Cloud Atlas: A Novel (Modern Library )

by David Mitchell

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future—from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction
 
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize
 
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, to an inglorious present-day England, to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok, and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.
 
But the story doesn’t end even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.
 
As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

• ISBN10: 0375507256
• ISBN13: 9780375507250
• Publish Date: 17 August 2004 (first published 1 March 2004)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 528
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780375507250

Reviews

[empressbrooke]

Was expecting something much grander than what I ended up getting, based on the overwhelmingly enthusiastic reviews. I found it curious and interesting but not exactly compelling. The impression I was left with was that so much time was spent on the cleverness of the structure that not much was done with it, content-wise. I liked some of the individual stories much more than the others, and thought it was unfortunate that the beginning was such a boring slog - I really dreaded looping back around to the second half of that one at the very end.

[clq]

This is a very impressive book. I didn't think it was quite as good as it was impressive, but I can't deny it... I'm impressed.
The book is a number of short stories of which all but the last are interrupted in the middle. Once the last short story is finished, the book makes its way back through the end of the stories. As it turns out, all of the stories are somehow connected.
What impressed me the most about the book was how incredibly different, yet very well done, the short stories were. An unfortunate consequence of this was that I found myself liking some of the stories very much indeed, and getting a bit bored by others. The links between the stories are mostly rather clever and very well done, but become somewhat tenuous on a few occasions.
Overall, I really liked almost exactly four sixths of this book. And one of the sixths, a story set in a future dystopia, left me wanting much more.
I didn't quite love this book, but I really liked it. It made me think about things, covering serious issues such as politics, religion, morals, and so on, but didn't take itself too seriously, and also served up a bunch of good, irreverent, fun.

[brokentune]

Well, well, well. Cloud Atlas had been on my reading list for a long time, but when a trip half way around the world came up it suddenly seemed the right time to get started on it.

Is it the best book ever written? Nope. Will it translate easily onto screen and be understood by anyone who hasn't read the book? Probably, not.

Nevertheless, I do like short stories and cliff hangers. When starting the book I could not immediately warm to the characters (apart from Adam Ewing), but after a couple of days I found myself still thinking about the book and wanted to read on. And this despite the resonances of other books / films in the stories - even despite the regurgitation of the Erin-Brokovich-theme.

Maybe it is because of the contrived connections that I enjoyed the stories or maybe it is because of the emphasis of diversity between the stories, but it made for an easy read - and sometimes I do want to switch off the cynic in me that keeps shouting "it has been done before - so why waste time on it" and just go with the story.

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

Cloud Atlas is a really hard book to review; it starts off as a Journal circa 1850 documenting a voyage home from the Chatham Islands, then it’s a series of letters from a 1930’s English musician to a Belgium composer, then a journalist from 1975 investigating for a novel that will blow the whistle on a new nuclear power plant , a 21st century publisher is fleeing from gangsters in a movie dramatization, a dystopian future story told from genetically-engineered clone’s perspective and finally the post-apocalyptic future where technology is all whipped out. Confusing? Well this book does all come together in to make Cloud Atlas a truly interesting book to read but I don’t think it worked as intended.

I think author David Mitchell is too clever for his own good in this book. The stories do all come together and he really shows off by writing each section in the best genre style to suit what is happening but he is just doing too much in this book. I feel like I’m just starting to get invested in the story of one protagonist and then Mitchell jumps to the next one without any sense of resolution. Sure he does return to each story a second time around but by then I feel like it’s too late for me.

David Mitchell really flexes his literary muscles in the book and he is a wonderful write but there is so much happening in this book and I never felt like he achieve what he was hoping for. I’m not sure cutting from six to three or four story arcs would have helped the book but it might have helped the reader become more invested. I particularly liked the thriller style of the investigative journalist and that gangster story line of the publisher but when their story is just getting exciting it’s all over and we have to move on to the next one.

Cloud Atlas is an interesting, clever book but this doesn’t make it a good book; I enjoyed parts of it and other parts infuriated me. I will say I’m glad to have read it before the movie adaptation is released but it’s not something I ever want to revisit again. I get that he is trying to do a novel about evolution or reincarnation; as each protagonist bares the same birth mark but that element of the book never really went anywhere. I know some people really love this book but I felt like it was too much of a show off. I’d like to read a David Mitchell book where he sticks to one genre instead of all of them.

[jamiereadthis]

Mitchell did the next-to-impossible: wrote in invented dialects and still kept my interest. Normally that’s one of my least favorite things; here, it was a puzzlebook of good things.