"Cloud Cuckoo Land"

"Pseudepigrapha are falsely attributed works, texts whose claimed author is not the true author, or a work whose real author attributed it to a figure of the past." (Wikipedia)

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr.
Published 2021.

What a very strange novel! Six different stories are told alternately. One is titled "Cloud Cuckoo Land;" it is a fragmentary narrative supposedly by an ancient Greek writer named Diogenes, translated by a twentieth-century man named Zeno. The narrative of this Zeno's life in Lakeport, Idaho, is the second alternating story. Also in Lakeport is the story of a boy named Seymour. From outer space decades in the future is the story of a rapidly traveling space ship with a young passenger named Konstance. Finally, two stories come from the fifteenth century, in and near Constantinople under siege by the Turkish Sultan: the story of Anna, who works in an embroidery studio, and the story of Omeir, who begins life in a village somewhere in the Balkans.

One theme ties the disparate stories together: the characters' great love of nature, especially birds, and above all, owls. In every story, the world is fragile, and there's a constant awareness in the twenty-first-century and future times of the decline of all species, of all the natural world. Somehow, thanks to the strange choices of times and places, this great fear for all living things does not become polemical, just phenomenal.

A challenging element of the novel is the presence of pseudo-ancient Greek texts, written in Greek characters, which I think the reader is expected to try to memorize and grasp, especially as the characters, especially Anna and Zeno, try to learn to read the text of the pseudepigraphic story by Diogenes. (A Greek author named Diogenes did exist, but his works are lost and Doerr made up the story in the novel.) I did not rise to this challenge, but just enjoyed reading the stories and their emerging connections. I also appreciate the role that the fictitious text plays in the other main theme of the novel, which is the idea that human literary accomplishment is fragile, and that wonderful books are constantly being lost, and vast numbers of great classics were lost long ago. 

Absolutely anything else I would like to say about this amazingly readable book and the intricate way it weaves its six stories, would be a spoiler. Each character is highly sympathetic. Each story is very suspenseful and well-crafted. You could think of a wide variety of reasons why this book wouldn't work. It does work.

Here is a quote from author Anthony Doerr:

"The fragments that we still have of ancient Greek novels indicate that many of them were more experimental and playful than were originally thought: they apparently played with metafiction and historicity, even as they fell over themselves to be entertaining. Though we only have a few extant fragments of Antonius Diogenes’ writing, it’s clear he was interested in mashing up genres: myths, travel narratives, natural histories, romances, ghost stories, historical treatises, etc. I wanted my book to embrace that sense of playfulness, too, and I wanted to continually rotate the story around the running theme of a sieges-inside-sieges, libraries-inside-libraries, worlds-inside-worlds. Because what is a book if not a little self-contained universe that you get to hold in your hands? So, yes, I think it’s safe to say that Cloud Cuckoo Land was my attempt at a literary-sci-fi-mystery-young-adult-historical-morality novel." (source)

Book review © 2021 mae sander.