Cloud Cuckoo Land - February CC Book Club Selection

Parents Forum Parent Cafe
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Update, I just this morning, discovered this New Yorker article, mentioning a quote about Zeno name. This article, helped me understand what @ignatius meant about this is not a book “about characters as much as it ideas”- the author praises and criticizes equally, and I highly recommend, relating to many issues discussed so far here,

** The terminality of the message perhaps explains the frantic didacticism of all the theming. Libraries are everywhere here, from Constantinople to Idaho. In one of the book’s most tender episodes, Zeno meets an English soldier in Korea named Rex Browning, and surreptitiously falls in love with him. Rex is a classicist, who tells Zeno that he might be named for Zenodotus, “the first librarian at the library at Alexandria.”

Later in the novel, back in England, Rex writes a book titled “Compendium of Lost Books.” The spaceship Argos offers an elegiac, troubling vision of life without actual libraries; its brain is a Siri-like oracle known as Sibyl, a vast digital library of everything we ever knew: “the collective wisdom of our species. Every map ever drawn, every census ever taken, every book ever published, every football match, every symphony, every edition of every newspaper, the genomic maps of over one million species—everything we can imagine and everything we might ever need.”

Gradually, you come to understand that the desperate cross-referencing and thematic reinforcing borrow not so much from the model of the Internet as from the model of the library

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From same New Yorker article @ignatius
Did the forced connections make this more about ideas, than character?
Did you, and others find the didactic, “preachiness “;of the message bothersome”

** These characters are, necessarily, held together not only by “Cloud Cuckoo Land” the fable but by “Cloud Cuckoo Land” the novel.

Having laid out his flagrantly disparate cast, Doerr must insist on that cast’s almost freakish genealogical coherence. This formal insistence becomes the novel’s raison d’être.

We have no idea how these people or periods relate to one another, or how they rationally could. But storytelling, redefined as esoteric manipulation, will reveal the code; the novelist is the magus, the secret historian.

Although the book is largely set in a recognizable actual world, largely obeys the laws of physics, and features human beings, storytelling, stripped of organic necessity, aerates itself into fantasy.

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One more post from The New Yorker article

** The author might reply, with some justice, that a fable is a therapeutic contraption, and so is plenty of Dickens. Doerr’s new novel, though, is more of a contraption, and more earnestly therapeutic, than any adult fiction I can recall reading. The obsessive connectivity resembles a kind of novelistic online search, each new link unfolding inescapably from its predecessor, as our author keeps pressing Return. The title shared by the Greek text and the novel comes, an epigraph reminds us, from Aristophanes’ comedy “The Birds.” Yet these characters are also bound to one another by larger ropes of classical allusion and cross-reference. Anna and Zeno both excitedly discover the Odyssey before they encounter the Diogenes text; Seymour, who appears to be somewhat autistic, develops a relationship with an owl, which he nicknames Trustyfriend (a borrowing from “The Birds”); when Konstance’s father was back on earth, he used to live in Australia, on a farm he called Scheria (a mythical island in the Odyssey); the spaceship is named the Argos (the name of Odysseus’ dog, and also suggestive of Jason’s ship, the Argo).

Cloud Cuckoo Land” has little time for such mimetic modesties and accidental beauties. Far more even than its predecessor, it is fraught with preachment. This novel of performative storytelling that is also a novel about storytelling is dedicated to “the librarians then, now, and in the years to come.”

Two anxieties, reinforcing each other, are at play: the end of the book, and nothing less than the end of the world. Which is to say, the book is under threat both by the erosion of cultural memory and by the climate crisis. Doerr’s invention of the fable of Aethon is also Doerr’s fable about the precariousness of the book: a fragment that barely made it into the modern world, surviving only by the tenuous links between successive generations of readers.
Books, a teacher tells Anna, are precious repositories “for the memories of people who have lived before. . . . But books, like people, die.” Elsewhere, another scribe reminds Anna that time “wipes the old books from the world,” and, likening Constantinople to an ark full of books, neatly twins this novel’s emphases: “The ark has hit the rocks, child. And the tide is washing in.”

