“A book is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”
Welcome back! Hope your summertime was a smile, a kiss, and a sip of wine with your noses buried in a good book under the whirr of the ceiling fans and the air conditioning keeping up with the demand. After our break 17 Bookers gathered at the home of Bonnie Magee to celebrate our 20th year. Although we were missing several “regulars,” we were delighted to welcome new members, Barbara Kincaid, Carla Russo, Penny Callison, and her friend, Susan Dahlman.
There was little doubt that even some of our “seasoned” readers struggled with this selection. Many tried and just couldn’t, one referred to it as a Double Red rating, while others sloshed through hoping to finally turn the last page – some did, some did not. We heard from one who opted out of attending due to a case of “acute laziness,” but offered her opinion, “I liked it.” Many got on the “Marmite” band wagon which is a British food spread based on yeast extract made from by-products of beer brewing. As they say across the pond, “It wasn’t my cup of tea.”
The title is interesting in that the definition is of someone that lives in cloud cuckoo land is one who thinks things completely impossible might happen rather than understanding how things really are. The phrase has been used by musicians, poets, writers and frequently by politicians. Newt Gingrich referred to Barack Obama’s claim that algae could be used as a fuel source as cloud cuckoo land; Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Vice President used the term to describe the unrealistically inflated value of stocks on the New York Stock Exchange just before the crash of 1929 and more recently, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, used the phrase to mock General Motors CEO’s claim that GM is the electric vehicles leader tweeting, “Must be nice living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.”
Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See, was a Bookers February 2015 selection, a historical fiction set in Hitler’s Germany, Paris, and a seaside town in Brittany during WWII featuring a orphaned German boy blessed with intellectual curiosity, and a blind French girl able to see light only through her imagination. It’s now a Netflix movie. Interestingly, the author used symbolism in the form of an owl – a nocturnal bird of prey viewed as the ruler of the night, the seer of souls – and repeated it in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Review:
Although there’s nothing simple about this book – simply put it boils down to one book in the hearts and hands of the characters detailing their journey with it and how their lives were affected by it. Sounds simple but it wasn’t. Doerr says it is intended as a song of praise or triumph to books, its greatest debt to a novel that no longer exists.” To me its ultimate message is that much can be accomplished by believing in the unbelievable, embracing the impossible as possible, healing relationships with kindness, facing fear with courage, doubt with certainty, hatred with love, and putting stock in yourself.
This is a novel of the past, present, and future asking us to stretch our imaginations, expand our minds to embrace and learn about and from ancient Greeks and is dedicated to librarians then, now, and in years to come. It is classified as alternative/speculative fiction which is based on history that explores what might have happened if certain historical events, figures etc…had been different – the key to this subgenre is when imagination takes over from reality, or at least recorded history. Titans of the industry have praised the work as “an epic of the quietest kind, whispering across six hundred years in a voice no louder than a librarian’s…Doerr hopes “readers will come away from it with a greater appreciation for those invisible qualities that have bound human life cross the ages, the love of a good story and the joy of returning home.” Naysayers chime in saying how difficult it was to follow some suggesting his wife should not have talked him out of throwing the manuscript away five different times. The twenty-four folios symbolizing the letters of the Greek alphabet were designed to set up what was going to happen in that chapter, jumping from one character to another and switching perspectives but for some…including me I reread them a few times before understanding their purpose.
Cloud Cuckoo Land follows five characters whose stories, despite spanning nearly six centuries, are bound together by their mutual love for a single book. The story begins and ends with Konstance – the future.
