Cloud Atlas

Information and Book Review

Current TurboBookSnob Ranking: 2

David Mitchell

Mr. Mitchell has been named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists, and in 2001 he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel number9dream.

Cloud Atlas is a brilliant novel, and quite possibly David Mitchell's best work to date.  Through six distinct narratives and narrators, spanning time and geography, he unearths the footprints left behind by our ancestors' collective yearning to build empires at the expense of native peoples, and then traces those footprints forward in time to an imagined and dismal future.

Ours is a scary world.  We've advanced by leaps and bounds technologically, but on a global scale, we are still incredibly immature and completely lack the ability to co-exist peacefully in a world replete with differences.  It is appalling, and we should be taking seriously the impact of our actions on the future of this mudball we call home.

This feels like David Mitchell's year.  Cloud Atlas is certainly leading the way with the bookies, and has also garnered many exceptional and glowing reviews.  Still, we've seen the judges bypass the acknowledged favorite before, and it could certainly happen again this year.  No matter what the judges decide, Cloud Atlas is a book that deserves to be read and re-read, admired and considered seriously.

"The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance.  The corporations have money, power, and influence.  Our sole weapon is public outrage.  Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, ousted Nixon, and, in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam.  But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle.  First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being.  Any stage may be sabotaged.  The world's Alberto Grimaldi's can fight scrutiny by burying truth in committees, dullness, or misinformation, or by intimidating the scrutinizers.  They can extinguish awareness by dumbing down education, owning TV stations, paying "guest fees" to leader writer, or just buying the media up.  The media... is where democracies conduct their civil wars."

"Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood.  Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach.  Young ruddy fool.  What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable?  To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds."

"My vision roamed the moor, rested on a burial mound, an abandoned sheep pen, hovered on a Norman church yielding to a Druidic element at last, skipped to a power station, skimmed the ink-stained sea of the Danes to the Humber Bridge, tracked a war plane over corrugated fields.  Poor England.  Too much history for its acreage.  Years grow inward here, like my toenails."

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