Book Review: Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr (Doerr)

 

Can a story survive centuries? Can it find relevance across the ages? That’s what I wondered as I read Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr.

 

As one character states, books rarely survive. He says books are resting places for memories of people who have lived before. “But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths or worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safe-guarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second breath.” The fable of Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes entails how Aethon attempts to turn into a bird. He wishes to fly to Cloud Cuckoo Land where there is no suffering, only plenty of food and happiness. The story is woven throughout the book, with a short snip-it here, and another page there.

Thirteen-year-old Anna in Constantinople who works with nuns in an embroidery house 500 years ago, but who is really a thief on the side, uncovers a copy of the old Aethon fable. Anna does this while attempting to get money to pay for her ill sister Maria. Also touched by the story is Omeir, a teenage boy with a cleft palate who cared for oxen for the army invading Constantinople. Then there is Zeno who during the Korean war was a prisoner of war. But now during 2020 is in his 80s, and is practicing a play based on Aethon that he translated with five children. They find themselves in the present time in the same library with a teenage bomber named Seymore who has an axe to grind, or actually a library to blow up. And finally to the teenager, Konstance, traveling through space to a new planet she will never actually reach before she dies. To keep herself occupied, Konstance writes down the fable on scraps of paper as she is quarantined alone aboard her ship.

 

Did I love this book? Hmm. I’m not sure. I don’t regret the time reading it. It took a little time to put together all the storylines, but it was an intelligent book with a story to tell. It had a deeper meaning to make the reader ponder, and it was cleverly written. At the end I thought, “aha. Now I see how it all fits together.”

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, or The Midnight Library by Matthew Haig.)

 

( official Cloud Cuckoo Land web site ) | ( official Anthony Doerr web site )

 

Recommended by Cindy K.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

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