Tildes Book Club discussion - Cloud Atlas

I had the double whammy of never quite finding the time to get my teeth into this Cloud Atlas book, but I think what really smoked my bacon this time was the fact that I'd got stuck into C. J. Cherryh's First Contact (Foreigner) series, which has 22 (not a typo, 22!) books in the sequence.

I'm coming to the end of book 9, which marks the end of one of the three-book arcs the series is so helpfully split up into, and I've wanted to read Piranesi ever since I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, so I hope to be a more active participant in the next round of these discussions.

That said, I've very much enjoyed reading everyone else's experiences and views on this book and thought you did a great job posing a few questions to break the ice and get people's ideas flowing, so thank you for that. It's clear to me that it's a book worth being on the "to read" list.

I've been doing a lot of studying lectures, textbooks, and scientific papers lately, and I've found that at this moment I'm viewing most of my extracurricular activities from an entertainment standpoint--how fun it is rather than how deep. So from an entertainment perspective (plot, rather than themes), I found the stories roughly in order from least entertaining to most entertaining, with Ewing the most boring and Sloosha's the most interesting. The exception to this is that I would flip Cavendish with Luisa Rey in the order. I found the start of the book quite boring, and almost decided to quit on this book club idea.

I think all the sections are well crafted as far as the quality of writing. Mitchell paints a vivid picture for me, especially in the parts featuring nature. I think that's part of what helped get me through the first Ewing chapter. Maybe I was just more interested in the stories that I felt were describing bigger events. I didn't find the general plot of Ewing very interesting, with the action being mostly hikes and travel by ship. I think I just didn't care enough about Ewing to be interested in whether he was being poisoned or his conflicts with the crew of the ship. I wasn't terribly interested in Frobisher or Cavendish because they seemed like jerks who never learned anything. In contrast, I felt like I'd been on a journey with Sonmi and Zachry where they grew as people, so I felt invested in their conflicts, all the characters involved, and how their stories would end.

Maybe it's just that they're more on the nose about it, but I feel like some of the big overarching ideas in the book were presented better in the last two stories as well. Well, to me more realistically presented than Luisa Rey's story, which used a more cartoon villian kind of approach, with evil mega-corp Seaboard that somehow thinks it's financially prudent to build a power plant that will explode, and Bill Smoke, who seemed to have an almost mystical ability to show up at every turn. It kind of felt like I was watching an episode of Captain Planet in terms of subtlety of the overarching plot. I think this style of storytelling was in kind of a pulp fiction style on purpose, but I didn't enjoy it as much.

Letters from Zedelghem was always, and remains my favourite story in the book. It's one of those tales where nobody is really likeable, but I adore it anyway. As a musician and a writer, it really well depicts the struggle of having large, all-encompassing ideas that you just have to get out. "Sometimes you slay the dragon, and sometimes it slays you." The painful experience of knowing that you have talent but aren't able to capitalise on it to make a living is rendered very well here as well, and even though he's an arrogant shit, I feel for Frobisher every time. Early on this story has one of my favourite lines from the whole book: "Tapped on the pane, and asked in French if she'd save my life by falling in love with me."

I also strongly enjoy the Sonmi story, but that is more out of worldbuilding than for the story itself, which is done magnificently. Everything about this world is just normal to the two (ish) narrators, so we don't get explanations of all of the weird hyper-capitalist concepts that rule their lives, we just get passing mentions and fill in the blanks ourselves. I think that is quietly genius, and something I wish I saw more of in other works.

I really enjoyed Letters from Zedelghem and Sloosha's Crossin'.

I have a musical background and the way Mitchell describes the almost madness you feel when you hear music everywhere and just have to get it down really spoke to me. It's not something that I have seen written about often in fiction and it just really hooked me (which was much needed after The Pacific Journal - I almost gave up through that story).

I loved Sloosha's Crossin' for the dystopian future and the complexity of reading the language. I am typically drawn to science fiction and dystopian stories, so this one was an easy win for me. It was also perfectly sandwiched between Sonmi's story. I was first annoyed by the language and the way words were written because my mind was just trying to understand what was going on. After getting into the story and literally sounding out some of the words, it became much more enjoyable and almost a game to try and figure them out with minimal context.

Maybe I'm just lacking in insight or appreciation of subtlety, but I felt that the structure was only moderately successful. To me, the link between the stories was something along the lines of: "these stories all happened because of the same kind of human flaws." I was kind of hoping for more meaning behind that comet birthmark beyond that. Maybe that's part of why I appreciated the Sonmi and Zachry stories a bit more, because the former story directly influenced the latter, and returning to the Sonmi story resolved some questions about the Zachry story. In contrast, Sonmi could have been watching any Disney other than Cavendish, and it wouldn't have affected the story. I had this expectation that the end of the Cavendish story would tell me something significant about the Sonmi story, so I was a bit disappointed when I got to the end of it and all that happens is he escapes and gets rich off movies, which we already knew would happen from the presence of his film in the future. Sure there were some parallels you could draw between the two stories, and I can see why Sonmi might enjoy such a Disney ending, but I didn't find the connection that satisfying.

So in the case that there was a strong link between the stories, I felt like it added a lot of depth. In the cases where there wasn't much of a causal link, the structure felt like a cheap trick to me, cutting away from the action to build suspense rather than having the story speak for itself.

I think the morality of the book is where Mitchell's perspective shines through the most, and perhaps as well in the tale of an artist's struggles in Letters from Zedelghem. I've read a few of his works, and as a writer I think he is quite chameleonic, and I don't know that he has a consistent "voice" that I have ever noted. He slips on the guise of characters with ease, often writing in the first person, in a variety of eras, and that makes it difficult for me to pick out a particular style or voice that I could point to and say "that's David Mitchell!" I like a lot of his work though, ponderous and action-lite though they typically are, and even where the is action it's never the point of the book.

The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing is definitely what I would define as a slog, and it's a shame that the book has to begin and end with my least favourite of the stories it tells. I think the overall story it tells is fine, but I struggle with the delivery quite a lot, which makes it challenging to get through. When I do reread Cloud Atlas I typically skim (or even skip) this one.

okay, confession time. I didn't go back to this book after watching the movie, and when I made the decision I was going to dnf I was so happy lol. Can't say I'd recommend the book, but the movie was pretty good.

On the understanding that if you have seen the film it is a very different beast; and if not that it's a fairly ponderous, more philosophical than action-packed tome, then yes I would recommend this book!

I would not recommend this book. I had the distinct feeling that it was a collection of short stories, tied together rather tenuously, somewhat awkwardly, and deliberately, so that it could be called a novel. Aside from the Luisa Rey and Sonmi stories, the characters in the others were quite unlikeable. Sloosha's Crossing was difficult reading due to the dialect (soooo many apostrophes!). I stopped reading in the middle of the 2nd part of the Luisa story; I just gave up, the enjoyment factor was lacking. There were definitely some things I truly liked about the book. I loved the descriptions of Sonmi's world, such as yellowup for sunrise and calling things by corporate names.

Honestly, no. The first story almost had me wanting to stop reading before I got through. I understand that the author was writing with an authentic tone for the period, but I truly did not enjoy reading it at all. Throughout the entire book, I was looking for that thread that was going to tie all the stories together. It seemed like it would be the comet-shaped birthmark, but nothing came of it. I agree with many of the other posters that this could have been published as a book of short stories. I feel like it would have been much more satisfying to read knowing that the stories weren't really connected before starting.