Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

December - Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

I had heard of this book. The slightly absurd and nonsensical nature of the title appealed to me. I love offbeat. Had I been paying attention and realized that Anthony Doerr was also the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All The Light We Cannot See, I probably would have downloaded it right away. However, it wasn't until another author mentioned it at a writer's retreat that I downloaded it. One of my better decisions. Download it yourself, now, before you forget.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is a magical place "between earth and heaven far from the troubles of men and accessible only to those with wings where no one ever suffered, and everyone was wise." Or so we are told by the writer Antonio Diogenes.

The novel, however, is something else altogether. It combines dystopian, contemporary, and historical timelines and connects them back to the lost ancient Greek text from 414 B.C.E. about Cloud Cuckoo Land.

We travel between The Argos, a spaceship carrying the last humans to a new planet, the library in Lakeport, Idaho, The Korean War, and Constantinople in the 1400s. We meet rich and infinitely human characters and discover vivid and detailed worlds.

Anna rescues a moldy, ruined copy of the fable from an abandoned tower in the final days before the fall of Constantinople. Zeno learns of the text from a fellow prisoner during the Korean War. Konstance hears the story in bits and pieces from her father as they travel to Beta Oph2.

The thread that pulls the separate timelines together is the life of the fable through time. The story of Cloud Cuckoo Land has the power to soothe, to allow the reader to escape their pain, their prison, or their circumstances. Cloud Cuckoo Land also reminds us to marvel, reminds us how incredible and mystical it is that words written in 414 BCE can still resonate with readers thousands of years later. It is a magical truth whether Cloud Cuckoo Land, the Odyssey, the Bible, or Beowulf. It is something very close to miraculous that these stories not only exist but still resonate so far into the future.

The revelations of Cloud Cuckoo Land remind us why we love to read and why we love story. We seek the truth with Konstance.

We worry with Omeir and cry with Anna.

We feel Zeno's desperation and mourn with Seymour.

We learn empathy.

We gain new perspectives.

We discover.

We imagine worlds.

We escape.

We are entertained.

We revel in the beauty of the written word.

It's rare to find a book that does it all at once, but Cloud Cuckoo Land comes very, very close.