Book Review: CLOUD CUCKOO LAND by Anthony Doerr

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The best kind of art, books, and films are those that remind us "of the immensity of the world and our own smallness inside it," reminding us that "there is nobility in being a part of an enterprise that will outlast you."

The quotations above are from Anthony Doerr's latest, CLOUD CUCKOO LAND, which he wrote as a tribute to books, and to what they stand for: The Great Conversation, the unbroken chain of Civilization, of knowledge passed down through the ages.

Doerr's novel is set in three different timelines: Constantinople in 1453, Idaho in 2020, and a space ship in an unknown date in the future. Similarly to what he did in ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, Doerr draws the life threads of people together, despite being so far removed from each other (by millenia and geography).

Doerr writes truth despite his fiction, and the germ of this novel is a missing book written by a Greek, Diogenes, sometime in 150-200 CE. Doerr writes in the afterword:

"Diogenes claimed... that it was actually a copy of a copy of a text discovered centuries before by a soldier in the army of Alexander the Great. The soldier... had been exploring the catacombs beneath the city of Tyre when he discovered... engraved onto twenty-four cypress-wood tablets, the story of a journey around the world."

The book cover becomes meaningful once the novel has been read. How can one book matter to so many, throughout the centuries?

"A book is... a way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on."

Doerr adds, however, that "books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants."

It is a reminder never to take knowledge for granted. I was shocked at these statistics from Doerr:

Only 32 out of a 100 Greek tragedies survive... 7 out of Aeschylus' 81, 7 of Sophocles' 123, and 11 out of Aristophanes' 40 comedies.

Reading this book has special significance a few weeks from a historic presidential election in my country, with one side shouting: "Forgive and forget."

As Doerr reminds us, to forget what has gone before is to let the martyrs of democracy die a second time.

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