Cloud Atlas: A Novel (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints..." (more)
Key Phrases: steely gate, ruddy hell, ghastly ordeal, Papa Song, Luisa Rey, Bill Smoke (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At once audacious, dazzling, pretentious and infuriating, Mitchell's third novel weaves history, science, suspense, humor and pathos through six separate but loosely related narratives. Like Mitchell's previous works, Ghostwritten and number9dream (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize), this latest foray relies on a kaleidoscopic plot structure that showcases the author's stylistic virtuosity. Each of the narratives is set in a different time and place, each is written in a different prose style, each is broken off mid-action and brought to conclusion in the second half of the book. Among the volume's most engaging story lines is a witty 1930s-era chronicle, via letters, of a young musician's effort to become an amanuensis for a renowned, blind composer and a hilarious account of a modern-day vanity publisher who is institutionalized by a stroke and plans a madcap escape in order to return to his literary empire (such as it is). Mitchell's ability to throw his voice may remind some readers of David Foster Wallace, though the intermittent hollowness of his ventriloquism frustrates. Still, readers who enjoy the "novel as puzzle" will find much to savor in this original and occasionally very entertaining work.
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From The New Yorker

Mitchell's virtuosic novel presents six narratives that evoke an array of genres, from Melvillean high-seas drama to California noir and dystopian fantasy. There is a naïve clerk on a nineteenth-century Polynesian voyage; an aspiring composer who insinuates himself into the home of a syphilitic genius; a journalist investigating a nuclear plant; a publisher with a dangerous best-seller on his hands; and a cloned human being created for slave labor. These five stories are bisected and arranged around a sixth, the oral history of a post-apocalyptic island, which forms the heart of the novel. Only after this do the second halves of the stories fall into place, pulling the novel's themes into focus: the ease with which one group enslaves another, and the constant rewriting of the past by those who control the present. Against such forces, Mitchell's characters reveal a quiet tenacity. When the clerk is told that his life amounts to "no more than one drop in a limitless ocean," he asks, "Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (August 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375507256
• ISBN-13: 978-0375507250
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (183 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #7,617 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

290 of 298 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Loved this book but not for everyone, December 18, 2004

By	sb-lynn (Santa Barbara, California United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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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.

143 of 150 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A profound page-turner, September 25, 2004

By	S. Bush (Austin, Texas USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

47 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary work, September 14, 2006

By	Leah Shafer (Dallas, TX United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.