The Argos, Mission year 65, Day 307 inside Vault One: Fourteen-year-old Konstance sits on the floor inside a circular vault. Behind her inside a translucent cylinder is Sybil, the artificial intelligence bot safeguarding the heritage of all humanity against erasure and destruction, the precursor to our Alexa or Siri. (When I said Siri, my phone chimed in that I had to be on the Internet to use this feature – talk about timely and a touch scary!) Anyway, back to Konstance…. her living space is equipped with the bare necessities plus a treadmill in the shape of an automobile tire called a Perambulator. There is no visible exit. Scattered around her on the floor are rectangular scraps, one contains the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet; another describes the siege of Constantinople, another tells of the lost Greek tale, Cloud Cuckoo Land, about a shepherd’s journey to a utopian city in the sky most likely written the end of the first century, C.E. Another describes the book opening with a message from the author, Diogenes, to his ailing niece saying he had not invented the comical story which followed but found it in a tomb in Tyre. The tomb he said was marked, Aethon: Lived 80 years as a man, 1 year as a donkey, 1 year a sea bass, 1 year a crow. He claimed to find a wooden chest inscribed, “Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you.” When he opened it, he found twenty-four cypress-wood tablets upon which were written Aethon’s story.
On a blank piece of paper Konstance draws a cloud and atop it the towers of a city with little dots of birds soaring around the turrets. She picks up a rectangle inscribed with the date, February 20, 2020, sets it beside another that reads Folio A and places her cloud city drawing on the left. These three scraps set the stage for the tale we are about to read.
Her story ends in 2146 in Qaanaaq in the northern part of Greenland. Konstance lives in a little house with her three-year-old son and another child on the way. On the clearest days at the farthest edge of the horizon, she can see a low lump that is the rocky island where Argos rusts beneath the weather. Her youngster sits with the scraps of empty powder sacks in his lap, the pages of Aethon’s story. He begs her to tell the story. “I am Aethon, a simple shepherd…this tale I have to tell is so ludicrous, so incredible, that you’ll never believe a word of it and yet” – she taps the end of his nose – “it’s true.”
Summarizing the past brings us to Constantinople in 1439 where we meet Anna and Omeir. She is an orphan living inside the formidable walls in a house of women with her sister Maria. Anna is twelve when Maria’s eyesight fades and her journey to help her results in thievery and deceit as she steals from the convent’s library. On her last trip she recovers a stained codex bound in goatskin and an enameled snuffbox. When she opens the manuscript she finds a city in the clouds, a donkey at the edge of the sea – an account of the entire world and the mysteries beyond. At this same time in a woodcutter’s village in the mountains of Bulgaria, Omeir is born with a cleft palate. He and his pet oxen, Tree, and Moonlight are conscripted into the invading army marching on Constantinople. During the siege Anna continues to read the codex at night fixating on the golden city in the clouds. Maria succumbs to her illness and Anna is warned when the city falls, she will be in danger. She gathers her possessions in Maria’s silk hood, puts them in the bottom of a sack and escapes. On the other side of the walls, Omeir is also suffering when his oxen die, and he yearns to go home. This is where Anna and Omeir’s paths cross. They are fearful of each other but realize they need the other to survive. Finally reaching his grandfather’s cottage they live among family with Omeir taking Anna under his protective wing, eventually becoming kindred spirits. They were blessed with three sons, one succumbing to a grave illness. Omeir retrieves Anna’s hidden codex believing it can save their son’s life and once again the magical book wielded its powers, and their son was healed. After Anna dies, Omeir lives alone, his memories fading and has little use for stories except for Anna’s – the one about a man transformed into a donkey, then a fish, then a crow. He returns to their secret hiding place, but the book is soaked. He remembers how the book saved them, drying the pages and reassembling, maybe not in the right order, and wrapping it in a new square of waxed leather. Omeir walks around the mountain to a city that makes the painting on the snuffbox come alive – a rosy sky over a façade of a palace flanked by twin turrets. At the courtyard in front of the sultan’s palace he says he has a gift for the learned men – a place where books are protected. He wants nothing but a meal and oats for the donkey and they take the book. He’s accomplished what he set out to do and prays there is another life where he will find Anna waiting beneath the wing of God.
