I loved Anthony Doerr’s All the Light we cannot see, so when I heard Cloud Cuckoo Land, I was excited to get to it. And then I read the synopsis, and my excitement dimmed slightly. I feel like I have grown out of enjoying these kinds of books – set in separate time zones and narrated by different people.
About Cloud Cuckoo Land
Constantinople, 1453:
An orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy with love for animals risk everything on opposite sides of a city wall to protect the people they love.
Idaho, 2020:
An impoverished, idealistic kid seeks revenge on a world crumbling around him. Can he go through with it when a gentle old man stands between him and his plans?
Unknown, Sometime in the Future:
With her tiny community in peril, Konstance is the last hope for the human race. She must look to the oldest stories for guidance to find a way forward.
Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace, resilience, and a celebration of storytelling.
The Characters
Anna (7 to early adolescence) is an orphan living in 15th-century Constantinople with her older sister. They work as seamstresses in the house of Nicholas Kalaphates.
Omeir was born at the same time as Anna, but with a cleft lip and palate and living somewhere in Eastern Europe. He ends up joining an army led by the Sultan to invade Constantinople.
Zeno realizes he is gay as a child. But he lives in 1940s Idaho, where this is not allowed. He becomes a POW during the Korean War, when he learns Greek, eventually staging a performance of a play called Cloud Cuckoo Land, a book he translated from Greek.
Seymour is on the spectrum. The world overwhelms him, so he finds comfort in the natural world, befriending a large, amenable owl and reveling in walks in the woods adjacent to his home. He grows into adolescence and becomes an eco-warrior.
Konstance, 14, lives on an interstellar ship way out in the future. She was born on The Argos, and the plan is that she will not live long enough to reach the ship’s destination but will grow to adulthood and raise a family on the ship, passing down humanity’s culture so that someday, homo sapiens can rebuild on a new, unspoiled home world, Beta Oph2.
All these characters’ stories converge as they try to resolve their conflicts. Omeir and Anna are on opposite sides of a war. Same with Seymour and Zeno. Konstance is trying to survive a pandemic. And around them weaves an ancient Greek tale that connects all their lives.
My Review
I have such mixed feelings about this one! It started interestingly. The format is almost like short, barely interconnected stories from the points of view of five different people. I loved some of the characters – but was also quite indifferent to the others.
I should have loved Anna and Omeir. But their stories were the most boring of them all. Their chapters pretty much consisted of them waiting and prepping for war. Doerr got me all excited for the actual battle, which ended up happening offstage with Anna and Omeir running away to escape the carnage.
I loved the build-up of Zeno and Seymour, though (although, spoiler here: I did not appreciate the villain in the story being autistic). Their portions of the novel are the highlight of the book for me. Konstance’s story was just a little too weird and out there.
I enjoyed this book more if I thought of them as different short stories rather than connecting them through the Cloud Cuckoo Land story. I understood Doerr’s point – that stories are important and have power and endurance, but I don’t think he made that point well enough.
Also, and I hate to say this – but the writing throughout the book was a long-winded and over-embellished style that I disliked. Here’s an example of one of Doerr’s super-long sentences:
On a bright, redolent, May morning, when it feels as though the unseasonable cold has finally loosened its grip, the Hodgeteria, the city’s most venerated icon – a painting with the Virgin and Christ child on one side and the crucifixion on the other, purportedly made by the apostle Luke on a three-hundered-pound piece of slate and conveyed to the city from the Holy Lands by an empress a thousand years before Anna was born – is carried out of the church built to hold it.
Overall, I loved certain portions of the book but disliked others. It didn’t have the overall haunting quality in All the Light we Cannot see. There was just a bit too much going on – historical fiction, science fiction, and contemporary time frame all in one book. Doerr bit off a bit more than he could chew with this one.
What do you think? Did you enjoy this book?
