Book Report: Cloud Cuckoo Land (83)

5. Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021) (1/27/23)

Wow. I can't recall being so engrossed in a book in quite a while. Not just engrossed, but swept up, swept away—blown away. I closed the book just now feeling full—of emotion, of admiration, of wonder, of life, and of sadness too. Of appreciation for life, and for words and books and stories, and for the complexity and beauty (complex beauty, beautiful complexity) that this whole confounded world represents.

And this book, weighing in at 622 pages, is one of those monsters that I tend to avoid. Though admittedly, with its very short chapters and numerous part and section pages (the latter identifying simply a place and a time) surrounded by blank pages, it is probably closer to 522. But that's still more pages than I usually commit to without seriously considering how long it will tie me down.

Well, in this case, not long at all: a bare week. A good 400 pages in the last two days alone.

The book revolves around a fable, Cloud Cuckoo Land, written around the end of the first century CE by one Antonius Diogenes, telling the story of "Aethon: Lived 80 Years a Man, 1 Year a Donkey, 1 Year a Sea Bass, 1 Year a Crow." This fable figures into a trio of stories, set variously in 1450s Constantinople; early 21st-century Idaho; and a sometime-in-the-future spaceship 65 years out from Earth. We meet Anna and Omeir, she an energetic orphan who learns to read ancient Greek, he a boy with a hare lip and two strong oxen; Zeno, a Korean War vet and eventually translator, and Seymour, an autistic boy deeply dismayed by the damage being done to the planet; and 14-year-old Konstance, one of eighty-something prospective settlers hurtling toward a planet 4.24 light-years from Earth, a place they (or their progeny) won't reach for several hundred years.

It's not enough to summarize the book; it needs to be read. 

Here are a few passages I flagged. The first one takes place in Korea, where Zeno, not yet twenty, is a prisoner of war and has befriended another POW, a British classics teacher named Rex.

As soon as he can walk, Zeno is forced back into his duty as a fireman. Some days he is too weak to carry his meager bundle more than a few paces before setting it down again. Rex squats beside him and with a piece of charcoal writes Ἄλφάβητος on the trunk of a tree.
    Α is ἄλφα is alpha: the inverted head of an ox. Β is βῆτα is beta: based on the floor plan of a house. Ω is ὧ μέγα is omega, the mega O: a great whale's mouth opening to swallow all the letters before it.
     Zeno says, "Alphabet."
     "Good. How about this?"
     Rex writes, ὁ νόστος.
     Zeno rummages in the compartments of his mind.
     "Nostos."
     "Nostos, yes. The act of homecoming, a safe arrival. Of course, mapping a single English word onto a Greek one is almost always slippery. A nostos also means a song about a homecoming."
     Zeno rises, light-headed, and picks up his bundle.
     Rex buttons his piece of charcoal into his pocket. "In a time," he says, "when disease, war, and famine haunted practically every hour, when so many died before their time, their bodies swallowed by the sea or earth, or simply lost over the horizon, never to return, their fates unknown . . ." He gazes across the frozen fields to the low, dark buildings of Camp Five. "Imagine how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home. To believe that it was possible."
     Out on the ice of the Yalu far below, the wind drives the snow in long, eddying swirls. Rex sinks deeper into his collar. "It's not so much the contents of the song. It's that the song was still being sung."

Here, on the spaceship Argos, a mysterious disease has just erupted. A boy, Zeke, and an older man, Dr. Pori, have died, and "twenty-one others—one quarter of the people on board—are experiencing symptoms." The ship has entered the second of four quarantine periods, this one lasting two months, as the central, all-knowing computer known as Sybil assesses the situation.

A week ago, it all seemed so secure. So settled. Everyone whispering down the corridors in their patched-up worksuits and socks. . . . Fresh lettuce on Tuesdays, Farm 3 beans on Wednesdays, haircuts on Fridays, dentist in Compartment 6, seamstress in Compartment 17, precalc with Dr. Pori three mornings a week, the warm eye of Sybil keeping watch over them all. Yet, even then, in the deepest vaults of her subconscious, didn't Konstance sense the terrible precariousness of it all? The frozen immensity tugging, tugging, tugging at the outer walls?
     She touches her Vizer [a means of entering a vast virtual library] and climbs the ladder to the second tier of the Library. Jessi Ko looks up from a book in which a thousand pale deer with oversized nostrils lie dead in the snow.
     "I'm reading about the saiga antelope. They had this bacteria in them that caused massive die-offs." . . .
     "Where's Ramón?" Konstance asks.
     Below them images from long-ago pandemics flicker above grown-ups at tables. Soldiers in beds, doctors in hazmat suits. Unbidden into her head comes an image of Zeke's body being sent out the airlock, then Dr. Pori's a few hundred thousand kilometers later: a trail of corpses left through the void like breadcrumbs from some ghastly fairy tale.
     "Says here that two hundred thousand of them died in twelve hours," Jessi says, "and no one ever figured out why." Far down the atrium, at the limit of her eyesight, Konstance sees her father at a table by himself, sheets of technical drawings sailing around him.
     "I heard," says Omicron, staring up through the barrel vault, "that Quarantine Three lasts a year."
     "I heard," whispers Jessi, "that Quarantine Four lasts forever."

And finally—because I only flagged three sections, and each one, in a way, encapsulates a bit of what this beautiful book is about—here is Seymour, the troubled boy who decides to wage war on the ruination of his home place. The following scene takes place in prison, several years after he has planted a bomb, which does go off, though not as he intended. Before that happens, he stumbles on a rehearsal that Zeno and five fifth-graders are undertaking of a Greek tale called "Cloud Cuckoo Land." He has recently requested the text of the play, and everything related to that performance has arrived, including the scripts the five children were using.

On one of the last pages of one copy are multiple edits, not in Zeno's hand, but in bright cursive.
     While he was downstairs with his bombs, the children upstairs were rewriting the ending.
     The underground tomb, the donkey, the sea bass, a crow flapping through the cosmos: it's a ridiculous tale. But in the version rendered by Zeno and the kids, it's beautiful too. Sometimes as he works, Greek words come flashing up from the depths of the facsimiles, ὄρνις, ornis, it means both bird and omen—and Seymour feels like he used to when he was caught in the gaze of Trustyfriend [an owl], as though he's being allowed to glimpse an older and undiluted world, when every barn swallow, every sunset, every storm, pulsed with meaning. By age seventeen he'd convinced himself that every human he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption. But as he reconstructs Zeno's translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human. . . .    
     In a child's cursive, beneath . . . crossed-out lines, Aethon's new line [at the end of the play] is handwritten in the margin, "The world as it is is enough."

It is, ultimately, a book of hope, though it doesn't flinch from the uncomfortable, the tragic. I loved Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer. I loved this book even more. Here is a brief profile of Doerr from the New York Times, where he describes some of what he was thinking as he wrote Cloud Cuckoo Land. I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.