Published in September 2021, Anthony Doerr‘s Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel offers an interesting look into time, place and theme with a single book holding the threads of interpersonal understanding together. The term cloud cuckoo land itself critiques someone as living too much in their own narrow point of view, which helps those considering the parallel narratives bound together in the novel we view today.
The central characters of Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel aim to understand the world around them. First, characters Anna and Omeir appear on opposite sides of the formidable city walls during the 1453 Fall of Constantinople; Constantinople is modern day Istanbul, Turkey. Second, we meet teenage idealist Seymour in an attack on a public library in present day Idaho. Third, we meet Konstance, decades into the future, aboard an interstellar ship bound for an exoplanet. Anna, Omeir, Seymour, and Konstance are dreamers who find hope in the face of danger through their own initiative.
A fictional story within Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel inspires the four central characters of the novel. A comedy titled The Birds by Greek dramatist Aristophanes inspires the fictional tale of Aethon, a shepherd longing to be turned into a bird. As a bird, Aethon wishes to fly to a magical land in the clouds without pain and suffering. Within Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel, Doerr attributes the fictional tale is attributed to Greek romantic Antonius Diogenes, a historical figure who would have written the piece roughly 500 to 600 years after the piece that actually inspired Anthony Doerr.
Many additional works of classical fiction are incorporated into the larger experiences of the central characters of this novel. The stories of Anna and Omeir overlap in real time, whereas the binding of the characters of rests with the love of Seymour and Konstance find their feet through the literature referenced within Doerr‘s narrative. I found charm in the journeys of the four central characters, each of whom experiences tragedy, grief and loss the almost begs for the escape one might find in a metaphorical cloud cuckoo land; the internally fictional Cloud Cuckoo Land attributed to Antonius Diogenes by Doerr, along with other classical pieces of literature that I will not name here, bring joy to the librarian or literature major alike.
The payoff for Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel rests in no small extent to the precocious quality of the central characters in coping with their realities. The charm of weaving classical references to other literature in time, both hypothetical and legitimate, adds charm for those well read in classics to pick up allusions made by the author. I grant Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel as written by Anthony Doerr 3.75-stars on a scale of 1-to-5.
Matt – Monday, November 22, 2021
Matt Lynn Digital 