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@caraid, I’m not thinking of the adult, parental, maternal ? Role models for each of these characters, who were all abandoned.

Anna - she had sister Maria
Omeir- his grandfather the main influence
Zeno- his mother ? Died? Father hard working - Mrs B shudder awful
Konstance- father seemed more of a presence to her
Seymour- Bunny, tried, and loved, and did the best she could

Marian, the librarians truly depreciated as caring, wonderful, impactful women.

And, MOTHER EARTH- truly the maternal archetype, and suffering from human endeavors,

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Anthony Doer, in more than one article mentions he feels most connection to Seymour, and you point out that he may be the most impactful figure in the novel.

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Thinking also about Sybil, the extension of those home devices that so many are coming to rely on. Obviously a reference to prophetess or oracle, but my immediate association with the name is the 1973 book about the young woman with multiple personality disorder. And Doerr’s Sybil does exhibit that, especially at the end when she’s trying to prevent Konstance from breaching the hull.

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@jerseysouthmomchess, thanks for The New Yorker article. The writer’s criticisms are just and I can understand that on a certain level the novel is simply too much — too heavy-handed in the way it links every motif, idea, theme, name, and creature across the five stories. However, I was not in any way distracted by this as I read the novel. I sailed through it for the plot and the characters, and then afterward, the fun began of finding all the pieces of the elaborate jigsaw puzzle.

Our discussion has opened my eyes to much more than I realized was there — which is partly good (the novel’s connectivity is fascinating) and partly bad (“cramming imagery everywhere,” by Doerr’s own admission).

I have to say the writer of the article is more cynical than I am. At times, I thought his digs at Doerr did a disservice to readers, for example, this sentence: “Aethon returns to earth, grateful for ‘the green beauty of the broken world,’ or, as Doerr capitalizes for the slow-witted, ‘WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE IS BETTER THAN WHAT YOU SO DESPERATELY SEEK.’”

It’s an insult to people and it also misses the point: that Aethon’s story is a fable, which traditionally spells out the moral in no uncertain terms.

I’m glad I didn’t read the article before I read the book — it gives away everything right up to the end, e.g., "Omeir and Anna eventually fall in love and have children, and together they guard and tend the magical manuscript.” There’s more than a drop of sarcasm there: The writer thinks it “a pity, then, and a telling one, that Doerr finally resolves nearly every story optimistically and soothingly.” Yet I know that some of us did not come away from the novel feeling optimistic or soothed. As I read articles and commentary, I’m struck by how the novel evokes such different reactions from readers and reviewers.

I did like this observation:

Gradually, you come to understand that the desperate cross-referencing and thematic reinforcing borrow not so much from the model of the Internet as from the model of the library. Just as this novel full of stories is also about storytelling, so this novel about the importance of libraries mimics a library; it is stuffed with texts and allusions and connections, an ideal compendium of “the collective wisdom of our species.”

And this:

But “Cloud Cuckoo Land” embodies and imposes a darker connective energy, too. Climate change, after all, enforces an entirely justifiable paranoia: we are indeed part of a shared system, in which melting in one place arrives by flood in a second place and fire in yet another. One form of connectivity might be almost utopian; the other has become powerfully dystopian. History’s enormous optimistic library becomes reality’s enormous pessimistic prison. Each vision, as in Seymour’s alarmed search, fuels another in this book.

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I thought the exact same thing. I started to post this last night but then got distracted by preparing for freezing weather. :cold_face:

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For whatever reason, when I thought of Konstance’s name, I never connected it to Constantinople. Duh on my part.

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Same here, about Konstance, I thought more she was the “ constant” thing repopulating the earth, keeping life going, along with the other survivors on earth, too.

Thanks to those,who pointed out the Constantinople, / Konstance link.

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THIS! Totally agree the author of the New Yorker article is pretty cynical. And, yes, many parts of the plot are contrived – but I don’t care! I’ve read lots of other books that are overly contrived, but I didn’t enjoy them nearly as much as this one.

