Great Reads for Great Readers

 

Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr.

  

       

          Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr has long been a master of the literary magic that engages us, thrills us, and compels us to keep reading until the story is finished.  Now he has excelled himself:  after the wonder of ‘All the Light We Cannot See’, he has again proven his  mastery with a tribute in praise of The Story, the tales that keep us reading,  and searching for more when the tale is finished.

            It’s not immediately clear where we are being directed by Doerr in this sometimes confusing travel through time, starting two hundred years in the future on a spaceship voyaging to a new unpolluted planet after Earth becomes uninhabitable – not every traveller expects to arrive in their lifetime, but Konstance, barely a teenager, has high hopes that she and her beloved father will arrive safely.  She hopes.

            Back to 2020:  Octagenerian Zino Ninis is rehearsing five children in a local Idaho library to perform a play he has written based on an ancient Greek legend by Antonius Diogenes about Aethon, a simple shepherd who longs to fly, to be an owl, to live in Cloud Cuckoo Land, where rivers flow with wine (Aethon likes his wine!), and turtles plod by with honey cakes on their backs – in short, Paradise.  Zino and his five ‘actors’ are presenting their play For One Night Only, and tonight is the dress Rehearsal. Sadly, they haven’t anticipated the arrival of Seymour, a severely disturbed and angry young teenager with a pistol and a home-made bomb.

            Then there is a dizzying shift in time to the Siege of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453:  Anna, a young Greek orphan who needs money for her sick sister, chances across (steals) an ancient text from an abandoned monastery;  she sells as many of these precious papyri as she can before her Italian customers flee the besieged city, but keeps one codex – the story of Aethon, and his efforts to reach Cloud Cuckoo Land.

            We learn more about Zino Ninis, too – a solitary man who was unable to acknowledge his true self, even to the man whom he most loved when it most counted, but who redeemed himself with a great act of heroism, an act which saves his child actors – and his translation of Aethon’s adventures in his efforts to get to Cloud Cuckoo Land.

            Until just before the end of this wonderful story, it wasn’t clear to me how all the different times would join up;  each section and its engaging characters seemed to be separate stories within The Story, but the link is Diogenes’s simple shepherd who, after various disguises and frightening adventures decides that he’d like to go home now, thanks.  Fair enough!

            Konstance from the future has the last chapter in this wonderful tribute to the written word:  she uncovers shocking truths, helped by clues furnished by a man whom society has justly rejected and, thanks to him, she manages to escape, to live a productive life.  Anthony Doerr asks all the big questions of us here – and provides many of the answers.  What a journey!  SIX STARS.