Listening to the interview made me think I wasn’t so crazy for doing this:
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Awesome! I have notes on paper old school, pages of them.
I was really trying to see what the pattern was if any. Except that each story is told chronologically except for the first scene, I could see that what story came next was based mostly on what connections he could make with the Diogenes story.
Also I had to return the book to the library. 
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So when I finished the book the first time and was still stunned that Konstance had been on earth all along … and was tending her little garden in Qaanaaq … it was time for dinner, and I told my husband I’d just finished the most amazing story! “What was it about?” he asked, and in my swoony state, I said, “Well, just about everything!”
Over dinner I summed up all the story lines and some of the connections. (He is a scholar and has infinite patience.) When I was through, breathless with all I’d said and all I’d left out, he said, "It reminds me of Candide, ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin.’ "
Well, bing!! I’m sure Voltaire’s masterpiece was in Doerr’s mind; he seems to have read all the literature of the world. The New Yorker reviewer alludes to it in critiquing Doerr’s heavy-handedness:
And since we are living in critical times, the lessons are made very legible: the book is at risk; the world is at risk; we should not seek out distant utopias but instead cultivate our burnt gardens.
Written in 1759, Candide pokes fun at the philosophy that we are living in “the best of all possible worlds.” The protagonists suffer through an earthquake, flood, starvation, smallpox, shipwreck, etc., etc., before finally turning up in Istanbul, where a contented Turk hosts them and feeds them and delivers that famous line.
Poking around for some commentary to refresh my mind on Candide, I found this essay:
This section made me think of Zeno and his translation project! When we “cultivate our gardens” it might be a literal garden or …
We need to live in our own small plots, not the heads of strangers. At the same time, because our minds are haunted and prey to anxiety and despair, we need to keep ourselves busy. We need a project. It shouldn’t be too large or dependent on many. The project should send us to sleep every night weary but satisfied. It could be bringing up a child, writing a book, looking after a house, running a small shop or managing a little business.
Having read Cloud Cuckoo Land twice now, I’m still marveling over its craftsmanship. Unlike the New Yorker writer, I love and admire all the multidimensional intricacies. Maybe I need things spelled out for me, like a fable with a moral. But there’s no one simple lesson to take from this book. I think this one is going to rumble around in my mind for a long time.
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Give your husband a kiss on the cheek from me. That’s a very good reference/realization. Especially for someone who hasn’t even read the book!
Wow, impressive spreadsheet! Doerr’s comment that he was busy “keeping all five plates spinning in a reader’s mind” is apt. I enjoyed his interview with Seth Meyers; there’s a refreshing enthusiasm about him.
@jollymama, thank you so much for that wonderful post. I would never have made the Candide connection. Re your summation that the book is “Well, just about everything!”, see the title of the New York Times review:
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Going back to this…I think forgiveness is tied to the hope and resiliency. In Seymour’s story, it comes from Marian the librarian when she sends him Zeno’s notes: “At one time you were a thoughtful and sensitive boy and it is my hope that you have become a thoughtful and sensitive man.”
And especially, it comes from the children, who as adults agree to meet with Seymour – and Natalie Hernandez in particular, who works with him on the translation.
It’s brave of him, she says, to do this. “Braver of you,” says Seymour (p. 601).
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@ignatius posted that quote from Doerr upthread, and it reminded me that I wanted to look up Antonius Diogenes – the real author to whom Doerr attributed a fake book:
Antonius Diogenes was the author of an ancient Greek romance entitled The Wonders Beyond Thule (Τὰ ὑπὲρ Θoύλην ἄπιστα). Scholars have placed him in the 2nd century CE, but his age was unknown even to Photios, who wrote a synopsis of the romance. The romance was a novel of twenty-four books and was written in the form of a dialogue about travels. It is highly praised by Photios for its vivid narration, its clearness, and the gracefulness of its descriptions.
Bolding mine – the magic 24!
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Wow, I haven’t thought about Candide since AP French in 1972 or 1973! I wanted to like it, but it was a painful read!
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Even the Wikipedia synopsis of Candide sounded dreadful. So much suffering and violence. Not my type of story at all.
@jollymama what a great post! Insightful observations, thank you,Mr Jollymama.
You mention some of Doer’s influences, in the LA Review of Books interview he list some……
Care to weigh in on the architectonics of influence regarding Cloud Cuckoo Land and the Doerr canon as a whole?
Barrett, Saunders, Dillard, Powers, and Mitchell have, for sure, injected some base pairs into my DNA. And absolutely Anne Carson. Rick Bass, too, and Rachel Carson, Barry Lopez, and the poet John Haines — all four write about wonder and the land as well as anyone I’ve read.
I couldn’t get enough of Annie Proulx when I was in my early 20s, and Melville, and Katherine Anne Porter. Then I got into Sebald, Shirley Hazzard, Eleanor Clark, Marguerite Yourcenar. And yes, I cried multiple times during Malick’s The Thin Red Line without understanding why, and I wept on an airplane while watching The Tree of Life.
