“Because if it’s told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.”ĭoerr’s most recent book lets you slip the trap of life in 2021 (and beyond) by visiting an imagined future and its past – and it sticks with you long after it ends.Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr. “I know why those librarians read the old stories to you,” Rex says. As one character explains to another in Cloud Cuckoo Land: The best fiction also reminds you about the importance of stories in general while taking you far away from realities of actual life. That is what the best fiction does, no matter which shelf you put it on. Their lives intersect, as you think they must, in ways that you don’t see coming and that keep you turning the pages so that you find out the hows and whys. Interwoven into this story’s retelling are an elderly South Dakotan, a young adult South Dakotan, two children in or near 14th-century Constantinople, and a teenager on a generational space ship heading toward a far-off planet. The Cloud Cuckoo Land of the title refers to a (very much fictional) lost and rediscovered ancient Greek manuscript about Aethon, a simple shepherd, who is turned into fish. It is also very much a genre work in the Vonnegut-ian mode, where the genre’s furniture provides a nice seat from which to look at life on Earth.
This is a solid, well-told tale that doesn’t get lost in its own cleverness.
Yet, despite the author’s Pulitzer-winning pedigree, Cloud Cuckoo Land is not pretentious, nor does Doerr show off his writing ability for its own sake. The story tells the truth about books and being a human by looking at both slantwise – and it sticks with you long after you’ve finished it. His voice is clear, strong, and gorgeous.
2021Īnthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is hard to sum up for all of the best reasons.
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