as a whole

Cloud Atlas is a novel told through six interconnected stories. For example, the musician of the second story is reading the journal written by the man in the first. And the reporter of the third story reads the letters written by the musician and listens to his music. Each protagonist also bears a comet birthmark between their collarbones and shoulder blades, giving the idea that they might be the same person, living over and over again.

The novel begins with The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing. He's a notary on his way back to America from delivering papers to a client's heir in Australia. His ship has stopped at an island to resupply, and there Adam makes the acquaintance of Doctor Henry Goose.

In the second story a disinherited English musician ingratiates himself into a ailing Belgium's home, intent on helping this man finish his musical works, and bettering his own position.

Half-Lives: The First Luisa Ray Mystery shows her meeting a scientist working on a new atomic energy plant, and discovers that this so called safe energy might not be so safe after all.

I won't detail the other stories as it's fun discovering what comes next. My favourite of the novel however, was An Orison of Sonmi-451. It's basically a science fiction story showing how commercialism has overtaken the world and had resonances of Soylent Green, 1984 and Battle Royale. In fact, this is a novel that on the whole, reads easier if you're well versed in literature. I recognized a few other references, but I'm sure I missed a lot of others.

And as the stories start completing themselves, messages of when you save the lives of others you're really saving your own and how our actions, big or small, shape the world around us - even if we don't live to see the effects, come to the fore.

Ultimately, it's a fabulous novel. If you like thinking about the books you read, I'd highly recommend picking this one up.

I so wanted to love that book since I enjoyed the movie. I was waiting for more connections between the stories, to better understand what I did not in the movie... but no! It didn't happen. But what happened was I enjoyed a couple of storylines and had to find ways to keep me awake during others.

If Mitchell wanted to show that people are linked and that more things change more they are the same, he could have done it in way less than 500 pages!

I began losing interest about halfway through, because this book has an interesting but simple premise. Six overlapping narratives, each being cut off by the next, tell the story of a single soul throughout its many lives. I was about to give up on it because of the extra effort the book required of me to translate the entirely original language of Sloosha's Crossing, but towards the end something wonderful happens. As each story ends, the characters join us on the readers' side of the fourth wall and engage the previous narrative, resulting in an avalanche of ideas thrusting us back into the past in the most natural way possible. The thought behind this book is amazing, and many of the ideas hinted at in Mitchell's previous works are made (perhaps too) obvious here. Each narrative's big idea seems to fit perfectly inside the next one, so the seemingly schlocky structure works ridiculously well. This novel is a catapult cranked back to the past, ready to shoot you to the future, and the best part is the trip back. I highly recommend it.