Cloud Cuckoo Land
When first I heard Boise, Idaho’s literary rock star, Pulitzer-winner Anthony Doerr, was at long last coming out with a new novel, I was elated. His All the Light We Cannot See (2014) was touching and brilliant. It won a Pulitzer for fiction. I loved how he played with technology (radio waves) and blindness in the novel (all the light we cannot see, indeed). I also admired his thoughtful development of adolescent main characters on both sides of WWII’s whose coming-of-age created such empathy for us readers. Needless to say, I promptly preordered a signed copy of this new book (there are perks to living in the same town as a Pulitzer-winning author) from our local independent bookstore.
When I dove into Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021) earlier this month, I was surprised to find myself in a sci-fi future aboard an interplanetary ship in the novel’s prologue. I had purposely read little about CCL before picking up my copy. I did know there were a number of plotlines with their own characters that spanned many centuries of time, but I was a taken aback by its opening genre: science fiction. After the Prologue, however, CCL leaves Konstance (the adolescent main character aboard the spaceship, Argos) and introduces the titular Cloud Cuckoo Land text credited to Antonius Diogenes (note his initials) and translated by Zeno Ninis in 2020. (Metafiction, anyone?) After a paragraph of fictional text from antiquity, CCL jumps genre again to become contemporary literary fiction set in a fictional McCall, Idaho (Lakeport in the book) in the year 2020 told in alternating perspectives between an elderly man (Zeno, yes the same Zeno mentioned previously) and a troubled teen (Seymour). Finally in section two, the novel hops genre once again to historical fiction set in 15th-century Constantinople and begins developing another adolescent girl character in Anna to be contrasted by adolescent boy, Omeir. The first fifty pages were honestly a stretch, but Doerr had my undivided attention even before I picked up the book; he had won it when he published All the Light We Cannot See. I knew I could trust him as a reader to weave a tale (or five) that somehow comes together to create a contemplative, mind-expanding tapestry about humanity, community, and this place we call home. Days later, as I finished the novel, I felt a jubilance that he had succeeded in this far-flung endeavor to create one story out of many, bridging centuries, characters, and literary genre to make a profound statement about where we are as humans in this unique moment.
A few days after I finished CCL, my husband and I had the pleasure of attending The Cabin’s Reading and Conversation with Anthony Doerr at Boise State’s beautiful Morrison Center for the Performing Arts. (The Cabin is a fantastic nonprofit for readers and writers in Boise, ID that also happens to be my employer; when I am not writing and reviewing books, I work as a teaching writer in elementary schools around Treasure Valley.) After a touching introduction by a local songwriter and dear friend of the author’s, Tony Doerr took the stage with a wildly clever powerpoint to guide him, and walked all of us dedicated readers, friends, and community members through the process that led him to the creation of Cloud Cuckoo Land. To say the evening was a delight is an understatement. For an hour and a half, Doerr led all of us through a ten-point progression that began with “Billionaires” (think: the race to space among some of the world’s richest men) and ended with “Hope.” Along the way, he touched on the “Overview Effect” (the shift in outlook common to many who observe our blue planet from space), technologies that protect and disrupt (“Walls,” “Cannons,” and “Books”), “Plinko” (yes, a la The Price is Right), “Cloud Cuckoo Land” (the text that survives from antiquity), “the World” (and the interconnectedness of all things), and “Rhizomes.” Needless to say, it was an insightful and fascinating presentation that shone light onto the process that led Doerr out of the alternating perspectives in WWII-era All The Light We Cannot See to the walls of 15th-century Constantinople as a new technology emerged that would disrupt a long held seat of power, art, and commerce.
I found it interesting that while the story that would become Cloud Cuckoo Land began in Doerr’s imagination as the story of Omeir and Anna on opposite sides of Constantinople’s walls in 1453, their story was last that Doerr introduced as he builds the scaffolding for his wildly ambitious project in the novel’s first few chapters. After his presentation, however, I better understood why he made those choices and how one story led into the next and touched the one following, just as a plinko coin falls rather haphazardly from where contestants drop it at the top to where it lands at the bottom. In Cloud Cuckoo Land it is, of course, the ancient novel that Doerr creates based on a reference made in Aristophanes’ The Birds (the quote which serves as CCL’s epigraph) that falls from story to story through the centuries and beyond. And that is the true beauty of this novel, I think; it highlights the delicacy of a physical manuscript and its power (if it survives the centuries) to transform lives regardless of age, year, and nationality when read, cherished, stewarded.
Ultimately, Cloud Cuckoo Land is about the power of stories to transcend readers out of the suffering, the loneliness, the pain that life brings. As one character reflects to another at one point in this novel: “’I know why those librarians read the old stories to you [. . . b]ecause if its told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap’” (191). In fact, this is a theme that percolates in all the subplots even before they touch each other directly. Books and stories relieve readers and listeners alike in moments of anguish; as such, they may be thought to contain some magic, healing property. Perhaps, however, I think Doerr means to suggest that stories remind us that we are tiny, our lives are tiny, our pain is tiny, but that we are a part of something much more complex and connected. Books, it seems, provide us some variation (by no means as intensely felt, perhaps) of the overview effect experienced by many who have observed earth from space. As such, stewardship of books through the ages—by scribes and librarians, poor and affluent, learnéd and illiterate individuals—is a wildly important, even lifesaving labor. Any of us who have been in low places—suffering either physical or emotional pain—can attest that stories do, indeed, allow us to “slip the trap” of sorrow and struggles “for as long as the story lasts.”
