Cloud Atlas: A Novel

The English Writer David Mitchell wrote a novel entitled Cloud Atlas. Mitchell was fascinated by “Italo Calvino’s 1979 slim postmodern classic, "If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler," which William Weaver translated. I had never read anything like it" (Mitchell 514). Mitchell writes, “Calvino’s parlor game of a novel blew my bookish teenage mind. It switched genres multiple times. It treats structure as an element of narrative comparable to plot, character, ideas, and style. It made me wonder: Could undiscovered structures still roam the literary wild? Could I find one and write a book with a structure that nobody, from Daniel Defoe to Danielle Steel, had ever deployed?” (Mitchell 514-515). Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler, differs significantly from Cloud Atlas. Cloud Atlas is also unique. Mitchell’s book is made up of six novellas. These novellas are “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” [this novella is written in the style of a seafaring memoir of the 19th Century as such by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.], “Letters from Zedelghem”[this novella is written in a series of letters in the style of “1930s Oxbridge English” (Mitchell 517)], “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery” [this novella is written in the style of “mass-market paperback” known as an ““airport thriller”” (Mitchell 518)], “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” [this novella is supposed to be comedy written in the style which was influenced by the self-presentation of a particular type of “roguish vanity publisher” (Mitchell 518). This novella was also influenced by eighteenth-century novels by Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett (Mitchell 519)], and “An Orison of Sonmi-451” [this novella is a dystopian story influenced by the work of Yevgeny Zamyatin (Mitchell 519)]. Each of these novellas is divided into two parts. The first part of these novellas ends on a cliffhanger. The sixth novella is “Sloosha's Crossin' an' Evrythin' After.” "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Evrythin' After” is not divided into two parts. “Sloosha's Crossin' an' Evrythin' After” is set in post-apocalyptic Hawaii. Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker influenced this novella. Mitchell writes this novel “is set in what was once the English country of Kent, two millennia after a nuclear war erased our society and returned humanity to the Iron Age” (Mitchell 520). Mitchell writes, “The language of Hoban’s novel is our English, degraded into a future Chaucerian dialect” (Mitchell 520). “Sloosha's Crossin' an' Evrythin' After” was also influenced by the work of Ursula K. Le Guin. Mitchell’s novel, Cloud Atlas, was also influenced by many other works. Each of these six novellas is linked by a common thread (Mitchell 522-524). The novel's title comes from a piece entitled Cloud – Parts I-III by the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. Mitchell liked the paradox of the title and thought it reflected the theme of meeting “a person for the first time and noticing an illogical certainty that I’m always going to know them” (Mitchell 526). Mitchell combined these six novellas in Cloud Atlas to create a unique novel. Works Cited: Calvino, Italo.1981. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, Incorporating. Mitchell, David. 2024. “Afterword: A Confluence of Clouds.” In Cloud Atlas. Pages 513-525. New York: Penguin Random House, LLC. Kindle. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. 2015. We. Translated by Mirra Ginsburg. New York: ‎ Harper Voyager.

Story-telling and characterization are the strengths here. Literary fiction where I encountered the literary form in various avatars. Each tale is crisply told. Perhaps the best of them, for me, was the fourth voice, that of Timothy Cavendish. It's trapped in its own adversity but is humorously told. Each narrative voice tells a tale you could put your trust in.
Would have no qualms revisiting this one.

Rereading this book, I maintain that this book is fun and clever, though not in an obscure, hard to understand way. It’s clever in that it wraps around itself and pokes fun at itself and goes through so many varying styles.

There were parts where I really questioned why he included it, if there wasn’t a better way, but the end almost makes up for it. Almost.

Some have said this book is a revolutionary masterpiece or extraordinarily convoluted. I honestly don’t think it’s either.

Masterful, versatile storytelling that ambitiously entails six novellas spanning through different times, continents, cultures, genres, narrative styles and languages where the main characters in each are reincarnations of each other. There is nothing quite like it that I've read before. David Mitchell's work here is undoubtedly that of a literary genius in creativity and writing. It is awe inspiring and manages to have recurrent themes in each story and an overall philosophical message of humanity's power struggle, ethics around enslavement, predator-prey chain, etc.

Now, the reason why I do not give this book 5 stars is that if you hold each of the six novellas independently, they aren't too remarkable, some of them are especially weak. The thin thread tying their plots to coherence seems to be in place just for gimmick's sake and for the same reason, the core substance of this book gets drowned for me in unnecessary details. So even though I was highly impressed by it and appreciate it very much, I will likely not be carrying any of it or its characters with me for long.

I really enjoyed this book. I was confused by the way the first couple of stories ended so abruptly, but when I began to realize that they were tied together by a very thin wire I knew that it would all come together, eventually. It's a good book for discussion as it leaves much unanswered.