NP - Cloud Atlas

[kelber at mindspring.com]

As long as we're getting ahead of Chapter 1:

SPOILER:

I was unpleasantly surprised when I got to Chapter 2, because the character of Ayrs was a complete knock-off of the composer 
Delius, as described in the book Delius As I Knew Him, by Eric Fenby.  I'd read this book years ago, by chance.  The fact that Mitchell,
in his Acknowledgements,  says the scenes in this chapter "owe debts of inspiration" to Fenby's book, didn't mitigate the plagiarism.  I felt I had lost all respect for the author, until I forced myself to read a little further, when the character Frobisher literally steals a book (the Ewing diary) from Ayrs' library.  Then it seemed that literary theft itself was one of the themes of this book and that Mitchell's plagiarism was open-faced and deliberate.  This is a clear theme running through the book, along with standard issues of how we read others' texts, the relation of text to reality, etc.  I read a couple of the interviews that Otto gave links to, and there wasn't much discussion of these themes.  The interviewers were clealy none too sharp, but it gave me a lingering anxiety that the book is smarter than the author.  Anyway, it's certainly worth reading, though it definitely doesn't belong on the same shelf as GR, The Brothers Karamazov, and, possibly, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (I'm re-reading it after many years to see if it's as good as I'd remembered).

-----Original Message-----
From: Ghetta Life <ghetta_outta at hotmail.com>
Sent: Jul 13, 2005 9:29 AM
To: joe at barrera.org, bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net
Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: NP - Cloud Atlas


Cloud Atlas is not a hard read at all.

!!! SPOILER BELOW !!!

I'm currently in the 4th chapter.  The 3rd chapter, "Luisa Rey," read like a 
very short (and not very good) spy-thriller.  That chapter had me starting 
to lose faith with this book (but I'll keep going to the end).  Each chapter 
has a thread connecting it to the one before, and that thread is the actual 
TEXT of the previous chapter emerging as an artifact into the current 
chapter.  That is an interesting concept and structure.  It seems that the 
"bad spy-thriller" was intended to be just that, with the author not yet 
identified, which is then found by the first-person "author" of the 4th 
chapter.

I am beginning to agree with MalignD that the writing is sometimes too 
"cute," but the interconnections of the different chapters may make the 
individual ones not the real focus...

Ghetta

>From: Joe Barrera <joe at barrera.org>
>
>Huhmp -- found reading Cloud Atlas (and C o Lot 49) very easy reading.  
>Easier than Infinite Jest and much easier than most of Pynchon's work (e.g. 
>GR). Perhaps it's a matter of taste.

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