The present arrives with the story of octogenarian, Zeno Ninis, and teenager, Seymour Stuhlman in Lakeport, Idaho, setting the stage for what happens in the public library on February 20, 2020, and its aftermath. A bullied child, Zeno found solstice in the public library where he was introduced to Homer’s Odyssey. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, his father enlists and dies in the conflict. With nowhere to go, Zeno moves in with his father’s “friend with benefits,” Mrs. Boydstun, beginning a life-long commitment to her. He enlisted in the Army at the onset of the Korean War, was taken prisoner, and met the love of his life, Lance Corporal, Rex Browning, a grammar schoolteacher from East London. Zeno returned home to Mrs. Boydstun but was obsessed with finding Rex and out of the blue, he received a letter from him with an invitation to visit he and Hillary finding Rex’s plus one to be a youngish six-foot-tall man. The reunion did not go as Zeno hoped, and after returning home, he resumed his caregiving role until Mrs. Boydstun died. Rex had gifted him a copy of his book “about books that no longer exist” that he was struggling to translate. The new children’s librarian, Sharif, showed him an article about new technologies uncovering an ancient Greek tale inside a previously unreadable book that allowed a team to image bits of the original text of a “small nine-hundred-year-old goat leather codex,” concluding it was the work of prose fiction by Diogenes – a tale of a shepherd’s journey to a city in the sky. Zeno had found his purpose – a project he must do before he dies.
The library had become a refuge for after-school children and the head librarian, Marian, pleaded with Zeno to help her with five children – show what you are doing, do a magic trick…do anything! She tells them Zeno is working on a very old Greek story that has wizards inside whales and guard-owls that ask riddles and a city in the clouds where every wish comes true, and fishermen have “tree-penises.” Soon the kids are huddled around his table.
In child-speak they offer their take on his story…you’re saying this “Ethan” guy has all these insane adventures, and the story gets written a zillion years ago on twenty-four wooden tablets which are buried with his body to be discovered centuries later in a graveyard by “Dyed-Jeans” and he recopies the whole story onto hundreds of pieces of paper and mails it to his niece who is dying. Then that copy somehow got copied in “Constant-a-whatever” and that copy got lost for another zillion years only it was just found in Italy, but it’s a big mess because a ton of words are missing. The children realized how translating all this old writing into English was hard especially since he only had pieces of the story, didn’t even know what order they go in…and the pieces looked like someone smeared Nutella all over them. Zeno refers to an analogy of a superhero movie where he’s always getting beat up…that’s what these fragments are – superheroes – somehow in the last two thousand years these superheroes survived natural disasters, failed governments, and handfuls of shady characters and a copy of this text made it to a scribe in Constantinople nine or ten centuries after it was written and all we know about him is this tidy handwriting leaning slightly to the left. Zeno now has a chance to breathe life back into these superheroes for a few more decades and writes in Aethon’s voice about telling a tale so ludicrous you’ll never believe a word of it, and yet it’s true.
The children want to transform the fragments of Cloud Cuckoo Land into a play, dress in costumes and perform. Zeno is now focused on what there is and not what’s not there, trusting the children’s imagination will do the rest. Zeno tells them Aethon means blazing – maybe that’s why he never gives up, why he can’t settle down…he’s always burning inside. They find costumes, make paper-mâché animal heads and everyone cuts out clouds from cardboard. A carpenter constructed a plywood stage and wall and soon all that’s left to do is write an ending, copy scripts, and buy a case of root beer.
