Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

August 10, 2024 1:54 PM

Postmodernist novel with 6 "nested" narratives, each in a differing literary style, exploring the meaning of existence.

Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, 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.

The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

posted by miss-lapin (19 comments total)

I love David Mitchell, and this was the book that introduced me to him.
The second time I read CA I read each of the parts in total, rather than following the structure of the book, and just last year after reading Utopia Avenue for the first time I went back and read all of his books again in order, trying to note the connected bits among the characters and places. It was quite an experience, and of course CA is the cornerstone in the middle of it all.
Needless to say CA has a special place in my heart, although I personally rate TTA of JDZ and Black Swan Green above it as personal favorites.
posted by OHenryPacey at 6:04 PM on August 10 [3 favorites]

I'm very curious what your thoughts are on how reading the narrative sections each in its entirety rather than as ordered in the book impacted your experience. I remember when I got to the second part of the narratives that some of them I had go back and see where they left off because I didn't remember exactly.
posted by miss-lapin at 7:49 PM on August 10

Me too! Do tell. I remember being utterly absorbed by CA but also being aware that I had dropped details along the way. Happily I had read it as paper book where it is more feasible to stick a finger in a spot and then riffle around.
posted by janell at 8:48 PM on August 10 [1 favorite]

I think this is a brilliant book, a classic, my introduction to Mitchell and still one of my favorites, and at the same time a book where some parts work much better than others.

It's a bold experiment and not all of it is perfect, but some of it is, and the whole is also more than the sum of its parts.
posted by kyrademon at 4:20 AM on August 11 [5 favorites]

The fact that it has such a sad and hopeless ending is redeemed by that ending being in the middle. Usually we think of a better future redeeming past mistakes but this book makes a case that humanity is more than the sum of its choices.
posted by rikschell at 4:59 AM on August 11 [1 favorite]

I also had the "I've gotten to part 2 of this story but forgot how part 1 ended" and read through this with extra bookmarks saving those places. Also, I think having seen the film just prior helped me keep the stories straight. (I don't know why the film got called "confusing", compared to the book!)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:03 AM on August 11

I'll be the dissenter, I guess--this to me is a classic example of a literary writer picking up SF tropes as if they were new and exciting but not actually doing anything new with them. It's not a bad book, it's a book I would certainly give to a fourteen-year-old who'd come up on genre and could use some nudging out into the wider world, but overall I was not dazzled.
posted by praemunire at 10:34 AM on August 11 [4 favorites]

That’s fair, although I didn’t read it then (and wouldn’t read it now) to rate it as an example of its genre (ie lit-fic dipping toes into sf) or any genre. That’s just as valid an approach, it just isn’t mine.
posted by janell at 1:42 PM on August 11 [1 favorite]

I'm very curious what your thoughts are on how reading the narrative sections each in its entirety rather than as ordered in the book impacted your experience. I remember when I got to the second part of the narratives that some of them I had go back and see where they left off because I didn't remember exactly.

IIRC, and please , i've done a complete reread since then, I think my thoughts were that it made CA seem more like Ghostwritten and Number9 Dream, i.e. a series sequential short stories that were connected by a force or beings that move through time on a longer cycle than normal mortal humans. Of course this idea is fleshed out in The Bone Clocks, and I knew that by the time I was rereading.

I think i thought it would make the stories more coherent or that I would remember the details more clearly, but I don't think it made that much difference.
posted by OHenryPacey at 4:26 PM on August 11 [1 favorite]

I am well aware of the book but have yet to read it. I find this thread both edifying and disturbing.
posted by y2karl at 4:43 PM on August 11

This book blew my mind. A mind blown previously by other books. I've been afraid to re-read it, worried the feeling of reading it the first time will be overwritten.
posted by cocoagirl at 4:50 PM on August 11 [1 favorite]

This book blew my mind. A mind blown previously by other books. I've been afraid to re-read it, worried the feeling of reading it the first time will be overwritten.
posted by cocoagirl at 4:50 PM on August 11

I whole heartedly recommend reading the rest of his oeuvre, they share a universe and are subtly connected, and can also be mindblowing.
posted by OHenryPacey at 9:00 PM on August 11 [3 favorites]

I'll be the dissenter, I guess--this to me is a classic example of a literary writer picking up SF tropes as if they were new and exciting but not actually doing anything new with them.

I loathed this book in college because it seemed to have such frank contempt for those genres. It felt like the epitome of attempting to satirize or critique a genre you had little familiarity for and crucially, no love for. But I admit my read may have been uncharitable because I was disgusted by his treatment of queer characters.

But I was in my early 20s then. Maybe I’d have a different reaction now. I can also see myself at that age having the exact same reaction to House of Leaves, which I read in graduate school and is one of my favorite books in existence.
posted by brook horse at 6:43 AM on August 12 [2 favorites]

I don't know if it read like a satire to me, but it did feel a little...condescending...towards its tropes, for sure.

But, like you, I read it some time ago. I don't know how it would read in 2024.
posted by praemunire at 10:07 AM on August 12

one of the things I really enjoy about Mitchell's works is that he's perfectly content to bounce between narrators (in Cloud Atlas, and in other books), and when he does, or EVEN when he does, he inhabits his narrators so richly - he writes with such an impeccable voice. I always feel like I'm so perfectly in the vivid heads of his characters.

That said, the more I read his work, the more I find he sometimes admires the ends of his paragraphs a bit too much.
posted by entropone at 12:16 PM on August 12 [4 favorites]

I feel like talking about the nesting is a spolier. The absolute joy I had when past the half way mark the pattern began to emerge was a rare experience.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 4:20 PM on August 16

I took the description of "nested" narratives from one of the blurbs on the back cover of my book. If you would like the description changed, I'm guessing a mod can do so, but I think something that is listed on the back cover blurbs as a "spoiler" is going a bit far.
posted by miss-lapin at 5:01 PM on August 16 [2 favorites]

Put me in the 'didn't quite click' club. The wafting echoes of other lives were too intangibly ephemeral for me to care about the slight intertextuality (normally one of my favourite things), and the individual stories themselves seemed strangely lackluster in the telling, though I concur that Mitchell's use of voice is stellar.

By comparison, The Thousand Autumns gave me terrible dust-in-the-eyes when I finished it, and I enjoyed the Bone Clocks a great deal as well, enough that I'm looking forward to picking up a few more of his, even if this one was a swing and a miss for me.
posted by Sparx at 10:18 PM on August 19

I have much to say about the book (and the movie), but I just want to point out how Mitchell makes the dead center story of the book about the hike to the top of Mauna Loa (Kea?). So reading the first half is climbing a mountain and the second half is going down the mountain. Not an accident, I think.
posted by zardoz at 6:28 AM on October 3 [2 favorites]