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Cloud Atlas Signed

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This goes down as one of my favorite books of the year.

Story in a nutshell (without spoilers):

Cloud Atlas consists of 6 [slightly] interlinking stories, told from the viewpoint of 6 different individuals at different points in time. The first story consists of the letters of Adam Ewing, and his fateful trip on a ship in the Pacific in the mid 1850's.

From there we go to the second story, which takes place in the 1930's and is told from the viewpoint of Robert Frobisher, a talented disinherited muscial composer who visits an infirm maestro and his family in an attempt to get work and advantage. His story is told through his letters to a scientist friend/lover named Rufus Sixsmith.

The next story takes place in the 1970's, and has to do with reporter Luisa Rey, and her exposure of corporate malfeasance that could result in disaster. Sixsmith is a scientist there, and plays an important part of the story.

Next, (and my personal favorite), is the story of Timothy Cavendish, in present day England, and the tale of his (mis) adventures as a book publisher. Utterly hilarious and poignant.

The second to last story becomes a sci/fi read of future corporate controlled Korea, complete with cloned humans. And the final story is one that takes place in post apocalyptic Hawaii.

And then we go back to each story, in opposite order, and put the pieces together and complete the cliffhanger endings from the first half.

I think this book is brilliant. I often found myself rereading various sections because I found them so ingenius and profound. I think David Mitchell is one of the most talented new writers around.

My only complaint? Sometimes I think that the author was a bit taken with his own writing, and was too clever for his own good. At points the writing became tedious, although never to the point that I wanted to throw in the towel.

Note...I personally had trouble getting through chapter one, but then I was hooked by chapter two. If you find yourself getting impatient, hang in there.

Highly recommended, with the reservations expressed above.

Cloud Atlas is a series of six interlocked tales - encompassing a wide array of eras, locales, and genres -in which the protagonist in each story is impacted in some significant manner by the tale told in the preceding section (or the following section, as the book's tales wind out in reverse order in the second half).

So...the stories we tell, and the sense we make of things, have meaning. I'm not sure if Mitchell intended this a straightforward(ish) reincarnation tale, or if the larger theme has something to do with the idea that the stories we tell survive us, perhaps at least partially define what it means to be human, or enable us to retain some vestige of humanity in the face of forces (imperialism, slavery, corportization, or just our own worst impulses) designed to strip that away. The centerpiece of the book does take place in a future world in which civilization has been literally reduced to the ability to remember, and relay that rememberance forward in a sort of verbal folklore.

This is a good, moving, well-written, and entertaining book. One's patience for it is probably dependent on one's degree of exposure to genre fiction - I think someone approaching this from the perspective of classic "literary fiction" might find it off-putting - part of the fun here is the manner in which Mitchell plays with the tropes and cliche of various genres (sci-fi, hardboiled crime fiction, belles lettres, etc) across the six tales. That said, there's lots of "high literary" enjoyment to be had here - the writing is stellar, and there's lots of good thematic linkage (boats, bridges, musical themes, etc.) that add quite a bit of depth.

I would also like to dispel the notion that this is a "difficult" book in the style of David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, etc. It is just extraordinarily fun to read. The novel's overarching themes are challenging and profound, but it is also a page-turner of the highest order, and in that sense a real celebration of the various genres it exploits and parodies. Highly recommended.

I've just finished this phenomenal book by David Mitchell, a present from a friend who recommended I read it immediately.

So glad I did. It has aspects of the dystopian future scenarios that I so loved in The Handmaid's Tale, Dune, and The Sparrow coupled with recent past and long-past stories. It addresses basic questions of where we are going as a species, following one soul reincarnated through six lives. That soul is on a trajectory that traces the basic human desire for domination, the often-myopic thinking of the powerful, and the fate of the powerless. It is on a grand scale, beautifully told, and quite enthralling.

The structure is what had me hooked to start--it is a mirror of itself. Rough breakdown: The first and twelfth chapters are "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," a story of subterfuge, gullibility, and poison on a ship bound from the South Seas to London.

Second and tenth chapters are epistolary, taking place in 1939 through the correspondence of Frobisher--a bit of a cad and scammer--to his friend Sixsmith. Frobisher is a brilliant musician but the family shame, in the process of writing his great masterpiece while apprenticing under a syphilitic genius composer.

Third and ninth chapters follow the efforts of investigative journalist Luisa Rey to uncover serious evil at a soon-to-be opened nuclear facility in the mid-70s. One of her primary sources in the mystery Sixsmith, Frobisher's correspondent from the last chapter, but now 35 years older.

Fourth and eighth chapters are the disturbing and frequently funny tales of Timothy Cavendish, a bumbling, arrogant, failure of a publisher in London during roughly our current times, maybe a little later.