Seymour, nicknamed Possum, was born odd, a fussy newborn and a picky toddler who would only eat “circle” shaped food, sounds would drive him crazy and his mom, Bunny, could only touch his arms and legs, never his ears, feet, or hands. They hit the mother lode when she inherited a double-wide sitting on an acre of weeds a mile from town. Seymour was a latchkey kid whose only friend was a great gray owl he named Trustyfriend who lived in a dead ponderosa tree in the nearby forest clearing. The discovery of a pair of rifle-range ear defenders in their toolshed enabled him to navigate the world of sound. Eleven-year-old Seymour was distraught at the announcement of a new housing development by Eden’s Gate coming soon right behind their property upending the serenity of his domain and resulting in the disappearance of Trustyfriend. He found a severed wing of a great gray owl which he brought home and buried in the backyard, further fueling his vendetta against the new housing development. Between a stash of ammunition, a pistol he found in his grandfather’s toolshed, and a tutorial on how to blow up a house, Seymour felt empowered to right a wrong. From a paper he wrote for his English class filled with environmental exposes and doom and gloom, his teacher recommended the Environmental Awareness Club where he and a fellow member fell hook, line, and sinker for the rhetoric calling for dismantling the global industrial economy. His view of life was of a planet dying and everyone around him complicit in the killing. The virtual “recruiter” pushed Seymour to “do his task” – one that would qualify him for their camp. All his life had been a prologue and now he was set to begin living.
The novel continues with scenes from The Lakeport Public Library on February 20, 2020, with Zeno and the children in dress rehearsal. Seymour arrived with a backpack full of explosives that he hides in the library – his mission. to blow up the Eden’s Gate Realty office next door. Sharif finds the explosives, confronts Seymour, and is shot in the shoulder. Nothing goes as planned. The library is surrounded by police, a remote-controlled drone hovers overhead, the phones inside are ringing. He hears booming thuds from upstairs, scaling the stairs to find the entrance to the children’s library blocked by a plywood wall with an arched entryway. Zeno is hiding with the children behind the bookshelves. Sharif hollers – “Hey kid, I have your backpack. If you don’t come downstairs. I’m going to carry it outside to the police.” Zeno’s life flashed before him…the regrets and the memories in eighty-six years of his life…he accepts who he is, and he doesn’t want to live anymore. Zeno confronts Seymour, learns what’s inside the backpack and how it will detonate. He sprints into the glaring police lights with the bomb…he’s Aethon turning his back on immortality – he runs toward the lake where the bomb explodes.
Seymour is incarcerated inside the Idaho State Correctional Institution from 2021-2030, spending his days inside the computer lab. He pled guilty to kidnapping, use of a weapon of mass destruction, and attempted murder (Sharif survived) receiving a sentence of forty to life. The Ilium Corporation, after assembling the most comprehensive map of the world, selected Seymour to “sanitize the planet” by removing any raw images that might be objectional. As he “cleaned” the world images of Zeno haunt him, so he virtually visits Lakeport. The library is gone, replaced by an upscale hotel, but he was able to connect with the head librarian inquiring about what happened to Zeno’s papers after he died. She ships three cardboard boxes to him and mentions one of the children in the library that fatal day was taking classes in Latin and Greek nearby. As a troubled teenager he was convinced every human was a parasite but as he reconstructed Zeno’s translations, he realized the truth was infinitely more complicated – that we are all beautiful, even if we are all part of the problem and the problem is to be human. He was moved to tears. Among Zeno’s papers the translators arranged the folios to leave Aethon in the garden, inducted into the secrets of the gods, finally freed of his mortal desires. The children had another idea…the old shepherd looks away and did not read to the end of the book. He eats the rose proffered by the goddess and returns home, to the mud and grass of the Arkadian hills…in child’s cursive beneath the crossed-out lines – Aethon’s new line: “The world as it is is enough.”
A happy ending?
