Cloud Cuckoo Land, By Anthony Doerr

“Doerr is reliably mind-blowing.”

I entered into a phase in life at the close of my forties when my ADHD had calmed down enough to read books and had the fortune to think to pick novels from “best of” lists.  While subjective to the point of futility, these catalogues led me to some fabulous finds early on.  I read Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner first but got my hands on Anthony Doerr’s mesmeric All the Light We Cannot See next (and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas after that, along with Roberto Bolaño, Irène Némirovsky, Jonathan Franzen…that was a golden stretch).  Doerr’s book thrums with power .  An awful inevitability lends the story a weight that I feel to this day.

In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Doerr tackles the theme of continuity.  He wants to learn more about how books survive, since the hands that pass them down across the generations do not.  A fire.  A religious zealot.  Rain.  Time.  The forces arrayed against preservation seem insurmountable, yet stories sometimes beat the long odds.

To get at his theme, Doerr uses the third century biographer of philosophy, Diogenes Laertius’, cautionary tale Cloud Cuckoo Land as a fictionalized case study.  What remains of Laertius’ real-world scrolls tells of a peasant who wants to transform into a bird so he can reach an imagined city in the sky whose feathered inhabitants have solved all problems.  Dr. Seuss writes of a similar quest in I had Trouble Getting to Solla Sollew (“…On the banks of the beautiful River Wah-Hoo, / Where they never have troubles.  At least, very few”).  Grass-is-always-greener parables extend across literature, and perhaps amount to the hero’s journey itself.  In all such confections, the main character encounters unending obstacles until realizing that there’s no place like home.

Since we’re talking about Doerr however, instead of a folktale we get a Jenga-like interdimensional machine.  Cloud Cuckoo Land oscillates among five parallel plots: a young man (autistic?) who has a Grendel-esque sound sensitivity and ends up trying to blow up his local library in an eco-terrorist act before helping to build the Metaverse; a fifteenth-century Saracen boy with a cleft lip during the Siege of Constantinople; an adventurous girl stuck in a needlepoint workshop on the Greek side during the Siege of Constantinople; a repressed gay man from Indiana who fights in the Korean War; and a young girl in a windowless spaceship bound on a multi-generational trek to a future colony future planet following earth apocalypse.  The subplots span the lifespan of each character.  Narratives converge.  All the parts play a role in the survival of Diogenes Laertius’ codex, a pattern that unfolds in the last few hundred pages of the book.

So.  First off, Doerr is one of the one writer who writes the way that I want to write.  He’s a Strunk & White guy in a way that Strunk & White do not themselves emulate.  Doerr writes in active voice.  He uses active verbs.  He avoids unnecessary words (suddenly, even, started/began to, most adverbs…).  He does not put “It” at the front of sentences (The Unforgivable: It was John who opened the door.  [Ten-thousand fingernails on chalkboards]).  His books have complex but recognizable structure.  His characters grab your heart.  The pages turn.

Although the ability to conceptualize such a tour-de-force seems incomprehensible, I would concede that Cloud Cuckoo Land does not carry quite the same the Library of Alexandria-just-knocked-me-over-on-my-backside impact as All the Light We Cannot See.  In part, juggling five story balls—two of which bounce between decades—can prove dizzying.  The typesetting includes short chapters with blank pages following title pages.  A small point, but the layout makes the book feel a bit fatiguing since you’re turning so many pieces of paper, maybe.

Also, when reading a second Doerr, the element of surprise has worn off.  You know that someone’s going to get blown up.  A boy and a girl will meet each other at the very end of up until then non-intersecting plots.  We inhabit magical realism-curious settings with fantasy lurking offscreen.  Your heart will break.  You go in not expecting to find an uplifting worldview.  Rather, the book makes us feel bittersweet awe that anything survives at all.

On a personal level, I noticed the absence of mention of the Greek playwright Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds, which tells the tale(feathers) of two hucksters who hoodwink some bird-brained birds to build a perfect city in the sky (“Cloud Cuckoopolis”) but where some birds turn out to be more equal than others.  My friend Vinny wrote an adaption of the Aristophanes, which he also directed for my then-college’s theater department.  Doerr must have run across The Birds in his meticulous research, but we only ever hear about Diogenes Laertius, including a children’s theater adaption of it as part of one of the book’s threads.

Youf have to evaluate Cloud Cuckoo Land in its own terms since Doerr writes on another level.  I think that I do prefer the terrifying intertwining of All the Light We Cannot See, but that’s like saying one Marc Chagall painting is better than another.