I’m also enjoying all the nuances/references being discussed here. Some I “got” but others just completely sailed over my head. I so appreciate this group for the illuminating discussions.

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For the record, I’m in the camp who enjoyed the book 4 - 41/2 stars , loved the connections, loved the varying points of view, writing style, and the overall message.
But, the reason I linked to the article, to express what others are feeling,too, and for me to understand why I didn’t rate this 5 stars. :rofl:

Although, the article’s author does praise Doer, too,

It’s here, perhaps, that “Cloud Cuckoo Land” becomes an affecting document. As a novelist, Doerr is utterly unembarrassed by statement. For him, storytelling is entertainment and sermon; the novel is really a fable. Late Tolstoy might have approved. 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. Above all—or, rather, underneath all—everything is connected. Seymour, vibrantly, morbidly alive to our self-destruction, realizes this:</>

Cloud cuckoo Land, and the Netflix movie about global warming “ Don’t look up” ……singing the same song.

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Relating to our discussion of names – I don’t think anyone has mentioned Ethan/Aethon. We see just once in Konstance’s story that her dad’s name is Ethan (when the hologram boy pops up in the Library to say why he was applying to go on the Argo mission).

When Zeno and the children are first discussing the play, one mentions “this Ethan guy,” and Zeno corrects him, “Aethon.” Then another kid says “Should be Ethan. It’s easier.” Then, eons later, we find out that Rachel, one of the children in the play, becomes Ethan’s grandmother, so, Konstance’s great-grandmother.

I loved all the connections in the book and was glad to figure this one out, but like the New Yorker writer, I thought some of them (this one!) were a bit too contrived!

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Another semi-silly thought, but this is how my brain works: the planet they thought they were heading for, Beta Oph2. Did Doerr choose that name with tongue in cheek, “Better Off”? (I see by Wikipedia there is an actual star named Beta Ophiuchi, but as far as I can discern, the planet’s name is Doerr’s invention.)

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Holy smokes, @jollymama – that one blew right past me! Thanks for pointing it out.

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In Cloud Cuckoo Land, I probably got a little more playful than I normally do in layering in some postmodern winks. The name of Konstance’s ship, The Argos, for example, is also the name of Odysseus’ dog, waiting at home for him all these years; the name of Trustyfriend the owl is one way to translate Pisthetaerus, one of the protagonists in Aristophanes’s comedy The Birds, which is where the phrase “Cloud Cuckoo Land” comes from.

If a reader finds some extra pleasure in discovering a little Easter egg, then I feel some extra pleasure too. But I absolutely don’t want a reader to have to carry any specific knowledge into the text in order to enjoy it. The novel’s title is perhaps the best illustration. For many British and Irish readers, “Cloud Cuckoo Land” is a very familiar phrase.

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@jollymama I love Beta Oph2 meaning Better Off. Perfect! Ethan/Aethon is also a good find. Hillary might be another overly contrived name in the book. Hillary means cheerful and Rex’s partner Hillary was definitely a cheerful guy!

I am enjoying Doerr’s Easter eggs!

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@Caraid I also thought Hillary was a clever name choice, but because it works for either gender … The minute Zeno’s mind jumped to a matronly woman serving tea, my mind said, “Aha, Doerr is setting us up, this is going to be a guy!”

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I knew Hillary was going to be a guy, but agree that it was great to choose a name that Americans of our generation don’t think of as a guy’s name.

I belatedly got to The New Yorker article. Definitely not one to read before you’ve read the book! I feel like Doerr warned us from the beginning that we were dealing with a novel that was going to be a little over the top, too fable-like, too well-crafted, too, too, too. You might not like it, but you were warned!

@jollymama good catch on BetaOph, did not see that one!

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Well, I really liked the book. However, I still think that “All the Light We Cannot See” was my favorite of his.

I am definitely going to read it again because there was so much that I missed. I was stunned when I saw that the Argos was still on earth. However, I was very confused when the travelers on the Argos started to get sick. Where did that come from? I don’t remember if it was mentioned in the book.

I love this book club because I learn to appreciate the books that we read so much more than when I read them alone. Thank you for having it.

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