Fifth and seventh chapter are my favorites--here Mitchell hits the sci-fi, dystopian future part with full gusto. Sonmi~451 is a human clone of sorts, grown in a womb tank (like all "fabricants," as they are called) and born into service to Papa Song Company. The world as we read about it is governed and shaped around corporate structures and the economy is based on the slave labor of these fabricants.

This chapter is her testimony about her ascension from fabricant to full human thinking and feeling. She observes the world outside Papa Song restaurant and ventures into the broader culture (a scary place, indeed).

I don't do these chapters justice. Sonmi~451 weaves a wonderful tale about this future world, using neologisms and appropriated words that make perfect sense based on how we are using language now. The links and connections to life in the 21st century make it compelling.

The peak chapter, "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After," describes a fallen world, one that has collapsed in on itself leaving the vast majority of humans in a new Dark Age where violence and predatory actions are the way of those who want to live very long. The strong dominate and destroy the weak. The protagonist, a goat herder, refers to the "Civ'lized days before the fall when people was ler'nd." It's written in this dialect and he tells a hard-wrought tale of lawless times.

But it's all believable. Mitchell never stretches his story in any part of the book beyond what we can imagine. He begins with a tale of dishonesty in the 1800s and spins it into the future, following some of our baser instincts to their logical, if stunning and frightening, conclusion.

This book is complicated and ambitious--it's a little over 500 pages of teeny, tiny print and plot lines that crisscross over chapters, lives, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of years.

The reincarnation theme is only hinted at in the vaguest of terms--it's not even a central part of the book, but it does weave the narrative thread from character to character. I can't begin to fathom how many Post-it notes and spreadsheets it took Mitchell to keep track of all this.

Cloud Atlas was the most thought-provoking novel I've read in years and I found myself meditating on the lives of the characters long after I'd put it down and moved onto something else. Extraordinary work.

There are several levels at which one can appreciate David Mitchell's fantastic novel, Cloud Atlas, and like the novel's narrative, they unfold out of each other. The first level is the novel's construction. Cloud Atlas is made up of six narratives. Each narrative begins, is interrupted by the next, and then they resume in opposite order. Like a child opening a matrioshka doll, the reader delves deeper and deeper into Mitchell's world, and is sent careening back out. This device might sound difficult or confusing, but it is fascinating, especially as echoes of earlier narratives appear in the later ones. The book becomes a treasure hunt - an active exploration.

The second level is Mitchell's artistry. Each narrative is told in a different style - diary entries, letters, a mystery, a farce, an interview, and a tale told around a fire. Mitchell's ability to mimic each voice is so perfect that it is difficult to credit that he is the ventriloquist behind these six souls. He captures perfectly the vivid and memorable protagonists (and, in all but one case, narrators) of his six stories. At turns witty, hilarious and heartbreaking, they remain indelible in the reader's mind, thanks to Mitchell's facility with language.

Up until this point it might be possible to dismiss Cloud Atlas as clever and fun, but Mitchell truly has something to say along with a clever way of saying it. Mitchell touches on so many themes and ideas in this relatively short book. Cloud Atlas is a kaleidescopic view of kindness and cruely, civilization and barbarism, enslavement and release. Through it all, the power of art, of history and of faith endures.

Cloud Atlas combines three qualities that any devoted reader should be looking for - clever and challenging narrative, excellent writing, and heart. I highly recommend it to any reader looking for an unusual, thought-provoking book.

This is one book where I honestly can't wait for the movie version, as author David Mitchell has a cinematic sense of narrative that juggles with time like a Quentin Tarantino and sprawls vividly amid exotic locations like a David Lean. This would be an impressive achievement even for the most accomplished writer, much less one as relatively new to the literary scene as Mitchell, as he interweaves six individual stories, each one set in a unique time and locale, into amazingly, one cohesive novel. The discrete stories are told in parts and sometimes out of order, but they tie together through intersections, coincidences and the clever notion that every central character is a reincarnation of a previous character. Perhaps that concept borders on being contrived, but somehow the ploy works beautifully due to Mitchell's full-blooded commitment to his themes. Spanning times, continents and cultures, Mitchell focuses on the follies that would subjugate humanity - slavery, corporate greed, and of nationalistic politics.

