Book Review: Cloud Cuckoo Land, a Philosophical Love Letter Celebrating the Power of ‘Story’
After several mediocre reads, I was so excited to finally pick up an anticipated read I thoroughly enjoyed! While I loved this book, I can completely see this book not being for everyone. There are a LOT of characters, time jumps, and context switching. It’s vibes, not plot. It’s character driven, and heartbreaking. Doerr doesn’t pull any punches. It brings to life many philosophical quandaries. From environmental challenges, to technological progress, impacts and horrors of war, troubled youth, and how narratives and stories are influential to us all. There’s no big villain to fight other than the decay of time. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a tapestry of everyday humans’ stories and how one story’s thread can survive the ages, and impact their lives in different ways.
Things to know:
Multiple storylines and timelines spread over many hundreds of years
I cried on page 395 (of the paperback)
Reads super quickly as the vignettes for each character are super short throughout
“But books, like people, die too. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a great book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”
This story follows many characters over several hundred years, from the distant past of Constantinople under siege, to the near-distant future on a spaceship headed to a new planet.
And all of them are somehow tied to a fictional Greek story ‘discovered’ on folios, Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, with lots of inspiration taken from “The Golden Ass”.
“…already I have seen things I did not know how to dream.”
Each of our characters are faced with their humanity ending. But it starts with their beginnings. Doerr writes from a child’s mind and perspective and I think this makes incredibly complex topics that much easier to navigate as a reader. The characters, of course, grow up, but you’ve seen their entire journey, albeit a bit out of order. And they all have some sort of relationship with a Librarian, and discover the power of stories.
“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 ant-hills.”
From the walls of an impenetrable ancient city to a double-wide in rural Idaho, to a future world run by AI, I was invested in these characters, their worlds, and I could not put this book down.
If you’re a fan of character driven stories, philosophical reads that truly make you think, and books dedicated to the preservation of stories, this might be your next favorite read.
“…the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.”
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Many thanks to Scribner for sending me a copy of the paperback in exchange for an honest review.
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