As the Constantinople story developed, I recognized the same literary devices that had made All the Light so powerful. Anna is Christian living inside Constantinople’s defensive walls; Omeir is Muslim living outside. As in All the Light, one of these characters suffers a physical deformity. Outside, more global forces (paralleling the rise of Fuhrer and the Nazi party in All the Light) promise to interweave Anna and Omeir’s stories. Cloud Cuckoo Land uses the literary devices that Doerr mastered in All the Light as a stepping stone to create something much more complicated and universal.
As Doerr studied the impenetrable walls of medieval Constantinople he recognized the protective power those walls offered to libraries. Protected from barbarian invasion, these libraries copied and stewarded ancient texts from generation to generation, keeping those stories and manuscripts alive in the world. This multigenerational care ensured that these texts were available for Western Europe to rediscover after Constantinople’s fall in the 15th century, giving way to the Renaissance. Ultimately, that stewardship became Doerr’s story.
To tease out the impact, he developed contemporary characters in a fictionalized version of his home state of Idaho, as well as a future that relies on A.I. (“Sybil”) and an intergalactic spaceship for survival. He inserts plenty of other themes as well: the Korean War, environmental destruction in the name of development, community, varying stories of God, pandemic, and more. (He even somehow references “omicron” affiliated with a virus! A reference, I believe, to a different pandemic novel he read a decade ago, the name of which I failed to note.) Cloud Cuckoo Land includes a bit of everything both in terms of its genres and themes. Its message echoes notions of the “Overview Effect” that Doerr raised in his presentation I attended. We are, indeed, all miniscule beings on a tiny, blue planet floating in an expansive space; we are all in it together. Period.
If you enjoy books that tackle ambitious projects, play with historical trends and technologies, include inspiring nature writing, dig into themes of contemporary import, and end hopefully, I encourage you to pick up Cloud Cuckoo Land. Then keep reading. It really does, in my opinion, succeed in connecting a five-pointed pentacle of a tale in eloquent prose. By the end, if you are anything like me, you will find it both suspenseful and compulsively readable, not to mention beautifully crafted and satisfyingly hopeful.
Bibliography:
Doerr, Anthony. Cloud Cuckoo Land. Scribner: 2021.
A Few Great Passages:
“He makes Frisbees from plates of bark, pole-vaults over puddles, rolls rocks down slopes, befriends a pileated woodpecker. There’s a living ponderosa in those woods as big as a school bus stood on end with an osprey nest at the very top, and an aspen grove whose leaves sound like rain on water. And every second or third day, Trustyfriend is there, on his branch in his skeleton tree, blinking out at this dominion like a benevolent god, listening as hard as any creature has ever listened” (100).
“Snow flows past the windows. An ejected bullet casing smokes by the dictionary stand. Minerals of panic glitter in the air. Jean Jacques Rousseau, in a green-spined harcover that’s right over there, one shelf away, JC179.R, said: You are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!” (127).
“‘Do you know the story of Noah and his sons, child? How they filled their ship with everything to start the world anew? For a thousand years your city, this crumbling capital’—he waves a hand toward a window—‘was like that ark. Only instead of two of every living creature, do you know what the good Lord stacked inside this ship?’ [. . .] ‘Books.’ The scribe smiles. ‘And in our tale of Noah and the ship of books, can you guess what is the flood?’ [. . . ] ‘Time. Day after day, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world. The manuscript you brought us before? That was written by Aelian, a learned man who lived at the time of the Caesars. For it to reach us in this room, in this hour, the lines within it had to survive a dozen centuries. A scribe had to copy it, and a second scribe, decades later, had to recopy that copy, transform it from a scroll to a codex, and long after the second scribe’s bones were in the earth, a third came along and recopied it again, and all this time the book was being hunted. One bad-tempered abbot, one clumsy friar, one invading barbarian, an overturned candle, a hungry worm—and all those centuries are undone” (171-72).
“‘The things that look fixed in the world, child—mountains, wealth, empires—their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives. From the perspective of God, cities like this come and go like anthills’” (172).
“‘Antiquity was invented to be the bread of librarians and schoolmasters’” (190).
“For as long as we have been a species, whether with medicine or technology, by gathering power, by embarking on journeys, or by telling stories, we humans have tried to defeat death. None of us ever has” (212-13; 267).
“‘Boil the words you already know down to their bones [. . .] and usually you will find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up’” (247).
“‘On Earth, when I was a boy, most everybody got sick. Rashes, funny little fevers. All the unmodified people got sick every now and then. It’s part of being human. We think of viruses as evil but in reality few are. Life usually seeks to cooperate, no fight’” (267).
“‘Some stories [. . .] can be both false and true at the same time’” (317).
“Why can’t healing happen as quickly as wounding? You twist an ankle, break a bone—you can be hurt in a heartbeat. Hour by hour, week by week, year by year, the cells in your body labor to remake themselves the way they were the instant before your injury. But even then you’re never the same: not quite” (334).Tale
“How do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live?” (378).
“‘Take the tragedies alone [. . .] we know that at least one thousand of them were written and performed in Greek theaters in the fifth century B.C. You know how many we have left? Thirty-two. Seven of Aeschylus’s eighty-one. Seven of Sophocles’s one hundred and twenty-three. Aristophanes wrote forty comedies that we know of –we have eleven, not all them complete. [. . .] When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it [. . .] or a single line quoted in somebody else’s text, the potential of what’s lost haunts you. It’s like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become’” (403).
“That’s what the gods do, they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come. Not now, gods. Not tonight” (439).
“He should have risked more. It has taken him his whole life to accept himself, and he is surprised to understand that now that he can, he does not long for one more year, one more month: eighty-six years has been enough. In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you’re this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world” (542).
“’The world as it is is enough’” (568).