The utterly nonlinear novel begins with the 18th-century diary of Adam Ewing, a San Francisco notary who is traveling by ship in the South Pacific (story #1). Story #2 follows in 1931 when a sexually indecisive, aspiring composer named Robert Frobisher serves as amanuensis to an older, more accomplished composer. Story #3 jumps to the 1970's where a reporter named Luisa Rey investigates a cover-up at a nuclear reactor (think of Karen Silkwood), and Story #4 focuses on a 60-ish book editor named Tim Cavendish who finds himself accidentally imprisoned in a home for the elderly. A near-future vision of Korea is the setting of story #5 where a genetically engineered ''fabricant'' named Sonmi-451 is interrogated for her crime of wanting to be fully human, and finally, story #6, the most devastating of all, a Hawaiian ruminates on a post-apocalyptic life. Mitchell is particularly strong in describing the Hawaiian landscape, populated by primitives, tribal warfare and brutal violence. Somni returns here as God for the tribesman protagonist Zachry. Then all the unfinished stories are completed in backward order, a creative stroke at once maddening and fulfilling.

Through birth, death and rebirth, Mitchell raises some tough questions that give the reader pause. This is a dense work driven by an appropriately dark vision, and one could certainly get caught up in the plot convolutions if a full commitment is not made to the audacious concept he has presented here. The title of this book is apt, as this is a map of ever-changing clouds alternately revealing and hiding a world that evolves on common paths. Make sure to concentrate when you read this complex book because it's a winner for the patient among us.

It's hard to know where to start with this book, so I'll do so by saying that of the 130 or so works of fiction I've read so far this year, this is easily among the best. I suppose that's because Mitchell effortlessly blends a number of fictional genres I happen to like, including historical, science, neo-noir, dytopia, farce, and comic. This is done by structuring the book as six separate novellas, each of which is cut in half. The first half of the book presents the first half of each story, in chronological order. Then, the middle of the book is the "bridge" story, set in a post-apocalyptic Hawaii, after which, the second of half of the five other stories unravel in reverse chronological order. To a certain extent this is merely a gimmicky way of presenting six novellas (one character, a composer who is arranging a six-part piece with the same title and structure as the book even admits as much, "Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished."), but the recurring themes of the mankind's capacity for evil and the man's inhumanity to man and the transience of civilization are what bind it all together.

The first story is "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing", and appears as the journal of a San Francisco lawyer in the 1850s who has been traveling in search of a legatee and is now en route home. A stop in the Chatham Islands (near New Zealand), opens his eyes to the both innate cruelty of both native peoples and the colonial system which professes to be saving them. His account, with clear echoes of Melville and Conrad, is found in the library of an aging composer living in Belgium in the 1930s -- which is where the second story takes place. Its unearther is bisexual composer Robert Frobisher, who has insinuated himself into the luxurious home of the decaying blind genius in order to hide out from his numerous creditors. His trials and tribulations are recounted via hilarious scathing letters to an old Cambridge friend which then turn up in the third storyline.

This takes the form of a '70s pulp thriller starring a Latina investigative journalist looking into malfeasance at a California nuclear plant. This "Luisa Rey Investigation" is a very capable thriller which turns up as a manuscript in the offices of a contemporary London vanity publisher. The publisher's story is Kafkaesque farce, as he is incarcerated by person or persons unknown in a retirement home/prison. His attempts to learn who put him there and to escape appear as a film watched by a genetically engineered McDonald's waitress in a dystopic futuristic Korea. This is a very well-realized story worthy of any sci-fi anthology, with overt nods to films ranging from "Blade Runner" to "Soylent Green."

The central bridging story, a far-future tale of a boy's post-apocalyptic survival on a Hawaiian island is definitely the weakest, requiring the most heavy lifting on the reader's part due to the constructed slang. In it, a peaceable farmer/herder community are continually at risk from warlike neighbors. An envoy arrives from a technologically advanced group, potentially upsetting the delicate balance of power. This storyline clearly binds it to "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" in Mitchell's attempt to show how human behavior simply cycles back around to established modes. If this all sounds bafflingly complex, it really isn't. What it is is a set of completely immersive stories with distinctive settings, characters, and styles, but common themes. Mitchell is at ease across genre, time, space, gender, race, you name it. The stories can be read for individual enjoyment or one can track the progression of various recurring cues and behaviors as an exploration of the corrupting and dehumanizing nature of power. Either way, this is an amazing -- and entertaining -- work.

This is the 31st book I've read on my Kindle and while I have no complaints about the actual story, the translationn into the e-reader format is poor at best. there is missing punctuation and missing spaces between words on almost every page. This makes an already challenging piece of literature even more challenging to read. I wish there was a more stringent editing process in place.

