My actual score is closer to a 3.5. Sorry for the lazy review, school is intense and I don't really know how to organize my feelings on this one.

Cloud Atlas is one of those books that you either love or hate, which is why it's unusual that I feel mostly neutral about it. It was an entertaining, clever book; the unusual narrative style kept the book interesting and varied. The one largest complaint I have is that I didn't "get" the main connection between all the stories. It was evident when they were referenced within each other, but I feel that if I hadn't read a little bit about the book beforehand, I wouldn't have understood the overall theme of reincarnation and souls passing through the stories. Most critics of the book fail to get this theme entirely, so maybe it helped that I came in with some prior knowledge.

To those who want to read this book but are wary of all the negative reviews, I offer this advice: just read the book. Enjoy it. I liked all of the stories, and they're so different in plot, narrative style, and setting that you're bound to enjoy at least one of them. The stories that didn't hold my attention in the first half became some of my favorites in the second half. The point is, don't read this book for some big, philosophical revelation. If you look close enough, you can gain some insight from this book, but at the end of the day it's best to approach it as a bunch of short stories compiled into a novel.

To address a few more common issues: the middle chapter. As you may know, the six stories of Cloud Atlas are divided in half and told in order, then in reverse order: 1 2 3 4 5 6 5 4 3 2 1. So at the very middle, you get the entire story in one whopping section. Many people consider the middle story, "Sloosha's Crossin'," impossible to get through. It's told in post-apocalyptic Hawaii by a boy who narrates in a futuristic English dialect, which some readers have a hard time understanding. Honestly, it's not that difficult. There are quite a bit of new contractions and a few new words that the reader has to discern, but the chapter about futuristic Korea has just as much ambiguous dialogue. It's Mitchell's style, I've noticed, to throw the reader into unfamiliar situations in which they must read along and use context clues to piece together what's going on in the setting. Nothing is handed to the reader on a silver platter, in "Sloosha's Crossin'" or any other writing of his. Besides, following "Sloosha" are some of the best chapters in the whole book, so don't call it quits right there.

This review has mostly been a collection of my musings about the popular opinion, so lastly, I'll include a short summary of the chapters. Beware of spoilers within.
* The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing - the journal of a man travelling through English pacific colonies in the early 1800s. It's a slow start, and the nineteenth century dialogue is hard to understand (I tried recording all the words I didn't know in this part, and stopped on page 9 after writing down over 100 words). Probably my least favorite chapter in the book, but if you can get through this, the rest will be easy peasy.
* Letters from Zedelghem - one of my absolute favorites, start to finish. This is the story of Robert Frobisher, a bitter, disadvantaged composer who travels to prewar Belgium to visit a famous musician whose health is declining, in the hopes that he will be taken in as an aide.
* Half Lives: the First Luisa Rey Mystery - this is one that would make a good standalone novel. A young journalist finds evidence of a corporation's sinister cover-ups and puts her life in danger when she tries to expose them.
* The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish - a successful editor goes through a series of misfortunes when the thuggish nephews of his best-selling author start to hustle him for money. This is one of the stories that I didn't enjoy at first, but the ending in the second part is brilliant. I can't wait to see this in the movie!
* An Orison of Sonmi~451 - set in dystopian futuristic Korea where corporations rule everything, a fast-food serving clone tells the story of her "ascension" to humanity. This was probably my favorite story through and through. I would love to see a whole novel inspired by this story.
* Sloosha's Crossin' an' Everythin' After - the infamous middle part. Not as gripping, story-wise, as some of the others. A boy named Zachry lives on post-apocalyptic Hawaii in a village of farmers and sheepherders, and must deal with several clashes with other, more nefarious tribes.

This is a good "fat book" for people who are intimidated by "fat books" -- because it is divided up into six different stories, it doesn't feel long. I think the book is best enjoyed by just letting yourself sink fully into whatever story you are currently in, rather than stressing out about how they all fit together. I liked the nods from one story to another and the overarching themes in the book. Of course, I liked some of the storylines more than others. I had trouble paying attention during the Luisa Rey storyline, probably because I don't particularly like "genre mystery," and I think I missed that story's significance to the whole.

The others, which range from historical fiction to dystopia and post-apocalyptic, all held my attention fairly well, although aside from Luisa Rey, Timothy Cavendish was my least favorite. The futuristic stories were my favorites.

