#it’s like if cloud atlas wasnt about people struggling against history but submitting themselves to it. LMFAO

[myrfing]

ok finished cloud cuckoo land by anthony doerr. it’s alright he’s good at weaving together stories and it has a strong central thread that binds a ton of seemingly distant narratives together. his prose is good; the dude loves stories and it shows. and I love stories about stories so I immediately picked up this book when I read the backing.

err weaker points is that it’s frankly one of those things that you can tell the writer is like…a center-left white american guy whose main purview into political issues is from the seat of the safe spectator trying to write a story encompassing all of humanity. politics, violence, and change wrought by humans instead of time is scary and almost always portrayed as senseless, power-obsessed delusion that’s beyond the grasp or interests of common men. to his credit he tried to extend a great amount of personhood to a character he even classifies as an extremist terrorist (who are like, leftist ecoterrorists; terrible chinese commies who “senselessly” call an american soldier an imperialist pawn also make their appearance—the question of the soldier being in a foreign land fighting the war is never addressed beyond his personal unfamiliarity and the plight of the american soldier) and puts a lot of effort into weaving a circumstance that explains why this “guileless boy” gets radicalized into anarcho eco communism through youtube cult figures (lol, interesting choice considering the reality of things) but he still classifies and grants these roles according to his belief yknow. all of the female characters get married and pop out a bunch of babies in the end and their function as such is supposed to be some narrative tie in to the theme of hope. he writes this passage:

and pretty much only reflects on it later on to have anna (the girl) be like Well he doesnt treat me like a possession. and of course here they’re only playing into an illusion to survive the absurdly cruel rules of their world, but they fall into the illusion in the end, and she, who had such a deep and compelling narrative before, pretty much loses all agency at the point their tales meet. she spends the rest of her life childrearing and learning the language of her conquerers and sewing haphazardly, which she hated as a child, and to be a “carrier/symbol/memory of hope” and is content while her husband’s life and journey continues. this is their return home and the end of the monomyth. and this isnt unintentional or a mistake it’s just written as a part of this overarching theme: the world is forever cyclical in the same way, everyone is the same, through stories we are able to just bear it and stave off death, and so “the world as it is is enough”. everything is in its place. it sort of believes that if only people understood that that they would settle down and not seek great change and foolish notions of a better world. but then it also sort of touches dotingly on this aspect too; it says the fools are just human and being a fool and dreaming of better things and not understanding all while tangling the threads of their mistakes and misguidedness more are what makes them human.

it’s sort of the reason why j0yce from DE (YESSS im going unto the epic crossover again) is the one to say an extremely similar line: “This world is enough.” it’s a lovely line and it does ring true, and it’s something that staves off despair which is a huge central thing to his story, but the outcomes of it are different for everyone. this doesn’t really occur to him and he writes like the power of this idea will always result in the same inevitable outcomes. people realize the world is enough; they abandon the cloud cuckoo land and return home and are granted peace and happiness and truth, for a time, and its enough. he both sideses everything in his story except this. and this whole story reminds me of when DE’s writers mentioned they moved elysium from the middle ages to modernity after realizing they couldn’t cling to antiquity and the middle ages and the old days when “history was not so complicated” to convey what they wanted to convey. doerr sort of instead clings to it instead; the entire narrative is spun around the idea that the myths of old are undying and unchanging and hold a sort of immortal truth that will forever govern human lives.

im not a huge fan of this personally, obviously, and reading through the book was like someone showing me a ton of ingredients I love and cooking them up real fancy with a lot of flourish and then coming out with something that tastes pretty good but is a little bland, like something is missing or there was some misunderstanding of what flavors could have been created. but it’s a fun tale to read with great pacing and great skill in running parallels between all the stories involved and it says something nice enough about human hope and living memory