NP - Cloud Atlas

[Ghetta Life]

>From: kelber at mindspring.com
>
>As long as we're getting ahead of Chapter 1:
>
>SPOILER:
>
>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.

MORE SPOILER:

By themselves these chapters don't hold enough for lengthy discussion, so as 
long as we alert each other w/ "SPOILER" alerts, I think we should feel free 
to bring at least a bit of future chapters into discussion.  And I think our 
schedule ought to be a chapter a week, if that's OK w/ others.

Theft of texts and the value/power of texts, even their suppression, is 
definitely a theme.  But although Frobisher does steal a book from Ayrs, I 
don't think it was the Ewing diary.  He reads the diary and is fascinated by 
it, asking his correspondent to see if the whole text can be found 
somewhere.  But the book he steals is an illustrated manuscript, I believe.  
Correct me if I'm wrong.

>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).

I agree that the writing is nowhere near as good as GR, or other such 
masterpieces.  I've never even heard of The Golden Notebook.  Thanks for the 
recommendation.  There are so few novels that soar to such heights, and I'm 
always hungry to hear of others.

Ghetta

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