Cloud Atlas

by David Stephen Mitchell | Literature & Fiction |
ISBN: 9780375507250 Global Overview for this book
Registered by wingGoryDetailswing of Nashua, New Hampshire USA on 4/12/2023
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2 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by wingGoryDetailswing from Nashua, New Hampshire USA on Wednesday, April 12, 2023
I found this softcover in this Little Free Library in Cambridge MA while dropping off some books of my own, and nabbed it for another release copy.

I've always enjoyed stories that include excerpts from other stories, and/or that involve lost manuscripts re-discovered (lots of M. R. James ghost stories feature that kind of thing). In this case there are six loosely-intertwined stories that take place at very different times and places; the book begins in the middle of one such account and breaks off again without warning, to pick up a century later and on a different continent. When, quite a way into the new story, the new narrator happens to mention the partial manuscript he'd been reading, I realized how the structure worked, and from there it was loads of fun. In addition to seeing how each partial manuscript/film/recording-device is passed along, there are lots of smaller details - I'm sure I missed many, but the ones I spotted made me feel quite pleased with myself. [One character feels a frisson upon walking past a two-hundred-year-old sailing ship - yep, that was the ship that the first story took place on! A garish portrait of the Laughing Cavalier keeps popping up. And the main character of each segment has the same birthmark and - perhaps - the same soul.] One clever bit of typesetting (don't know if it applies to all editions): there's a little cloud-graphic at the top of each page, and as the first half of the book moves towards the future the clouds move to the middle of the page; then, as the stories unravel again, the cloud-graphics move back out to the margins. One can flip the pages and see them drift...

I also loved the fact that each story was so different in style, from the melodrama-on-the-high-seas of the opening tale to the dark humor of "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" to the futuristic nightmare of the Sonmi segment - the sense of place in each one was quite strong, and I could easily imagine being there. I think my favorite tales were the outermost ones, Ewing's and Frobisher's, though as each story was echoed or foreseen or remembered in the others it became harder to think of one without the rest... Very nicely done!

[There's a TV Tropes page for the book that may help explain many of the twists - but it does contain spoilers, not all masked, so read with caution. And there's a 2012 film adaptation that I found ambitious, but not as effective as the novel.]

Journal Entry 2 by wingGoryDetailswing at LFL - Still River Rd (208) in Harvard, Massachusetts USA on Thursday, April 13, 2023

Released 1 yr ago (4/13/2023 UTC) at LFL - Still River Rd (208) in Harvard, Massachusetts USA

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

I left this book in the Little Free Library on this surprisingly warm day; hope someone enjoys it!

[See other recent releases in MA here.]

** Released for the 2023 Movie challenge. **

Journal Entry 3 by enchantingghost at Harvard, Massachusetts USA on Saturday, September 21, 2024
Picked this up in Massachusetts this summer, but hadn't realized it was a book crossing book until I recently started to read it. Sorry for the delay in updating, then, friends!

Journal Entry 4 by enchantingghost at -- Wild, Somewhere In Madison in Madison, Wisconsin USA on Saturday, October 5, 2024

Released 1 mo ago (10/5/2024 UTC) at -- Wild, Somewhere In Madison in Madison, Wisconsin USA

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

In a LFL on Dempsey Road

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