Cloud Cuckoo Land
Review of novel by Anthony Doerr
This wild tale rides piggy-back on Homer and Antonius Diogenes, a little-known author who wrote a romance in the second century. That tale has only survived as references in other works. In this novel, large fragments from that book have been recently uncovered and deciphered. he title is usually translated “The Wonders Beyond Thule. Doerr calls it Cloud Cuckoo Land. A third of the action takes place during the fall of Constantinople in 1452–53, when a damaged copy of the book barely survives. Another third takes place in Idaho 2000–2020, culminating in a terrorist act at a town library, when five elementary school kids are rehearsing a play based on a translation of that book. The rest of the book seems to be set in the distant future on a multi-generational space expedition to an exoplanet, a trip expected to take over 500 years.
The narrative acrobatics work surprisingly well. Normally, at best, I read about a hundred pages of a novel a day. But I read the 623 pages of this one in less than 24 hours. I couldn’t stop reading.
Here are a few of the many passages that caught my eye:
The Greek word muthos is “a delicate, mutable word… it can suggest something false and true at the same time…” p. 51
a book is “a way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.” p. 51
“mythical lands, which means that they aren’t real places…though at other times the librarians say that the old myths can be more true than truths, so maybe they are real places after all?” p. 76
“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. Non of us ever has.” pp. 212–213
“That’s what the gods do,” he says, “they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.” pp. 249–250
“Eventually I grew weary: I had traveled so far, yet was no closer to my destination that when I began. I was a fish inside a sea inside a bigger fish inside a bigger sea, and I wondered if the world itself swam also inside the belly of a much greater fish, all of us fish inside fish inside fish, and then, tired of so much wondering, I shut my scaly eyes and slept…” p. 305
in translating Homer “To select one word was to commit to a single path when the maze contains thousands.” p. 460
“Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don’t know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we’re doomed to fail. But int he attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language, that was, he said, the bet kind of fool’s errand.” p. 462
“Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.” p. 474
“But what’s so beautiful about a foo, he says, is that a fool never knows when to give up.” p. 484
“But as he reconstructs Zeon’s translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to e part of the problem is to be human…the world as it is is enough.” p. 568
“… all times and all stories being one and the same in the end.” p. 581
Going over these passages that I highlighted, I realize that I love this book not for its plot or its characters, but for its wisdom.
