Cloud Cuckoo Land

I absolutely loved All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, so when Cloud Cuckoo Land by the same author was published in September 2021, I was so excited to read it. Then I started reading reviews and the sci-fi, futuristic thread turned me off the book. Years pass. I am looking for something to listen to and my library has an audio of Cloud Cuckoo Land available with no wait. I take the plunge. I fall in love with this book. Why didn't I trust that Doerr would not let me down?

Cloud Cuckoo Land is an ambitious book. There are five distinct story threads, some of which converge, spanning centuries, not including the ancient novel attributed to Antonius Diogenes (a 2nd century Greek author) but actually written by Doerr that connects all five stories and characters.

It is creative, historical, fanciful, mythic, and poignant. My favorite characters were those from the 15th century who witnessed the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire--Anna is a reluctant seamstress who learns to read Greek and unearths the Diogenes manuscript whose story of a shepherd who ultimately makes it to the utopia of Cloud Cuckoo Land. It is this story that provides an arc for each of the other characters--Omeir, a peasant boy in the Ottoman Army; Zeno a Korean War vet who learns Greek and translates the story into English; Seymour, an autistic boy who loves owls and just wants to protect them; and Konstance, a young girl on a spaceship in which she is immigrating to another Earth lightyears away.

I know it sounds crazy, but it was crazy good. It was lovely and thought-provoking. I particularly loved how Doerr connected these various characters together, showing the connection between people, their commonality. Despite their profound differences in time and space and culture, he showed how we are all connected to each other and our world. It was a beautiful message for our troubled times. It lightened my heart, and that is a very good thing.

All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, published in 2014, was last year's high-buzz book.  I seemed to see it reviewed everywhere and my turn for the audiobook finally came up at the library at the end of December after being on the wait list for at least 8 months.

It's one of those books that has two main characters and the narrative alternates between telling their respective stories.  This adds time changing, forward and backward, to the mix, making it a bit disjointed at times, but ultimately it works as the stories find their focus in a common point in time.

In a nutshell, the book tells the story of Marie-Laure, a blind French teenager who flees Nazi-occupied Paris during WWII with her father to the coastal town of Sant-Malo, and Werner Pfenick, a German radio whiz-kid who is recruited into the Nazi Youth organization and specializes in tracking down illegal radio transmitters within the French resistance.

I found many things to like about this book.  I liked the sight and color imagery and themes, the various puzzles (engineering and otherwise) that both Werner and Marie-Laure learn to solve, and the natural science elements including the connection to Jules Verne's 20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

On the downside, I didn't care for the disjointed narrative--I was fine with the two stories being told alternately but the jumping around in time was a bit irritating.  I guess I just like my stories more linear.

Finally, most of my knowledge of WWII is from the Anglo-American perspective, so it was fascinating to read the German and French perspectives.   I'm now ready to dive into The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and I would love to learn more about the French resistance.

And, I decided to read 20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as part of my Back to the Classics challenge for that tricky Sci Fi category.

I love it when one book leads to others.