Cloud Atlas: A Novel [L0081]

2004 - PB Excellent condition. By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize A postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in twenty-first-century fiction, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending, philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profound as it is playful. In this groundbreaking novel, an influential favorite among a new generation of writers, Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity. Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . . Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn't end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Cloud Atlas features six interconnected stories. It's not that simple, though. The first five of the stories are left at a cliffhanger, and after the sixth story you revisit the stories in reverse order, returning to end with the first story. The characters in each story encounter one or more of the others through books, letters, film, or campfire tales, but don't directly interact. It's a very compelling format, and Mitchell is able to leave you eager to find out what happened in the last story while at the same time pulling you into the next."; "One of the most outstanding, hugely epic literary sagas ever. There seem to be six distinct writers in "Cloud Atlas"--distinct, original, "where the heck did these EVEN come from?"This compilation suggests that the boundaries of writing are endless. Mitchell is authentic in every story. These really are "found objects" placed in blatant, cunning contrast with each other. But that they were all borne from one fountainhead--from one single and chameleonic (probably the most chameleonic I have encountered since Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa's) mind--this is the reason the novel is now a classic."; " I greatly admire his ambition, his willingness to place expectations on the reader, his ability to create a rich world and complex characters to inhabit them, and his lack of fear in putting a message in his books and making his reader THINK. 5 stars from me."