Cloud Cuckoo Land

A gorgeously rich weave of apparently wholly disconnected stories across multiple places in multiple centuries; they are in fact all beautifully and heart-breakingly connected by one fragment of Greek manuscript. Like so many people, I loved All the Light We Cannot See - but I thought this was even better. Almost certainly the best novel I read in 2024; perhaps the best in several years.

Over the years I’ve read hundreds, maybe thousands of books. Many of them have moved me, stretched me, entertained me, but there are only a few I wandered into and realized early on that I was not going to get out of this one unchanged. These were books that transformed me and the way I saw the world: Tolkien’s books, LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a few others. And now, Cloud Cuckoo Land.

There is no need to laud the stunning inventiveness of… show more.

Over the years, I’ve read hundreds, maybe thousands of books. Many of them have moved, stretched, and entertained me, but there are only a few I wandered into and realized early on that I would not get out of this one unchanged.

The author's inventiveness is astonishing, managing to create not one new world we inhabit but three, all deftly interconnected by the unlikely thread of a simple fable passed from generation to generation. Perhaps most striking to me is the sheer power of the book, its capacity to take us places and share lives we would otherwise never dreamed… show more.

I challenged myself by listening to Cloud Cuckoo Land and pondered keeping up with extremely diverse plots and story threads. And yet, I discovered a thrill ride that traversed the past, present, and future! I employed the five senses—sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste—with illustrative descriptions and vivid, vulnerable characters that kept my imagination on full tilt.

I learned that I don’t have to love the characters when I’m empathetic and understanding of their weaknesses, defects, and personal history of suffering and loss. I didn’t miss a beat with all the twists and turns, and a tapestry emerged from divergent… show more.

A play within a play, a book within a book, may be one of the oldest tricks in the book. Doerr’s book (which also contains fragments of an ancient text of the same name by one Antonius Diogenes) infuses this familiar trope with new scope, pathos, humor, and profundity.

It is a story about the past, the present, the future, and two beautiful twin bulls named Tree and Moonlight; I think this book contains it all.

Doerr makes this narrative juggling act seem easy, shifting from fifteenth-century Constantinople to a world-containing spaceship as easily as he moved me from laughter… show more.

I love the way Doerr weaves together the stories of children in three different eras and countries. The common thread is the myth of a Greek shepherd, Aethon, and his adventures as he seeks to arrive in a fictional land where there is no pain. 

The novel is about wonderful but under-appreciated children, their passion for things that matter (like learning, like family, like other living creatures), and their determination to find meaning and joy in the bewildering, painful, and often senseless world.

Anthony Doerr is one of the most evocative writers I know – I loved All the Light We Cannot See and this one shows the same ability to conjure up incredible vignettes from across time and space, from the hare-lipped boy pressganged with his beloved oxen into moving a giant cannon for the Ottoman sultan’s assault on Constantinople to a suburban library on modern-day Idaho where kids are staging a play during a snowstorm, or into the future on a space ship bound for a new colony.

Doerr does all this effortlessly, in a series of short passages that immediately… show more.

It’s impossible to know where you are going when you start this book and impossible not to have taken the path once you get to the end.

That’s the incredible power of Doerr’s intricate, tender, magisterial braid of seemingly unconnected stories over millennia. The characters are powerfully drawn, and you want to stay with them despite the tragedies they encounter. A truly magical read. 

I was recommended this novel by a friend because it is partly about the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 which is something that I am particularly interested in.

It turned out, in fact, to have three interwoven plotlines: Constantinople 1453, Idaho in the 21st century and a spacecraft somewhere in the future, all linked by one long-lost ancient Greek text. Strangely enough, while I enjoyed the sections about Constantinople, I liked the dysfunctional teenager in Idaho and the inquisitive child in outer space even more. Perhaps because they took me into areas that were completely new: I have been to… show more.

Anthony Doerr’s masterpiece follows three sets of characters in three different time periods in three different settings.

The common thread is a book they are all reading—the ancient story of Aethon, a boy who wishes to become a bird and fly. It is a visionary tale as much about the desperation of confinement as it is about metamorphosis. About growing wings and rising above the mundane into the quixotic.

The visionary elements in this book include the timelessness of story and the awakening (and indomitability) of the higher spirit. It illustrates that, were it not for layers upon layers of… show more.