The Lego Movie (2014)'s own depiction of Cloud Cuckoo Land. This is definitely what I had in my noggin as I grazed the pages.
As I write this review, I am sobbing. A book has not made me this outwardly emotional since a forgotten-titled prose novel about a forgotten-named daughter that loses her mother, tears streaming down my face in my sixth grade social studies class. Today, eighteen years old and a freshman in college, Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr has taken its title.
Literature holds power beyond any earthly caliber. Any doubt from this statement was swiftly rescinded as I devoured the pages of this book. As I finished, I realized that it should be a societal given.
Doerr takes a fictional Greek comedy of a man venturing to paradise, and has its near-deteriorated pages reflect itself across a spectrum of real history to terrifyingly realistic near-future: The Fall of Constantinople, the Korean War, an Idaho library bomb threat in 2020, and a seemingly all-knowing vessel on its way to the next habitable planet. A rapid switch of third-person narratives keeps your memory in check, while also begging the question, “How is this connected like…at all?” Trust me, friend. They will.
Omeir and Anna. On polarizing sides of the walls of Constantinople, yet connected by their tender-hearted natures and a collection of precious words.
Zeno and Seymour. The former a man who found solace in words amidst experiences of lost love and war, the latter merely a boy who found solace just a little later, the roaring of his conscience saved by words.
Konstance. A girl born in space, an inevitable future remaining in space, until she finds the words that not even the omniscient intelligence running her home can fathom.
Whole lot of “words” in there, but they are all the same words. A journey of one man’s triumph through traveling the world copy and pastes itself into the lives of all five of these characters, different bodies with a beautifully identical skeleton.
Whether you want to sit and read through the 622-page behemoth like I did (so totally worth it, bt-dubs) or find an audiobook to take up a long car ride, I BEG of anyone to endear themselves in a story that has deepened my love for books, the history that carries them, and the voices that curate them. This is mostly a call out to anyone in my immediate circle so that I can have an indeterminately allotted discussion about everything that makes this book awesome.
It’s a big book. I started reading it on January 1st of this year. It is now March 6th. I have excuses, that being I have an abundance of required texts for college and I am a cinephile. I loved movies first, but books have always been a fiery mistress. For Lent, I gave up TikTok, dually and exponentially lowering my screen time and increasing my reading time. I'm not only blessing myself with impulsive writing post-MELTDOWN after finishing this, but I can impart a thanks to the Lord for this review as well.
You will find a piece of yourself in at least ONE of these characters, guaranteed, or make me toss in my words with Friskies and feed them to my roommate’s cat, Eclipse. She worryingly circled my chair as tears stained my shirt and the last 50 pages of this book, only upholding herself to her service animal duties as I shooed her away from my relentless need to finish. Glad to know she knows her place.
All this to say, this book is important. The man who wrote this holds a Pulitzer prize in one hand, and my utmost borderline idolatry in the other. I’m not yet a consumer of his most prominent novel All the Light We Cannot See (2014), but the unreliable source of the Internet mixed with reviews of real people preach on its pages as well, leaving me not only intrigued but obligated to continue ingesting anything this man has to offer on the shelves.
Take a moment and appreciate a book today. The one your friend got you and you still haven’t read. The one that you HAVE to share with others. The one you’ve practically worn down to tatters from unknown numbers of comfort re-reads. Or the one your sister bought because she thought the title was goofy and gave to you for your 18th birthday. Here I am.
Cheers,
MO
Comentarios