Cloud Atlas

After the mistake with The
Cloud Atlas, I put the correct book on hold at the library and picked
it up last week. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell came
highly recommended by several members of AskMe. I made an effort to
spend my week with it and so read large chunks of it at a time. The
book has six stories. The first halves of five stories are told in
the first part, then the sixth story, and then each story is finished
going in the reverse order. The first story takes place on a ship
around 1850s and it’s the journal of a notary traveling in the
Pacific. This was the hardest story for me to get through. I had a
hard time with the language and the character. It got a bit better
towards the end of the first half but I knew the book would get
better so I kept going.

The second story takes place in 1930’s and it’s about a musician
exchanging letters with a scientist friend of his while he works with
a maestro. I enjoyed this story very much and found it easy to read
with entertaining characters. The third story is about a newspaper
journalist who discovers a plot to a corporate coverup that could
cause a disaster and it involves the scientist from the second story.
The fourth story is about a book publisher who gets signed into a
retirement institution against his will. The fifth one is a sci-fi
story about a cloned human who is part of a scientific project. And
the final story takes place in post-apocalyptic Hawaii. I wasn’t
crazy about the last story either but loved the other four. Each
story briefly mentions the previous one and there are tones of
reincarnation and strong moral lessons in each story. The writing is
forced in some parts but great in others. Overall, I found it to be a
fascinating book and I want to read more of his work.

Here’s what one reviewer says about the book, “Here is not only the
academic pessimism of Marx, Hobbes and Nietzsche but also the
frightening portents of Aldous Huxley and the linguistic daring of
Anthony Burgess. Here, too, are Melville’s maritime tableaux, the
mordant satire of Kingsley Amis and, in the voice of Robert Frobisher
— Mitchell’s most poignant and fully realized character — the
unmistakable ghost of Paul Bowles. Here is a veritable film festival
of unembarrassed cinematic references and inspirations, from “Soylent
Green” to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to “The Graduate” to the
postwar comedies of England’s Ealing Studios. Here is an obviously
sincere affection for the oft-maligned genres of mystery, science
fiction and fantasy.”