Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
As clouds span the sky, so do souls. The story’s narrators—a reluctant traveller crossing the Pacific in 1850, a disinherited composer scraping by in between the wars in Belgium, a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California, a vanity publisher running from his gangland creditors, a genetically modified restaurant server on death row, and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the end of science and civilization—hear each other’s echoes down the halls of time. David Mitchell’s astonishing third book blurs the lines between language, genre, and time to give a reflection on humanity’s risky will to power and where it might lead.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
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The reader is left to infer meaning from the birthmark from the author’s collection of interconnected vignettes, which all sort of tie in loosely but may not satisfactorily enough to create a sense of fulfilment. There is some amount of scrabbling back to earlier chapters to remind oneself of how the story was left when the stories are divided into interconnected episodes.
Despite the author’s somewhat pessimistic and pessimistic predictions about the future and human nature, the book is nonetheless wonderfully and tenderly written. I enjoy how the writing style transitions from floral 19th-century to modern functionalism.
The book’s six stories are highly intriguing due to the manner they are arranged within it; they resemble a literary Matryoshka doll. A hard-boiled California cop drama from the 1970s coexists with an elegiac tale akin to Herman Melville’s from the 19th century. I truly enjoyed this book, but skip the movie! The protagonist of the 19th-century tale expresses his predictions for the future of humanity, including the possibility of human annihilation. He asserts that if we continue to be overly ambitious or compete with one another instead of working together, civilization will not be able to endure indefinitely without resulting in a catastrophic event.
It is an impressive feat of style and creativity, well-written, original, and not in a way that may turn off a reader. It is a narrative of wonder, the every day, adventure, and life; it is a story of what was and what might have been; it is a story of how people have crossed paths, drifted apart, and then reconnected over the course of generations; and it is a story of loss and redemption. It is a work that approaches the idea of reincarnation seriously and never slacks off.
