Cloud Cuckoo Land

Book Summary

Anthony Doerr is an institution. He captures the minds of his readers. You may even start to sound like him in your head. Or out of your head. His first novel, About Grace, caused The New York Times to emit this sentence: “there’s a rapture with nature expressed in prose that sings off the page; an infinitely subtle algebra of resonance and sympathy between minds, lives, objects, light, senses, weather.” You can find more reviews like these festooning Doerr’s website.

Cloud Cuckoo Land, too, contains prose that sings off the page. More than anything, the way Cloud Cuckoo Land is written makes the novel a world for you, the reader, to traverse, almost like a video game. You will remain, ultimately, on that world’s beautiful surface, with the purpose of learning the book’s lessons. You must negotiate the strange topology of Cloud Cuckoo Land’s many characters and multiple timelines. Maybe you trip on some Ancient Greek phrases that stick up like roots out of a hiking trail.

“Cloud Cuckoo Land” is a Greek phrase, originally from Aristophanes’ play The Birds. Cloud Cuckoo Land’s “lessons” that I mention above are really just one lesson. Doerr believes, fervently, in the power of literature: that “a book is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.” Cloud Cuckoo Land rewrites the Greek classics to show how they might be preserved.

In an author’s note, Doerr says Cloud Cuckoo Land is a “paean to books,” meaning a song or story of books’ triumph. The novel tells how a fictional Ancient Greek book Doerr invents miraculously survives, in various forms, across history. So books do triumph in Cloud Cuckoo Land! Or maybe just Doerr’s book does.

Our guiding discussion question for Cloud Cuckoo Land: does it allow you, the reader, to complete its mission for “books”? Meaning: does Cloud Cuckoo Land instill a greater love of “books” in you? Does it make you want to reach back into the past yourself and try to read the Odyssey again, say? Or another classic? Or is Cloud Cuckoo Land enough?

Read our Cloud Cuckoo Land discussion questions below to get a handle on that broader question.

Book club questions for Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

1. What is the plot of this book? Who is the main character? These are boring questions! Welcome to English class! But, interesting ones to ask here, perhaps, because of Cloud Cuckoo Land's structure. Many stories, many points of view, many locations all are going on at once.

Where does the momentum of this book that keeps you turning pages come from?

2. I compared Cloud Cuckoo Land to a video game. Video game protagonists are left somewhat undefined, so the player can map their own identity onto the protagonist's blank canvas.

Do the characters in Cloud Cuckoo Land have distinct personalities? Do they speak differently? Think differently?

3. Cloud Cuckoo Land invests a huge amount of your readerly attention in details. Think of how it describes Constantinople, or the Ottoman army's process of moving the cannons. Doerr clearly did his research.

Does detail immerse you in the story or take the place of the story? Were there things you wanted more detail about that were left out?

4. Greek culture is extremely well-known in the West. Many of us can name characters from Greek myths or Greek literature off the top of our heads. Do it now with your book club! Put people on the spot! This isn't just social hour!

Anyway, my point is that many other cultures we don't know so well have ancient literatures too. China and India immediately come to mind. Why do you think Doerr chose Greece, once again, to stand in for humanity's voice? He's not the first to do that by any means.

What do we learn about Greece or Greek art specifically from Cloud Cuckoo Land?

5. How, in Cloud Cuckoo Land, are climate change and the fragility of books related?

Here's one excerpt from Cloud Cuckoo Land that might help. Omeir thinks: "Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one--that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes."

What is being lost in both these cases?

6. Father figures seem to be either ideally perfect or totally absent in Cloud Cuckoo Land. This even goes back to Doerr's earlier novel, All the Light We Cannot See, where a father builds a scale model of a city so his blind daughter can find her way around.

"Paternalistic" is a word with both good and bad overtones. Many, many times, the story of Aethon is told in Cloud Cuckoo Land by a parent figure to a child.

Are bedtime stories and literature the same thing?

7. How seriously does Cloud Cuckoo Land take itself? Would it be flattered or offended by a comparison to Dan Brown's intricate history-spanning narratives like The Da Vinci Code? How would likening it to a historical adventure like Indiana Jones go over? Or a historical drama like Gladiator?

The story of Aethon certainly contains moments of comedy, but what are we meant to laugh at specifically in Cloud Cuckoo Land, and what is sacred?

8. Is Cloud Cuckoo Land interesting, or is it afraid to be boring? Let me explain.

Konstance skims the academic articles she discovers about what ink Aethon's story was written in (although she later needs them to make ink of her own); Zeno has the most success translating when he stops doing research. There's a general vibe in Cloud Cuckoo Land of literary critics or classicists being old white men with bow ties having stupid arguments. Books, by contrast, are about the heart.

You're in a book club. Did literature need to be rescued from your English teachers for you to enjoy it? Do you think Cloud Cuckoo Land will make your experience reading other books in the future more relaxed, more meaningful?

9. Technology, and computing, in Cloud Cuckoo Land, seem to be associated with lies about Earth. As in: those tactile moments in the Atlas where Konstance can uncover the "truths" Seymour programmed in, as opposed to the glossy tech corporation-sponsored facade. Or the Sybil hiding the truth about the Argos.

My question is: if literature is supposed to be about facing the truth of living conditions at "home," nostos, another key word for Cloud Cuckoo Land, why does this book travel across so many times and places? Can we ever feel familiar, in a home-like manner, with so many different cultures and places?

10. If question 9 is unclear, let's put it this way: where do we arrive by the end of Cloud Cuckoo Land? What have we learned? The rain in Greenland seems to be both redemptive and terribly wrong, like it doesn't belong in the Arctic. Is storytelling the only thing of value in human experience?

What does the end of Cloud Cuckoo Land, or the novel as a whole, make you want to go do?

Cloud Cuckoo Land Book Club Questions PDF

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