Cloud Cuckoo Land - February CC Book Club Selection

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I would guess this was deliberate on Doerr’s part, sort of a sly joke, as the phrase “Cloud Cuckoo Land” originated in Aristophanes’ play, The Birds.

In the play, this is the name given to the city in the sky constructed by the world’s birds, at the request of an Athenian man named Pisthetaerus. The idea is that the birds will thus gain control over all messages sent by both men and gods, but the idea is – to borrow another metaphor – a castle in the air. Thus the term came to apply to a fanciful state of unrealistic and over-optimistic thinking.
The Meaning and Comedic Origins of the Phrase ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ – Interesting Literature

Some Q&A from Anthony Doerr: Cloud Cuckoo Land — Anthony Doerr

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True, but I thought the characters were terrific – and as different from each other as night and day. I never had any problem telling them apart, unlike, for example, The One (an earlier CC book club selection), where it was hard (at least for me) to keep the characters straight in the intertwined stories.

I agree that the narrative seemed disjointed–or at least no structure was obvious to me when reading–but there was a method to the madness. Per Doerr:

There are five main characters, and I used the Greek alphabet as the through line, going from Alpha to Omega: There are 24 letters and 24 sections in the book. And the book that gets passed on in Cloud Cuckoo Land , the book I made up, has 24 sections. It took me years just to get to this outline of the structure of the book. Cloud Cuckoo Land: Anthony Doerr discusses new time-jumping novel

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Maybe I’m a minority but I found the book good but pretty depressing. Bunny, Seymour and Trusty Friend had such a sad story line, and sadly all too true to life. I’m glad he was able to turn around in prison but he nearly killed 6 innocent kids and the poor guard, as well as innocent Zeno.

I found Zeno’s early life pretty sad and disheartening too, as was Omeir’s, Anna’s and definitely Maria’s. Constance’s early life we don’t know much about but much of her life that we are privy to she’s frantically trying to outwit the computer who doesn’t want her to leave.

I agree that I believeZeno perished by having the bomb explode as he rushed with it toward the lake.

I would have liked to have read a bit of Anna being happy as she had to overcome such hardships.

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I have to say, I would never have read nor finished this book if it weren’t for this book club. It was a very different book and something I will spend sone time digesting.

I am in awe of Konstance. She’s a very smart and determined young woman! Being the only live person on a “ship” or shell sounds quite dreadful to me!

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I was amused by the Greek alphabet lettering for the Diogenes story and the way, it always reflected the next bit of “real” story. I thought it was a clever pastiche - it reminded me so much of the various comedies I read in a Greek lit in translation class I took my freshman year. (It was a notorious gut, but also known for being a great course - it was both.) I loved that the kids made a happy ending where the protagonist goes home, and how in each of the stories there is some version of that as well.

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@Caraid, you mentioned Sybil as an all seeing, all knowing, godlike presence, and I agree. I read @Mary13 link and this caught my eye, about “owls” and godlike symbolism.

I play a lot with owls in the book. Here in Idaho, we’re lucky enough to have these great horned owls come to our tree sometimes. They’ll screech and scare the crap out of you, man. They’re big and beautiful yet hard to find, and we’re at risk of losing them, so I thought,

‘Okay, I’m going to use the owl to dramatize the human connection to the natural world’ — that happens in Seymour’s section. I also use it to represent his lost father, maybe even a godlike figure. I decided to cram the imagery everywhere."/

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I’m on folio omega and will finish listening on my way home tonight. I love the way the different stories weave together (sometimes a little more than seems necessary). I was confused at first and I think I might go back and listen to the beginning again. I remember being perplexed at one of the opening scenes where Sybil and Konstance are having a conversation and somehow I thought Sybil was also Konstance’s mother (which…).

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@HImom, No, you are not alone, in finding this book depressing and you’ve verbalized, what I didn’t recognize fast enough, I rated the book a 4, to 4 1/2, highly recommend, but with reservations.

Now, that we are examining the book closer, it is immensely depressing, man’s inhumanity to man, on a grande scale, on a minute scale. The development of the canon, and weaponry, and today we push a bottom in Las Vegas, and slaughter people in the mideast. The terrorists, suicide bombers have become so common we aren’t appalled anymore, today when there is a schooling in America we ask, “how many this time”. The horrors or war, pandemic, and global warming are overwhelming.

But, somehow I didn’t feel depressed reading the book. Kudos to Doer, for the happy endings for Omier and Anna, redemption for Seymour ( see more as doer points out because he warns about climate change, and uses his owls to reveal the truth) and our beloved Zeno who found peace, and heroism, despite that awful, creep chain smoking Mrs B.

