Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

ARC from Scribner for an honest review

Book Blurb:

In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr creates thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. His path and Anna’s will cross. Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet.

My Review: 4 stars

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Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr is a magnificent piece of work, large in scope, but at times, daunting. Honestly, I tried this book two times before committing to it. The prose is brilliant, and this author can put together stunning scenes, but the first two times I sat down to read it, I wasn’t getting hooked. Due to my adoration of his prior book, All the Light We Cannot See, and the murmurings of a Pulitzer and/or National Book Award, I gave the book another try.

I’m so glad I followed that instinct to continue. This book takes place from the 1400s at the takeover of Constantinople to well into the future. Wisely, this book is written with very short chapters, which allows the reader to better follow the five main characters, two of which are in both past and present time periods. In my opinion, a sixth main character would be a manuscript, the Greek play Aethon, which connects the people, places, and time periods together. I hesitate to give more away, as this book should be savored. And for those of you, like me, that read more than one book at a time, I recommend reading this, and this alone, without any other literary endeavors.

I can easily visualize this as a blockbuster movie, with its unique mix of sci-fi, fantasy and history.

Quotes I liked:

Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.”

“But what’s so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up.”
“And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”

“Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.”

“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”