Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr was our book club pick for this month. This book is the interweaving stories of five main characters from different times and places around the world, along with fragments of an ancient story. In an admirable depth of writing, we go from modern day Boise, Idaho to 16th century Constantinople and it never feels like Doerr is reaching.

I haven't even really started writing yet and this is long, so I'm going to be brief. Recently, there was a Pop Culture Happy Hour episode in which Linda Holmes was talking about a book she was recommending and she said, "it really makes you feel like a hack, I think, when you read this guy's writing." And that's how this book made me feel - like I was a hack at life who would never be able to write anything as good as this. Forget writing, I'll never be able to do anything as good as this. So I definitely found the book praiseworthy.

That being said, I also don't think I fully understood this novel. I kicked off book club with "I admire this book, but I don't think I'm smart enough for it. If someone asked me, what's this book about? what is the theme? I wouldn't be able to answer." And what kicked off was probably the best book club discussion we've ever had.

Possible themes:

1) The repercussions of outsiders feeling like outsiders and how society treats them.

2) Loneliness, particularly in men.

3) Always looking, yearning for something better than what you have.

4) Books and librarians are wonderful. 

Lines of Note:

"But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death." (page 52)

It is crazy to think about books dying in today's world, but what happens if the servers break or the website is hacked or the library never gets a paper copy of the book. That doesn't even account for all the books out there that have been written that no one outside of the author and a few close friends read. Sad stuff.

"Bandits wait around every corner to bash your skull and ghouls lurk in the shadows, hoping to drink your blood. Here you have cheese, wine, your friends, and your flock. What you already have is better than what you so desperately seek." (page 69)

Some of that yearning for something better theme.

"For it to reach us in this room, in this hour, the lines within it had to survive a dozen centuries. A scribe had to copy it, and a second scribe, decades later, had to recopy that copy, transform it from a scroll to a codex, and love after the second scribe's bones were in the earth, a third came along and recopied it again, and all this time the book was being hunted. One bad-tempered abbot, one clumsy friar, one invading barbarian, an overturned candle, a hungry worm - and all those centuries are undone." (page 172)

The written word is magical.  Historical and ancient written words are miracles.

"There are many people in this world," Himerius says, "who do not care what purposes their engines are put. So long as they are paid." (page 229 - 230)

Morality is always a grey line when you've got to eat, isn't it?

"Boil the words you already know down to their bones," Rex says, "and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up." (page 247)

Boiling words down sounds like fun, doesn't it? Can't you imagine what that stew would taste like? 

"Movies make you think civilization will end fast, like with aliens and explosions, but really it'll end slow. Ours is already ending, it's just ending too slow for people to notice. We've already killed most of the animals, and heated up the oceans, and brought carbon levels in the atmosphere to the highest point in eight hundred thousand years. Even if we stopped everything right now, like we all die today at lunch - no more cars, no more militaries, no more burgers - it'll keep getting hotter for centuries By the time we're twenty-five? The amount of carbon in the air will have doubled again, which means hotter fires, bigger storms, worse floods. Corn, for example, won't grow as well ten years from now. Ninety-five percent of what cows and chickens is guess what? Cron. So meat will be more expensive. Also, when there's more carbon in the air? Humans can't think as clearly. So when we're twenty-five, there will be way more hungry, scared, confused people stuck in traffic fleeing flooded or burning cities. Do you think we're gonna sit in our cars solving climate problems then? Or are we gonna fist-fight and rape and eat other?" (page 350-351)

An angry young man from an angry generation.

They sit on the front step and sip Shasta Twists and watch bumblebees drift between the thistles. Janet smells like fabric softener and cafeteria tacos and says fifty words for every one of Seymour's.... (page 352)

Two pages later, that angry young man is sipping Shasta and falling in love.

"When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it," Rex says, "or a single line quoted in somebody else's text, the potential of what's lost haunts you. It's like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become." (page 403)

A parallel I've never considered before, but makes a lot of sense.

Step step step: there comes a point where the pressure of relentless fear perforates rationality and the body moves independently of the mind. (page 451)

Have you ever had that experience when your body just takes hold in a crisis and does things and you're not doing it consciously? 