It’s Boise, Idaho 2057 – 2064 and Seymour is in his work-release apartment. In an Ilium-owned building, he works twelve-hour days testing next-generation iterations of the Atlas treadmill and headset. He’s in his late fifties and the calamities he spent years expunging from the Atlas are still there – hidden as little owls, owl graffiti, owl shaped drinking fountains, a bicyclist in a tuxedo wearing an owl mask – and if touched they will peel back the sanitized version to reveal the truth. The company is more focused on perfecting and miniaturizing the treadmill and headset than Atlas. He is trying to atone for his mistakes by offering the five library children he terrorized and their families three days in a new resort on the lake at Lakeport – all expenses paid. All five accepted his invitation. Technicians deliver five state-of-the-art multidirectional treadmills, called Perambulators to pair with five headsets. Seymour showed up on their last day addressing them by saying that day he took something precious from each of them and understands what it is like to lose a place you cared about. He wanted to give theirs back. He removes five hardcover books with royal blue jackets and hands one to each of them. On the cover, birds swing around the towers of a cloud city. They were made from Zeno’s translations. Each one received a headset. He asks, “Do you remember the book drop box that said, Owl you need are books? Pull the handle on the box and you’ll know what to do from there. One by one the children enter the library.
Whew…That’s all folks…about 600 pages condensed.
Our discussion:
We agreed the format jumping from the future, to the past, to the present was confusing; how libraries, both virtual and brick and mortar, were prominent throughout the novel highlighting their importance as the stewards of knowledge and keepers of history; how reading to others was also at the forefront of this book seen as acts of kindness but also as sources of healing and comfort. We conducted a character study of Seymour – was he a villain, a victim of his circumstances, or displayed signs of autism/mental illness or all of the above – a complicated character for certain. His nickname, Possum, was in my opinion not an accident…Doerr cleverly attached that moniker to him noting possums are scavengers, solitary, nocturnal, and can play dead for hours in face of danger. His character matured as he realized how his actions altered the lives of so many and we spoke of his attempt to make sure history was not sanitized when he hid the “owl” icons inside the Atlas…. That’s how we build empathy and learn from our mistakes. We discussed Konstance and her father joining Argos as his livelihood as a farmer on Earth was destroyed and he had a chance to live, grow purer food, and provide for his family. She was a rebel of sorts, questioning the why’s and why nots of her existence, who acted to free herself from what she viewed as a prison. She was going to find a way to beat the system proving the human spirit was superior to the artificial intelligence of Sybil. We speculated why her segment began and ended the novel – it showed the positive and negative aspects of technology and its limits and in the end her efforts to escape are rewarded with a simple uncluttered life with family. Additionally, I think it purposedly began the novel to “hook” the reader…food for thought. Zeno thinks of his father and how much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the Earth…we grieve those who died in battle because we would never see the men they would become – they can be painted however we remember them. Hero comes from the Greek word, protector, but they are human – they fall and are flawed, but in the end “heroes” stay true to their ideals and beliefs and are often reluctant to stand out. Zeno struggled accepting himself and his choices but, in the end, he came to terms with his life. He was at peace and his final act made a difference in many lives after sacrificing his own – a hero perhaps! We reviewed the history of AI dating back one-hundred-years in the movies and how it has evolved and continues to fuel boundless potential, moral quandaries, uncertain dangers, copyright issues, and dilemmas for teachers with students using this method to research and write essays…this story is not over! There are two endings – the children’s version or Zeno’s translation in Folio X – the later leaves Aethon in the garden finally freed of his mortal desires while the children’s changes Aethon’s last line to “The world as it is is enough.” Out of the mouths of babes – truth reigns!
On the Business Side:
Our book selections for the upcoming year were revealed and a list has been emailed to everyone separately for those who want to order them from Bookish as we’ve done in past years. Please reply to me by September 19th. I’ll take care of ordering and paying, and we’ll settle up after we get the books. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the Bookers’ slush fund to cover out-of-pocket expenses. A number of BookTrib books were on display for anyone wanting an extra read. As always, those left over will be added to the Pinnacle library and/or donated to Bookish. Hope to see everyone at the PWC luncheon featuring Jen Sherman, owner of Bookish and champion of literacy. Please bring gently used children’s and/or adult books to donate to her cause if you have any.
“Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.”
Credited to Aristotle or John Wayne in the novel…attributed to Roman author, Pling the Elder.
Happy Reading,
JoDee
