Cloud Atlas: A Novel
by David Mitchell
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Book Summary Information
Author: David MitchellEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2004-08-17
ISBN: 0375507256
Number of pages: 528
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Cloud Atlas: A Novel
Book Review: When Humanity Consumes Itself
Summary: 4 Stars
I've just finished reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. It is an epic and familiar tragedy. Just the technical aspects of Mitchell's writing alone would warrant this novel a masterpiece. He shifts voice as though he were multiple authors and not one man writing from the point-of-view consciousness of several different characters in several different times. Despite the predictability of its plot, the book's prose is so surprising that one forgets the more unoriginal concepts throughout.
Mitchell takes the reader through six completely different time periods from gold rush San Francisco to apocalyptic future Hawaii. He uses one character to do it. Maybe character isn't the right word. Perhaps soul is more accurate. This soul, identified by a strange comet-shaped birthmark, reincarnates itself into various forms and versions of humanity. This soul is faced with the evil of the world each time and it is up to the reader to decide if evil triumphed over good.
The insatiable hunger for more...more anything is the plank of Mitchell's evil. His characters poison one another for treasure, steal intellectual property for glory and slaughter for pure survival. Whether this is a testament to the ills of consumerism or merely an exposure of the basest of human instinct is impossible to tell. Suffice it to say that humanity is its own worst enemy.
So, the cloud that is the soul must be guided by the atlas that is ineffable peace. And although that cloud will dissipate and wander off course it still must exist.
"'& only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!'
Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"
Summary of Cloud Atlas: A Novel
From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists 2003" issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope.A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified "dinery server" on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation -- the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.
In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity's dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us.
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