As soon as school lets out for the day, the library floods with kids with nowhere else to be. (page 487)

The public library in our town used to be beset by junior high students after school. You'd go over there at 3pm and there'd be kids throwing a football in the side yard, kids making out in the café, and kids eating Flaming Hot Cheetos and drinking Mountain Dew directly in front of the door. I know that they drove the librarians crazy. I'll also know that this COVID thing is behind us when the library is overrun by tweens again.

Things I Looked Up:

Jackdaw (page 29): Two species of bird in the genus Coloeus closely related to, but generally smaller than, the crows and ravens.

Hoopoe (page 29): Colorful birds found across Africa, Asia, and Europe, notable for their distinctive crown of feathers.

Hoopoe. Photo by Noah Strycker. 

Bastinado (page 48): A form of punishment or torture that involves caning the soles of someone's feet.

Scheria (page 116): A region in Greek mythology, first mentioned in Homer's Odyssey as the home of the Phaeacians and the last destination of Odysseus in his journey home.

Strangury (page 141): A condition caused by blockage or irritation at the base of the bladder, resulting in severe pain and a strong desire to urinate.

Quartan agues (page 141): Quartan fever is a form of malaria in which an onset of fever occurs in an interval of three to four days.

Astragalus (page 141): A root that has been used for centuries in traditional Chinese medicines for many conditions, including upper respiratory infections, hay fever, asthma, chronic fatigue, and chronic kidney disease. 

Betony (page 141): An herb grown in Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa. Used to treat asthma, heartburn, diarrhea, bladder and kidney stones.

Thwart (page 145): This was being used as a noun in the text - a structural crosspiece sometimes forming a seat for a rower in a boat.

Carrack (page 145): A large merchant ship of a kind operating in European waters in the 14th to the 17th centuries.

Homilary (page 153): A collection, or book, of homilies.

Rostrum (page 167): A raised platform on which a person stands to make a public speech, receive an award or medal, play music, or conduct an orchestra.

Culverin (page 221): A 16th- or 17th- century cannon with a relatively long barrel for its bore, typically about 10 to 13 feet long OR a kind of handgun of the 15th and 16th centuries (which is the what would have been what this text is referring to).

Arquebus (page 221): A form of the long gun that appeared in Europe and the Ottoman Empire during the 15th century.

Dervish (page 221): A member of a Muslim (specifically Sufi) religious order who has taken vows of poverty and austerity. Dervishes first appeared in the 12th century; they were noted for their wild or ecstatic rituals and were known as dancing, whirling, or howling dervishes according to the practice of their order.

Graupel (page 227): Soft, small pellets that form when supercooled water droplets freeze onto a snow crystal, a process called riming.

Fosse (page 237):  A long, narrow trench or excavation, especially in a fortification.

Nominative (page 249): Relating to or denoting a case of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (as in Latin and other inflected languages) used for the subject of a verb

Aorist (page 249): (especially in Greek) an unqualified past tense of a verb without reference to duration or completion of the action

Dative (page 249): (in Latin, Greek, German, and other languages) denoting a case of nouns and pronouns, and words in grammatical agreement with them, indicating an indirect object or recipient

Mephitic (page 280): (especially of a gas or vapor) foul-smelling; noxious

Huntington's chorea (page 341): Another name for Huntington's disease, a neurodegenerative disease that is mostly inherited. 

Casuarinas (page 358): Evergreen shrubs and trees native to Australia, the Indian subcontinent, southeast Asia, and islands of the western Pacific Ocean and eastern Africa. 

Quire (page 384): Four sheets of paper or parchment folded to form eight leaves, as in medieval manuscripts.

Lacunae (page 393): An unfilled space or interval; a missing portion in a book or manuscript.

Lascaux caves (page 424): A complex of caves in the Dordogne region of southwestern France famous for their Paleolithic cave paintings.

Red Cow & First Chinese Horse. Source.

Antimacassar (page 461): A piece of cloth put over the back of a chair to protect it from grease and dirt or as an ornament.

I'm sort of torn on this book. Deeply admirable, I learned a lot, and Tony Doerr is definitely an author to watch. But it's also a little bit sloppy in some POVs and the whole idea is not consistent. 4/5 stars