What might be missing from your literary-DNA analysis are artists who play with intertextuality. Right after college, I borrowed Lost in the Funhouse from the library, and John Barth blew my mind. In my mid-20s, I couldn’t get enough of Borges and I still can’t get enough of Italo Calvino. In “Memory Wall,” I played with Treasure Island as a story-within-a-story, and in All the Light, I played with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as my under-text, but I really went for it in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Perhaps the biggest influence on the new novel is a writer who died almost two millennia ago and whose work no longer exists: Antonius Diogenes. Fittingly for a writer who was also apparently fascinated by intertextuality, we only know about Diogenes’s work from the things readers wrote about it — most saliently a summary in the ninth-century Bibliotecha by the Byzantine patriarch Photios. From Photios’s abstract of Diogenes’s 24-part book The Wonders Beyond Thule, it’s clear that Diogenes was interested in mashing up existing genres: myths, travel narratives, natural histories, romances, ghost stories, historical treatises. According to Photios, Diogenes, in a double-preface to The Wonders, claimed to have “laboriously compiled” his tale (a series of nested narratives about a journey around the world, and possibly even to outer space) from “a library of ancient testimonials.” Immediately, Photios makes clear, Diogenes’s reader is aware that this is not true.
I wanted my book to embrace that sense of pseudo-documentary playfulness, so I invented Cloud Cuckoo Land, the novel Diogenes could have written, and installed it inside my own novel with the same title. I wanted to continually rotate the story around the running theme of sieges-inside-sieges, libraries-inside-libraries, novels-inside-novels, worlds-inside-worlds. Because what is a book if not a self-contained universe that you get to hold in your hands?
Thanks for sharing your link, fascinating, actually exciting
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To streamline this position (stated rather blatantly by William T. Vollmann in his New York Times review of your last book): He’s a helluva storyteller, that Doerr fellow, but I’m not sure his work qualifies as capital-L Literature. This was for a review of his previous book (which I haven’t read yet), but really? Is Dickens not literature? Because he’s really just a storyteller and occasionally a muckraker.
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And yet it’s considered a comedy, albeit a very dark one. It was turned into an operetta by Leonard Bernstein in the 1950’s, which is still performed. Why Bernstein's Operetta Candide is the Must See Performance
Not my cup of tea either, but it’s survived the test of time. Lots of universal truths, I guess.
@VeryHappy , kiss delivered, with pleasure! (I had to explain why, so we ended up discussing the book again. Maybe he’ll read it when he finishes some WW2 stuff … )
@mathmom and @HImom , I have to agree with you about the grimness of Candide, which I had blessedly not looked at since French lit class, but that final line did stick with me. Universal truth there, as @Mary13 says. (Thinking of the Aethon fable, Odysseus, This Tender Land, The Wizard of Oz … everyone goes adventuring, one way or another, and ends up longing for home, or some kind of peace. One of the archetypal human stories.)
Had to laugh at the NYT headline, “A Book about Everything.” That story sure shows what a good and thoughtful human being Anthony Doerr is, besides being an admirable author!
@jerseysouthmomchess , thank you for the good words and jam-packed fascinating link! Can you imagine spending time inside his mind, with all that literature juggling around and “intertextualizing”? – well, I guess we all just did!
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My H and his classmates remember playing with mercury. We are lucky it wasn’t a frequent occurrence and no bad side effects we can detect.
I remember asbestos sheets on tabletops for physical science in intermediate school. Each table had one and it seemed like a miracle thing—prevented fires and such a good insulator. They had asbestos in floor tiles and also in stage curtains.
Just getting back to this discussion after my son’s wedding and associated visits and family events…I loved the descriptions of the siege of Constantinople (history major here). Thanks for the cannon info, @jerseysouthmomchess!
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Actually, the siege became dinner conversation with my husband, complete with internet pictures, emphasis on 60 oxen, The size of the polished stone ball and the range it would go! A mile!
Unlike @jollymama’s scholarly husband, my husband found the weaponry and battle of interest, he may not know about Voltaire and Candide, but gunpowder got his attention 
I’ve learned so much about American and World history, in the last 14 years, through this book club, and the siege at Constantinople, the fall of the Roman Empire is now an added history lesson.
“but the fall of Constantinople was, nevertheless, a momentous episode of world history, the end of the old Roman Empire and the last surviving link between the medieval and ancient worlds. As the historian J. J. Norwich notes,</>
That is why five and a half centuries later, throughout the Greek world, Tuesday is still believed to be the unluckiest day of the week; why the Turkish flag still depicts not a crescent but a waning moon, reminding us that the moon was in its last quarter when Constantinople finally fell. (383)
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For me the seige story was a sad reminder that wasteful, destructive wars have been around a very long time.
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Thanks for that article, @jerseysouthmomchess. I noticed the line, “Many of the city’s inhabitants committed suicide rather than be subject to the horrors of capture and slavery,” and thought of Widow Theodora preparing the poison for the women:
Widow Theodora comes inside with an armful of what looks to Anna like deadly nightshade. She strips away the leaves, drops the shiny black berries into a basin, and puts the roots into a mortar. As she crushes the roots, Widow Theodora tells them that their bodies are just dust, that all their lives their souls have yearned toward a more distant place (p. 380).
Omeir’s story is set smack dab in the middle of a huge moment in history, yet it doesn’t feel forced or “fake” (in a Forrest Gump sort of way)-- it just feels like war. Horrible. And we see that again in Zeno’s story. As @Colorado_mom said, centuries pass, but we never stop killing each other.
Omeir’s path on that road is tragic, but also touching. I wouldn’t have thought on starting the book that I would be so moved by the fate of two oxen.
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Indeed! Surprisingly I seemed to mourn that more than some of the human deaths.
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