NP David Mitchell's _Cloud Atlas_

[Glenn Scheper]

500 pages? Another doorstop, not a table shim.

When I searched for: "Cloud Atlas", David Mitchell
to see if he is a fellow I should like to read,
I found a few links giving a pretty full view of
the book. Some of them are surely --SPOILERS--.

http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/
 Mitchell's sextet of linked stories crosses space
 and time to explore universal themes of exploitation,
 deceit, and cruelty while paying homage to myriad
 literary genres.

 Margaret Mason: Cloud Atlas explores human savagery,
 and I was certainly tempted to do violence to my copy.

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/mitchelld/cloudas.htm
 Cloud Atlas spends half its time wanting to be
 The Simpsons and the other half the Bible.

 The six narratives of Cloud Atlas vary
 significantly in style and tone,
 but they are animated by a single theme --
 mankind's capacity for cruelty,
 rapaciousness and violence.

 "Only after this do the second halves of the
 stories fall into place,
 pulling the novel's themes into focus:
 the ease with which one group enslaves another,
 and the constant rewriting of the past by those
 who control the present."

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2004/09/readers_report_.html
((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
 In untrained or unrestrained hands,
 a thesaurus can be dangerous."
))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

http://www.loopdiloop.com/folderol/2004/11/david-mitchell-cloud-atlas.asp
 he's re-writing the past by nodding his hat at
 all the authors he's read and who clearly he
 feels some form of debt to.

 you can hear the voice of pk dick and aldous
 huxley and george orwell in the sonmi's dystopian
 future, ...

 how many others are in there i don't know,
 sometimes there's just so many that you stop
 counting them,

 you can catch a whiff of thomas pynchon's mason &
 dixon in the travel diary (yes, mitchell is one of
 the many who fits under the back-of-book blurb
 "writes like pynchon" - the funny thing is,
 after spending years enjoying reading books by
 people who "write like pynchon" i finally read
 some pynchon and absolutely hated him).


        A most complete spoiler,
        with a rare excerpt itself:

http://www.januarymagazine.com/fiction/cloudmitchell.html

 Mitchell's composition also consists of six
 interrelated narratives, each "solo"
 or story being "interrupted by its successor"
 and converging into an impressive whole.

 "In one powerful yank my trousers were pulled
 from my waist -
 was he going to bugger me?

 ...

 He laid me on the body of his mowing machine,
 pinned me down with one hand,
 and caned me with a bamboo cane in the other ....

 Christ,
 such pain!"

 And this is just the tip of the iceberg.


        Another extensive spoiler, quote.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0%2C6121%2C1162871%2C00.html

 The novel opens with one ship -
 the Prophetess -
 and ends with another ship that contains the
 survivors of Civ'lise,
 the Prescients.

 Cavendish,
 considering "The First Luisa Rey Mystery",
 imagines a critic saying:
 "But it's been done a thousand times before",
 and snarls to himself,
 "as if there could be anything not done a hundred
 thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew
 Void-Webber!

 As if Art is the What,
 not the How!"

 Another paradigm we are offered is the idea of
 another character,
 a scientist -
 shortly before he is blown to bits -
 that we exist for a brief moment inside a shell
 (like Russian dolls)
 of virtual pasts,
 one of which is also the real past,
 and another of virtual futures,
 one of which is the real future.

 Ewing,
 at the end of the book which is close to its
 beginning,
 as it has come full circle,
 sees the "natural"
 ideas of dominance and fitness as "the entropy
 written within our nature".

        Best link: DM Interview.
        A glimpse of his home, life.

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/interviews/story.jsp?story=568871
 It's like a matryoshka doll,
 with stories buried inside other stories and
 resembling each other in curious ways.

 The theme of predation,
 the tendency of a society to eat itself,
 and the Russian-doll structure,
 evolved organically as I was writing.

 Mitchell is big on metaphors.

 He works hard at conversational imagery,
 as if horrified at the prospect of saying
 anything ordinary.

    ------

I was ready to conclude there is no evidence
of him a fellow in this David Mitchell, but upon
reaching this conclusion I hear the spirit say,

 "Buy cloud atlas, and I'll go in with it on you."

So, I'm in. I'll buy or order my copy tomorrow.

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.