Pure Reader’s Delight
A review of Anthony Doerr’s ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’
I first opened Anthony Doerr’s expansive new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, in bed late one night about three weeks ago and couldn’t help sighing in the half-dark of our bedroom as I read. Apparently, after a few minutes, I began chuckling on and off. My poor wife was trying to fall asleep.
After a few more minutes, she asked with amused patience what the heck I was reading. I took a deep breath and told her it was the new Doerr novel, then explained I was beginning to wonder if I should ever try to write a novel again. She shook her head and asked me to read out loud from where I was in the book. Cloud Cuckoo Land is meant to be read out loud like few books we find published today. I kept reading to her well after she fell asleep. I was hooked.
Anthony Doerr has always been an extraordinarily sensual and lyrical writer. From his first collection of stories, The Shell Collector, through his novels About Grace and All the Light We Cannot See, along with the excellent and underrated Memory Wall collection, his descriptions of the physical world and natural phenomena are enticing, delectable, and hypnotic.
Doerr is part of a collection of authors I think of these days as the psycho-environmental school. That group includes, among others, Rick Bass, Joy…
