Customer Reviews

Book of Clouds

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

From the stunning opening chapter when the narrator, Tatiana, first visits the Berlin Wall and returns years later as she recounts disquieting episodic encounters and adventures that reveal the city's grim past, to her final reckoning decision to return home to Mexico, Chloe Aridjis weaves a gripping, multi-layered and complex story. With a photographer's vivid eye for detail and composition and a writer's gift for keen metaphoric observation, she charges the stark realities of Berlin's landscape with digressive glints - fleeting references to Mexico's ancient cultures and lore, and the poet's lament for modernity's destruction of nature - all the while tracing the intensely alert protagonist's interior perceptions and musings from night to day. Darkness and light become diffused through the novel's dreamlike atmospheric prisms. Ms. Aridjis has achieved a contemporary modernist classic.

Book of Clouds is a novel of remarkable sensitivity, wit, profundity and grace. Chloe Aridjis guides us with poised assurance through the inner landscape of her protagonist, Tatiana, as well as the beguiling strata -- both temporal and spatial -- of Berlin. She writes with intelligence and beauty, limning characters and imagery that linger in the mind. This is an extraordinary and marvelous book, truly the best contemporary novel I have ever read.

I recently came across this debut novel and while reading it was impressed by the fine balance the author strikes between the seriousness of the themes and the playful manner of the prose. Aridjis's sense of humor is wry and understated and at times she conjures up a very particular sense of the Absurd.

The author successfully blurs the line between fact and fiction, creating a female character who appears to share some of her biography but is nonetheless an invention, an unreliable narrator whose vision of reality runs on its own strange and quirky logic.

A slightly surrealistic novel about a young woman's stay in Berlin. Very well written, with only three characters. Some is clearly based on the author's own life. Fine book if you're okay with magical realism. If not, not.

Combining echoes of Marquez' "magical realism" with the ability to bring her characters to life a la Thomas Mann, the debut novel of Chloe Aridjis is astonishingly well done. A portrait of contemporary Berlin, as seen through the eyes of female narrator Tatiana, "Book of Clouds" is startlingly realistic at the same time it surprises the reader at many a turn. If you read only one work of new fiction this year, make it this one!

I was led to this wonderful and surprising novel thanks to a terrific piece by Anis Shivani in the Huffington Post about the insularity of American literature. He mentions Book of Clouds as an exception, being as it is in dialogue with any number of world literary traditions. Echoes of Sebald, Handke and Bernhard are in there for sure. I was really impressed by how layered the narrative was and by the prose, which is deceptively modest, and by the dark, humorous, turbulent atmosphere the author evokes.

Sometimes you end up reading a book you're not in the mood for. Like Mexican dinner when you're craving Thai, it's just not satisfying, even when it's delicious.

That's how I felt about Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis. Though the pacing is a bit slow, it matches the tone perfectly. I read it, dying for something to happen. Anything. In the last chapters, something does happen. I won't tell you what, but I was past caring.

Tatiana, a Mexican expat living in unified Berlin, takes a job typing a noted German historian's dictaphone tapes. Obsessed with Berlin's separate histories during its division, the historian teaches Tatiana about the both halves of the city as she transcribes his notes. Frustrated and intrigued by how little she knows of Berlin's dual identity, Tatiana endeavors to connect to her adopted city and her employer.

Book of Clouds is a quick read, a stunning fictional debut in which the narrator, Tatiana, wanders around Berlin reacting to the people and places she encounters in a highly impressionistic and colorful way.

Chloe Aridjis's writing style is poetic and elegant, and her descriptions of the city and its people are compelling and jarring. It is so refreshing to read a contemporary novel that is not being written in the ubiquitous, Hollywood film style format (plot driven, black and white characters, dialogue heavy). Book of Clouds is real literature, and I recommend it for lovers of the great modernist novels.

"Book of Clouds" is literary-lite, in the extreme. It is written in a very pedestrian, seventh-grade reading level prose. The story (such as it is)is simplistic and shallow, and almost completely lacking in literary invention. I say almost, because it is not until the end of the novel that the reader encounters the only memorable and imaginative scene in the entire novel - an almost magical scene involving clouds. Considering how highly educated the author is, the book is surprisingly benighted, and as such, only a notch above run-of-the-mill "Chick Lit". This novel is not, I repeat, is not on a par with the likes of such truly literary writers as: Duras, or Elfriede Jelinek, or Nathalie Sarraute.

Chloe Aridjis' marvelous first novel is both delicious and haunting. The protagonist, a young Mexican woman living in Berlin, is sensitive to the invisible essences of actions and happenings, as held by the venues where they took place. She also is prone to carefully described sightings of odd characters, particularly in and around public transportation. Her world view, idiosyncratic, dreamy, whimsical, and sometimes surprisingly down to earth, yet always poised on the edge of reality, will charm and fascinate the reader. She is master of the turn of phrase: a squat woman with an umbrella "waddled by like a windup toadstool." A rare and wonderful read.