Although each section has its own "voice," the book somehow manages to pull off a cohesive overall tone. There is no doubt that Mitchell is a masterful writer, although this book's experimental style isn't going to be for everyone. Although I enjoyed the ride the stories took me on in the first half of the book, I found the second half to be somewhat lackluster in comparison -- each story seemed to be building to another one that was even more compelling, so going through them again in reverse felt like something of a deflation. It was also disorienting, since I had kind of lost track of minor characters or plot points in the earlier stories by the time I returned to them.

I went to the movie when it first came out, and I liked it. But there is no doubt that the book delves much deeper into characters and themes, and ultimately weaves a richer tapestry.

To say that David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a good book is a gross understatement. Cloud Atlas is nothing short of a masterpiece; a mesmerizing postmodern novel about the journey and self-education of a single soul. Borrowing from the teachings of such philosophies and beliefs as eternal recurrence and samsara, Cloud Atlas spins a tale of human greed which weaves as effortlessly between genres as the soul weaves through time, gender, and geography.

 

Cloud Atlas follows seven manifestations of a single soul, marked by a comet-shaped birthmark between their collarbone and their shoulder blade. There is Adam Ewing, an American notary sailing along the Pacific not a generation after the War of 1812, Robert Frobisher, a disinherited Englishman from a wealthy family in the 1930s, Luisa Rey, a dangerously ambitious journalist in the 1960s, Timothy Cavendish, a slimy but loveable publisher somewhere around the modern era, Sonmi~451, a fabricant created to serve in a restaurant in a corporate-driven dystopian world, and Meronym, a character in the story of Valleysman Zachary, a sheep herder living in Hawaii long after the fall of civilization. Each story begins and is then interrupted by another, only to return to the previous story. The reader experiences each story as a needle passing through a matryoshka doll: Beginning with Adam’s story before being interrupted by Frobisher’s, which is then interrupted by Luisa’s, who is stopped by Cavendish, then Sonmi, then Zachary, who finishes his story before returning to Cavendish, then Luisa’s, then Frobisher’s, and ending upon Adam with a bittersweet poignancy. The stories are ingeniously tied together by the narrator of one story somehow discovering the story of its predecessor; Frobisher discovers half of Adam Ewing’s published journal under a chair, Luisa meets the man to whom Frobisher wrote his story, etc. This device insinuates that the soul learns about itself in its travels, affecting its present self with its own past.

 

Mitchell is an absolute master of genre. His ability to identify each specific voice—the flowery, letter-driven narratives of colonial fiction, the hard-boiled urgency of the 1960s/70s murder mystery, the prophetic eccentricities of the dystopia—is beyond enviable. The “best” story of the novel will depend largely on the reader’s personal preferences; if one prefers an irreverent and charming Byronic narrator, then Frobisher will hold the most interest. If one cannot abide the strange new language invented in a faraway future dialogue, then Valleysman Zachary’s adventure will be hastily glossed over. Such was my journey into the ever-changing world of Cloud Atlas. I relished in the terrifying Corpocratic world of Nea So Copros, the world into which Sonmi~451 was born (or rather, incubated.) However, my distaste for the formal and often meandering prose in colonial fiction, and my hatred of the diary/letter format, nearly caused me to give up on the book halfway through Adam Ewing’s journey across the Pacific. However, each chapter is strong in its own right, with a complete story arc and dynamic characters to fall in love with and despise.

 

Taking a moment to speak of personal favourites, I would have to say that Sonmi~451’s story drew me in and kept me in the most. Nea So Copros is a terrifying nation because, like any good dystopian world, our current world can so easily become something like it. Corpocracy rules the land; the majority of the world has been driven to barren toxicity as Nea So Copros, and other like nations before it, leech away the Earth’s natural resources. Words like shoes, computers, and cars have been brilliantly replaced by and referred to exclusively as brand names; nikes, sonys, and fords. Dewdrugs and face-scaping eliminate the appearance of old age in the wealthy. Humans are divided into three distinct classes of wealth, privilege, and, in case of the hand-created fabricants, slavery. The world around me dissolved as I read Sonmi~451’s journey from mindless slave waitress at a McDonald’s-like restaurant (Papa Song’s) to voracious student to radical revolutionary.

