This book was awesome. I loved the themes of the present’s effect on the future and barbarian vs. savage. Beautifully presented and wonderfully written.

The second half of this book makes the first half’s slog worthwhile. It’s an interesting take on characters from two angles, a bizarre mix of times and styles and contexts. I like the reflections on perception, on good and evil, on history;s role on the future.

Review on Big Dumb Object

True, there’s some styling ‘gimmicks’ in here. But I enjoyed almost all of the book for it’s content too (a couple of sections were less interesting to me than others).

One of those books where when I’d finished I’d wished that someone else I knew had read it too so I could chat to them about it. I felt like there were some big themes that it had compelled me to think about, without ramming them down my throat. Which is nice.

This is diverting enough in its way, but I can’t help but feel its major achievement is one of marketing: how did a book that’s essentially an undistinguished sci-fi novel manage somehow to acquire a reputation as daringly innovative in structure, writing and ideas?

Like a number of contemporary fiction novels (Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake being the most obvious), it’s an irritating example of the literary establishment’s enthusiasm for genre fiction, just so long as it self-identifies as something “worthier”.

This was middling good, but not as mind-blowingly amazing as I was led to believe it would be. More of a quick fun pseudo-sciffy-genre read than anything deeply profound. The structural gimmick was sort of one-trick and overdetermined… when I compare it to other current authors who have intertwined structure and theme and content much more effectively(Powers in Gold Bug Variations, and DFW in Infinite Jest are my gold standards here), it comes up way short. A lot of this was just because there wasn’t much thematic content to flesh out the structural skeleton by comparison… the message was simplistic amd piled on quite thick.

I also could have done without the whole huge section narrated in dialect. At that point, he was just showing/jerking off. Still, the rest of the individual story tracks stood up well on their own, and I really got sucked into several of them. Excellent characterization and interesting world-building all in all. And his polyphony is definitely an impressive feat and fun to read in a playful pomo litgeek way. I’d recommend it, just not burden it with expectations.

Pretty mediocre.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/livredor/94834.html

A few months ago I stumbled on a website called The Morning News that had a really cool idea: A tournament of Books. The idea was to take the best books of 2004, and put them up against each other in a bracket tournament. Think of the NCAA tournament but with books. I was interested in the process and enjoyed watching the bracket whittle it’s way down to an eventual winner: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. After following it’s ascent to the top, I couldn’t very well not read it. If there’s one thing the ol’ dubya-dot knows about me by now, it’s that I’m a nondiscriminating consumer of media. Film, blogs, books, whatever. I love a good yarn and I’m rarely without a novel. So I marked my reading list accordingly, finished Everything is Illuminated, and tackled Cloud Atlas.

Awesome Fucking Novel.

Seriously, I could end the essay right there and you’d know all you need to know about Cloud Atlas, a rollicking journey through time and genre.

It’s that last bit, genre, that really gets me. I think it’s not so atypical to tell a story that moves through time. But Mitchell accomplishes something really special by inhabiting not just time, place, and character, but also genre. Every tale is told in a different way. In a vacuum, each section is completely true to itself and avoids any cheekiness that might arise from such an experiment. Taken together, it becomes irresistibly fun as the reader asks what is this guy going to do next?!

You’re telling me one of the coolest things about this book is form, not content?

Yes and no— Yes, the form itself is loads of fun. The reader follows 6 stories. In the first half, each story is interrupted to make way for the next section. In the second half, we work our way back through each story’s conclusion. One character, a musical composer, writes an orchestral sextet that mirrors the form of the book and describes it thusly:

To be fair, it’s hardly revolutionary, but if it’s gimmicky, the gimmick works.

But like I said, the real joy is in the content and how the substance overlaps in each story. Cloud Atlas tells the story of the same soul who is continually reincarnated through time tracing society from the 1800’s through the modern day, a distant future, and finally a post apocalypse. The overarching story is that of a society that builds itself upon the foundation of slavery, business, and consumerism before coming tumbling down in a presumed anti-technological disaster. Though, sci-fi in concept, it hardly comes off as science fiction much of the time because so much of the book takes place in the past or the present. The first story is told in a Melvillian journal style while the later entries are modern, cheeky, and finally the very best of science fiction. It is a dazzling mastery of not just genre, but an ability to inhabit the soul of Mitchell’s various creations.

In the end, It’s the very best of a Robert Mitchum historical Novel and an Isaac Asimov Science Fiction tale. The only thing is, I never really liked Mitchum or Asimov because those authors, in the works I attempted, never really placed any emphasis on character. Here, character is Mitchell’s primary focus as he traces a soul’s movement through time and story:

Best book I’ve read a long time.

Kazuo Ishiguro recommended Cloud Atlas when I heard him speak in 2005.

This book was incredible; I haven’t read anything quite like it. Really six stories wrapped into one, the switch from one to another and back again is really intriguing. Some transitions were hard for me, but I ended up enjoying all six parts. I hope to read more Mitchell in the future.

Gorgeously written, and unlike many critics I don’t think that Mitchell’s ventriloguism is either hollow or schizophrenic—as much as the novel apes muliple genres, there’s a dominant, unifying voice. However, Cloud Atlas is so similar in both execution and themes to Ghostwritten that it isn’t as impressive as it would be without that earlier novel. Perhaps that’s the trouble with experimentation—while more familiar styles mask their own similarness under convention, the innovator is expected to produce a vastly different work each outing.

gift from Judy