This article helps articulate better, the bigger message, the one of hope, love and home.

**The book is a puzzle. The greatest joy in it comes from watching the pieces snap into place. It is an epic of the quietest kind, whispering across 600 years in a voice no louder than a librarian’s. It is a book about books, a story about stories. It is tragedy and comedy and myth and fable and a warning and a comfort all at the same time. It says, Life is hard. Everyone believes the world is ending all the time. But so far, all of them have been wrong.

It says that if stories can survive, maybe we can, too.

Thank you, @HImom and @ignatius , your views helped me clarify something that was unsettling about this book

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I decided to cram the imagery everywhere

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the book, but when an author says, “I decided to cram the imagery everywhere,” his editor should probably say, “Ease up, dude.”

I think most readers are good at picking up subtleties and don’t need to be saturated.

Not surprising, as Sybil was more of a mother to Konstance than her actual mother, who was a background character with about as much definition as the blurred faces of the people in the Atlas.

Speaking of the Atlas, I thought this sci-fi element was easy to accept. It was basically Virtual Reality Google Maps “Street View & 360°”.

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Yes, and Sybil was basically Alexa on steroids.

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I agree that it felt like a story of hope and resiliency in the face of great horror.

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@jerseysouthmomchess, the passage from the NPR article is great! Excellent description of the story.

In Cloud Cuckoo Land the characters are all on a journey to find something better. Everyone’s journey leads them back home. The stories are all different from each other, but also the same.

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I noticed that sewing plays an important role in several of the stories, maybe–to complete the imagery–as a sort of thread that stitches the stories together.

Anna and Maria are seamstresses, “bent all day over needle and thread, sewing saints and stars and griffins and grapevines into the vestments of hierarchs” (p. 34).

Konstance’s mother is a seamstress for the Argos, with “various worksuits waiting their turn at Mother’s sewing machine–here the bin for malfunctioning zippers, here the bin of scraps, here the loose threads, nothing wasted, nothing lost” (p. 115).

Omeir’s mother pays the farrier’s wife “to travel nine miles upriver from the village to stitch together the gap in the boy’s lip with the needle and twine and twice the project fails” (p. 53). Later, Omeir stitches a leather binding for Anna’s folio.

One of the first things Zeno notices about Rex is that his trousers are “mended with neat stitches.”

Sewing seems to be protective somehow – Maria sews the embroidered cloth that covers the folio; Konstance’s dad sews together the oxygen suit that will save her life; Rex makes plans for he and Zeno to survive escape by sewing “bits of food into the linings of their hats” (p. 270).

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There was a part in the middle there where I had to put it down for a bit because it was so depressing in its commentary on how much humans can suck. But I also loved how every character had an arc of wanting to be courageous, missing that opportunity, kicking themselves for it, then finding a chance to be brave by the end …even if it was the last thing they did (in Zeno’s case). Ultimately, I think it was a hopeful book where everyone found a way to carve out meaning and usefulness in their lives after initially feeling powerless.

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Yes!

To extend my earlier sewing imagery: In ancient times, Maria and the other women sew beautiful luxury vestments for the rich. In the distant future, Konstance’s mother sews simple worksuits for practical use. One extreme to the other. And yet it’s not progress. All these women are trapped, “enclosed” in lives where they are not free.

But Anna and Konstance escape these prisons. Their lives aren’t easy, but they are loved and are making their own choices – as you say, “carving out meaning and usefulness.”

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Good point about the sewing themes. Also there was the part where Kontance’s father sewed her protective suit from the toilet curtain before transporting her to safer space.

I liked the book, even though I was often confused. I’m still wondering whether the Greenland town knew about the spaceship experiment. If yes, were they doing any support and monitoring?

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My theory is yes, that the ship was being supported and monitored as part of a grand (evil) corporate experiment. We know that the Argos was owned by Ilium (name is stitched on the worksuits). Ilium is the same company that made Seymour’s tablet and the computers in the library, so it managed to stay in business for hundreds of years with ever-advancing technology.

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And I dig that the way they escaped their prisons was through education.

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I feel the way that Anna, Konstance, Omeir, and Zeno made better lives for themselves was perseverance, education and some vision of something better. Seymour was more of a puzzle to me, as to what motivated him to work for Iliam, other than boredom and ability. I don’t have a good understanding of why he chose to make the portholes of reality nor do the translation either. He was an enigma.

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@Mary13, thanks for pointing all the sewing/thread connections in the book. It fits in perfectly with threads of Sybil and the threads the gods spin that I mentioned above.

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