Not every story in Cloud Atlas is as dramatic or action-packed as Sonmi ~451’s tale, but each story encapsulates a single theme, which is at times flat-out described to the reader: Mankind will destroy itself through hunger. Each chapter is a tale of the powerful preying on the powerless; murderers poisoning trusting friends, corporations and other structural powerhouses preying on the Earth’s resources, the elderly, the powerless. Cannibalism is also mentioned in some form in each and every story (even Timothy Cavendish’s comedic romp features him teasing elderly people by shouting “Soilent Green is People!”) The soul character is always the preyed upon, who fights oppression and either transcends their bonds or crumbles beneath them. In Cloud Atlas, mankind’s hunger for power is eternal. The hunger destroys lives, cultures, cities, and worlds in its wake. For every triumph of human empathy and betterment, the hunger rises from its ashes, ravenous, forever preying upon the downtrodden. Yet the novel’s message is not a hopeless one. Rather, it is a proclamation of perseverance in the face of endless human greed. In Robert Frobisher’s words, “One may transcend any convention, if only one can first conceive of doing so.” Frobisher may be speaking subconsciously of his own soul, who transcends all conventions to be man, woman, fabricant, old, young, poor, or wealthy, but he is also speaking of mankind’s ability to overcome its own vices, its own long-held establishments, in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. Cloud Atlas is a tale of man’s triumphs over its own evils, one moment in history at a time.

 

I do have to admit that I am not really an avid short story fan and this book is basically an assortment of short stories.  Each story is in a different time and place but threads from the other stories are woven into each other.  There is a common theme of oppression throughout the book.  Even though I like to read various genres, the way the book completely switched genres, eras and language really threw me for a loop.  I can tell you that by the time I got to the middle of the book, the language used was an extreme chore to read.  

“Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.”

Zachry

Once Mitchell reaches the end of the sixth story, he takes up where he left off on the fifth and so on until by the end of the book you are back to finish the first story. That's great because the first story left off in mid-sentence and I actually thought there were pages of my book missing!  I think this was a great structural idea but I never comfortably settled into this book and I couldn't wait to finish it.

 

 

 

After YouKneeK posted her review and having a lively discussion with her about the book (and the movie), I realized that I was fuzzy about the details in the novel. A situation I couldn´t tolerate. A reread was required and I ultimately did it. And it was a great experience.

 

It is hard to say something about the story without giving away too much. There are six different stories, told by six different narrators: a lawyer in the midst of the 19th century, a composer in 1931, a journalist in the year 1975, a publisher in the beginning of the 21th century, a genetic clone in a near future and a goat herder in a post apocalyptic setting. The common denominator for these six people is their struggle for humanity, their personal freedom and how their decisions influence other people along the way.

What makes this novel extraordinary is its structure and all these connections that run through the narrative. Some of these connections are obvious, others are more subtle and especially the latter ones are harder to catch and they justify to actually read this novel for a second, third or fourth time. I got a different insight into the novel reading it for the second time and it was easier for me to relate to the characters this time around (I especially struggled with the Cavendish and Zachary chapter the first time I read the book).

I adore this novel and the message that the story conveys. Cloud Atlas is one fabulous piece of storytelling. A favorite of mine and I can highly recommend it.

 

I´m putting some of my thoughts behind a spoiler tag. If you haven´t read the book you shouldn´t be looking here, because there are some major spoilers ahead:

• Reincarnation is a topic throughout the novel. The reincarnated souls have a birthmark, shaped like a comet. Frobisher, Luisa Rey, Somni and Meronym have this birthmark. In the Cavendish chapter a birthmark has been mentioned, but the location of it doesn´t fit and we don´t know, what his birthmark looks like. And I don´t know how he can be the reincarnated soul of Luisa, because he has to be alive around the same time as Luisa. I think that Timothy is the reincarnation of another soul, possibly Reverend Horrux and Vivian Ayrs. These three are exploiting other people and if we are going into the future, Unanimity and the Kona are basically doing the same.
  In Adam Ewing´s chapter the birthmark hasn´t been mentioned. Either Adam has it or Autua. I actually haven´t made up my mind about this one, but for me Adam does fit better.

 

• I like how one story is mirrored in another one:

1. Adam Ewing – Zachary: Both characters have to fight pure evil (Dr. Goose, Old Georgie) and have to overcome their own fears and preconceptions to survive. Both are not alone, having someone by their side. Without these people they would ultimately have parished.
2. Robert Frobisher – Somni-451: Both have to fight for their creation (Frobisher´s Sextett, Somni´s catechism). After finishing it, their lives work has been fulfilled and both sacrifice themselves for it. Both characters have someone to confide in (Sixsmith and the Archivist), so these two aren´t alone either.
3. Luisa Rey – Timothy Cavendish: Both have to overcome oppression by society (Luisa: feminism, Timothy: behaviour towards the elderly). Both are getting into trouble trying to change their situation. They are getting help from other people, but in the end they are both alone. Yes, this theory is a farfetched one but I can´t shake the feeling that these two stories are telling the same thing.

 

 

(spoiler show)