Finished
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell today at work (not a single customer all day; I used to dream about having jobs like this). What a great freakin' book. It'd be easy to get bogged down in the structure of the work; it's a series of nested stories, each of which references the previous one, which are arranged palindromically, I guess you'd call it, since each ends in a cliffhanger somewhere in the middle, until the story at the center, which completes, and then the stories are reprised and finished, in reverse order, until the book ends with the same story with which it began. But while the structure, which in lesser hands would be downright gimmicky, certainly dominates the reader's attention (and kept at least this reader's attention with the unceasing novelty of a new character, setting, POV, and narrative/dramatic arc every--for lack of a better word--chapter), there are some interesting and insightful themes running through the work (colonialism, violent conquest, historical teleology, the way that words, things, and ideas take on a life of their own) that carry it past the merely gimmicky and into the realm of Literature-with-a-capital-L. And it's fun, too. The proliferation of stories and POV characters allows Mitchell a great deal of room to play (even while the underlying project has all the seriousness one might ask of a work of literature), and the result is an absolute joy to read. Friends of mine have been recommending this book to me for years now, and I'm glad I finally got around to reading it. Especially after
2666, this was just what I needed: just the right blend of levity and gravity in an interesting puzzle of nested narratives each with its own particular flavor and character but that connected to each other in interesting and not always obvious ways. I've also got
Black Swan Green, one of his later books, sitting on my bookshelf, which I hope to read soon, but, alas, will not be able to get to immediately, since I'm going to have to be more targeted in my reading in the immediate future.
Why? you ask. Well, I'm glad you did (which is why I did it for you).