Whether you preferred number9dream or Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas is the best of both worlds as Mitchell's most ambitious and polished work to date. Instead of the loosely related, chronolocigally concurrent stories of Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas uses stories that are temporally dispersed, instead of just geographically so, and for the most part Mitchell manages to avoid the biggest fault of Ghostwritten, the stories all have a powerful and recognizable impact on their flanking stories without seeming so contrived it takes away from the story. The story of an American Notary crossing the Pacific in the 1860's has an impact on the story (not just plot-wise, but thematically was well) of a Belgian composer in the 1930's which effects the story of the 1975 story of a Californian investigative journalist who recurs in the next story of an elderly editor in conteporary London who has an influence on the story of a Korean genetically engineered slave in the near future who in turn figues prominently in the central, post-apocalyptic world of young Hawaiian tribesman. (How's that for a run-on?) However, let me sneak in a word on the novel's structure: unline Ghostwritten, in which each story was told in its entirety at once, each story in Cloud Atlas is divided right down the middle into two halves. The first half of each story is told in ascending chronological order. Then, when we get to the post-apocalyptic story, it is told in its entirety before the other five stories finish themselves up in reverse chronological order. Hence, we start in the 1860's, and we end in the 1860's. Each story is nested inside the chronologically earlier ones, and each contain the chronologically later ones inside. This structure is in no way a mere gimmick. Mitchell uses it to produce quite an effect.

During the chronologically progressive first half of the stories, Michell begins to unfold for the reader that what is happening in each story is contributing, seemingly inexoriably, to the bleak future of mankind. Mitchell seems to say that, given the prevalent greed in human nature, that's where we're going to end up, no matter what. Hence, he sets up the theme that figures so prominently in the end of Ghostwritten: the role of human agency in the face of the seemingly contradictory facts of human nature. However, nothing in any of Mitchell's novels is quite that simple. As the stories begin to unwind, we begin to see the role choice has played in all this, and we see the hope for mankind's future that each story's second half produces after the seeming condemnation of the first half of the book. We get to see the impact each character's life has on the lives of the other characters. It's something of a surreal experience to read.

Now, I also said that Cloud Atlas Also includes the best parts of number9dream. While the overall structure and driving force of the novel is descended from Ghostwritten, the novel's lighter, more playful side descends from number9dream. Like Mitchell's second novel, Cloud Atlas is very playful as far as what is real and what isn't. Again, it's up to the reader to decide what to believe and how exactly each episode relates to those other episodes surrounding it, and then what kind of impact that level of reality in that story has on the novel as a whole. It also incorporates the exciting aura of Mitchells narration and language found in number9dream along with philosophical moments that are out of place in the real world, but fit right into the context of Mitchell's novel as such passages often do into the works of Don Delillo. We also get the depth of character in at least four out of these six stories that we get with Eji in number9dream that Ghostwritten didn't have time for. These characters have history, emotion, vulnerability, and the ability to adapt and change.

Is this the greatest novel ever? No. As you can see, I give it four stars. It's amazing, and I wouldn't be saddened to see it get nominated for (or win) the next Booker, but Mitchell has not yet written his masterpiece. Often, he still comes across as heavy-handed, especially in his criticism of colonialism (massive running theme) and human nature. (For him, they are rather blurred together--something he tends to do much more often than many other British Post-Colonialist writers.) Also, occasionally he telegraphs a plot twist, gives us a not-quite-satisfying climax, or wraps up a story a little too quickly. These faults are most evident in the sixth story, but they occasionally become evident in almost every story to some extent with the notable exception of the story of the Belgian composer (this is the story that really ties the whole novel together, and is probably the single best thing Mitchell has ever written).

But overall, I highly recommend this book to previous Mitchell fans-it's definately his most well-rounded book-and I would also recommend this to fans of authors such as Jeanette Winterson, Don Delillo, Salman Rushdie, and others of their ilk. If you didn't much care for either of Mitchell's books, I don't really think this one will change your opinion.

I thought David Mitchell was immensely precocious and talented when I read Ghostwritten, though not many of my friends were as taken with it as I was. Having just finished Cloud Atlas, I am thrilled to report that --in my opinion-- his promise has been realized -- and in such a brief time. The book is more than an endlessly fascinating puzzle. Each of the six characters and stories interwoven here are riveting from literary, aesthetic and philosophical standpoints as well as being great narrative page-turners. You might think that Mitchell was six different writers - all equally brilliant. This is not quite like anything you have ever read before - a new form and vision for a new century.

I'm enjoying the book, well written, but my comment relates to quality assurance in the Kindle edition I am reading on my iPad. I can't imagine the printed book is in this kind of shape, so I assume there is a big problem with the conversion process to ebook format. There are literally thousands of missing periods, word spaces, and commas, several per "page," along with many spurious line breaks. I've been reading past these, but when sentences are run together I often have to slow down to sort the missing punctuation. THIS IS A DEFECTIVE PRODUCT. The printed book is about the same price; I'd recommend you get that instead. Complaint filed with Random House, for all the good I expect that will do.