"Cloud Atlas", David Mitchell: Connections Through Time and the Ether

This novel by David Mitchell was another one of the "recommended by my dad" series while the missus and I lived in that tiny little back-house in our college town. I bought it in 2004 or '05. It is one I recommend to other folks all the time, recommend to kids who are inspired by my informal lectures about the differences between literature and genre fiction. Not all literature is stuffy fights between dysfunctional families. (Why is that what I think other people think literature is?)

So...Cloud Atlas.

This has been called a "nested puzzle-book" before, and I suppose that is an accurate statement. For anybody wanting a good book to get into, this one here is rewarding and exciting.

It starts out in the 1840s, and you're following a doctor on a whaling vessel, and the language in which it's written is just like it would be from that era. At the bottom of page 46, it stops mid-sentence.

The next section starts and it's presented as a series of letters from a musical conductor living in the 1870s Hapsburg Austria. The letters proceed for another 40 or so pages, until they end, and a section starts where a young lady is reading the letters. Her story is a pulpy '70s style detective story.

In the middle of the action that story stops, and we get the story of an older man who feel he's been wrongly committed to an elder care home. While he's plotting his escape, the story stops and we're sent to the future, where an uprising of the android/clones is beginning.

This sections stops abruptly and we get to a future way after the fall of civilization. This section doesn't end abruptly, it is twice the size as the other parts, and ends regularly. The next section wraps up the futuristic uprising plot, then the story about the man stuck in the home ends, and then the detective story ends and the main character goes back to reading the letters. Then we see the end of that Austrian conductor, and, in his last letter, he claims to have found the other half of the whaling ship novel.

The last section is the end of that storyline.

This novel has a direct influence on the novel I'm finishing the first draft of now, and I realized it after I excitedly watched the trailer.

That's right, this book is getting a big Hollywood treatment, and by the Wachowski Brothers (makers of the Matrix) to boot. Here's a link to the extended trailer on Youtube.

This book is just fun.