"Cloud Cuckoo Land" by Anthony Doerr

When you have a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and a spectacular commercial success like All the Light We Cannot See, the next book is going to be a challenge. From what Anthony Doerr says in the acknowledgements for his new novel Cloud Cuckoo Land, he had a rather intense struggle on his hands. He credits his wife with keeping him from throwing the manuscript out on five separate occasions as he worked on it. 

All the Light We Cannot See gradually fused together two separate stories, that of a French girl and a German boy, during World War II. Cloud Cuckoo Land uses that same approach – fusing separate stories that gradually merge. But this time, Doerr is managing three narrative threads, and they are separated by hundreds of years. It’s a more complex, and more ambitious, undertaking than his previous novel, and it requires close reading until the reader masters the threads. 

 

What binds the three stories together is an old, decayed codex, only parts of which have survived. The codex is a novel called Cloud Cuckoo Land, the subject of the ancient Greek play The Birds by Aristophanes. To live in Cloud Cuckoo Land is to live in a crazy, absurd place, where the impossible might happen, or you think it might, like being turned into a donkey, a fish, and a bird. People who believe in such a place tend to deny reality, or so we might think. The interesting idea running through Doerr’s novel is that Cloud Cuckoo Land is often the absurd reality we have to live within.

 

One narrative thread concerns Anna and Omeir. Anna is a young girl, an orphan living in the last days of Constantinople before the fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. She and her sister work in a a sewing shop, where young girls and older women sew and embroider, usually fine, threaded clothes for priests and the wealthy. Omeir is a young boy from the area that is now likely Bulgaria, pressed into service as a teamster when the family’s oxen are requisitioned by the sultan for the final siege of Constantinople. Anna finds an old, moldering manuscript in a ruined monastery, and it is the codex of Cloud Cuckoo Land.

 

A second thread centers on Zeno Ninis and Seymour Sturbridge, who live in present-day Idaho. Zeno is 86, with a hard-won gift for translating ancient Greek. When the Vatican Library announces the discovery of a new technology allowing scientists to decipher old codexes, and that it is putting one online, Zeno is thrilled, and he begins a translation. Seymour is 19, mesmerized and radicalized by an online personality, and he’s planning to blow up the town’s library, which sits adjacent to the major area property developer. Inside the library are Zeno and five kindergarten children, working on a planned production of Zeno’s translation of Cloud Cuckoo Land.

 

Anthony Doerr

The third thread is Konstance, a 10-year-old girl on board the spaceship Argus, traveling an impossibly far distance to reach a planet much like Earth. Earth has become almost uninhabitable. It’s sometime in the 2060s, or thereabout. Life aboard the Argus is highly regulated, centered on a central digital presence called Sybil, who’s wired into everyone and everything. Konstance’s father keep a blue-bound book by his bedside; the book is Zeno’s translation of Cloud Cuckoo Land. 

 

Two things you can be sure of with all three threads. Nothing is ever as it appears; reality can often be as absurd as anything in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Second, never to be underestimated is the power of books, or a book, to extend across centuries and bind people together is real, tangible ways.

 

Doerr won numerous prizes for All the Light We Cannot See, including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Carnegie Medal, and the Alex Award. He’s also published two short story collections, Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. His other recognitions include five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. A native of Ohio, he and his family live in Idaho.

 

Cloud Cuckoo Land is, as Doerr acknowledges, a tribute to the power of books. It is also a very human story of people across centuries, unknown to each other but bound together by a book (or codex). It initially takes patience on the art of the reader to keep track of the threads and subthreads, but the reward for doing so is ultimately a rich one. 

 

Related:

 

Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See.

Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See”

It was selected for The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2014. It was a National Book Award finalist. Almost 13,000 reviews on Amazon. And it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Usually I see that kind of recognition for a book and expect to be disappointed when I read it. Not this time. Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See deserved all of those accolades, and more.

Doerr is the author of a collection of short stories, The Shell Collector (2002); a memoir, Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the World (2007); and a previous novel, About Grace (2010). I haven’t read them, but I will.

And then there’s All the Light We Cannot See.

I knew from the first few pages I was reading something extraordinary. Short chapters. Narrative written in the present tense, giving an immediacy and almost urgency to the story.

And what a story. Oh, my, what a story.

A blind girl. An orphaned boy. A legendary diamond.

And World War II.

It is 1934. Marie-Laure Leblanc lives with her father Daniel near the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Daniel is a locksmith for the museum. He has also created a wooden model of the neighborhood for his blind daughter to eventually find her way around. Her birthday presents are usually small puzzle boxes with candy inside. As Marie-Laure grows older, her father takes her to work, where she meets the scientists and museum curators, and learns about mollusks. She also receives a Braille edition of part one of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne.

Werner Pfennig and his sister Jutta are raised in an orphanage near Essen, Germany. Werner is small for his age but can do incredible things with his hands, like create radio receivers from scraps of metal and tubing. He builds a radio, and one of the programs he and his sister listen to at night comes from somewhere in France. The programs are about science, and Werner and Jutta become enchanted. It is how he learns French, and the wonder of what he hears will change him forever.

But this is 1930s Europe. The Nazis are consolidating power in Germany and creating the Reich that will last a thousand years. And persecuting Jews and others who don’t belong to the master race. Werner’s technical skills comes to the attention of local Nazi officials, and he eventually finds himself, the boy who builds radios, at an elite Nazi school for training Germany’s youth.

With the fall of France in June 1940, Daniel and Marie-Clare flee westward from Paris, with a place supposedly found for them with one of the museum’s governors. When they arrive, they find the house in flames and being looted by locals. Daniel then takes his daughter to St. Malo in Brittany, where his Uncle Etienne lives. Etienne has not been in his right mind since World War I, and refuses to leave the six-story family townhouse. And then the Germans arrive.

Anthony Doerr

What Daniel tells no one is what he is carrying with him, one of three replicas of a famous diamond in the museum’s collection. Or it may not be a replica. No one knows for sure, including Daniel, and that’s by design. A Nazi official, however, will spend years tracking down the stone and its copies, seeking to claim it for the Reich.

Doerr moves the story back and forth over a ten-year period, 1934 to 1944, underscoring how much the past has to do with the present, and the future. And while the suspense of the story is important, it’s not what the novel is ultimately about. It is about the things that matter, the small and seemingly insignificant things. Wars and thousand-year reichs may swirl around us, but there is still beauty in the natural world and beauty in the relationships we build and sustain. That is what lasts, even after life itself is gone.

All the Light We Cannot See is a marvelous book, a beautiful book. I held back the tears until the very last chapter, and I don’t know whether the tears came because of the story itself or the fact that I had reached the end.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. A book like this never really ends.

Related: You can read an excerpt from the novel, “The Education of Werner Pfennig,” via Doerr’s website.

Illustration: the City of St. Malo in Brittany, from the cover of the novel.