intertwining ammonites

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction, historical fiction, science fiction

Review: Reading this book felt like doing a puzzle with beautiful, imaginatively drawn pieces.  You don't know what the final picture will be, but you know it's got to be something fantastic.  The book requires some close attention to recognize all the puzzle pieces, but your patience and attention are well worth it, as it all comes together to form an intricate and unexpected picture.

Made up of three stories from different time periods that intertwine and spiral together, each story contains elements of homecoming, identity, and searching.  Anna and Omeir are on opposite sides of the siege of Constantinople in 1453.  Seymore and Xeno are on opposite sides of an accidental hostage situation at a library in Idaho in 2020.  Konstance is the only survivor on a generation ship in 2145 (or so she thinks).  Wrapping around and running through each separate story is the tale of Cloud Cuckoo Land, a fictional ancient Greek comedy that is found and lost and found again throughout history.

Anna finds a codex in a ruin on which is written the tale of Cloud Cuckoo Land, in which Diogenes tells the tale of his attempt to find the mystical world of the birds.  Anna keeps the codex safe, and it disappears until it is next discovered some 500 years later in the vaults of the Vatican.  It is very degraded, but Xeno attempts to translate it as the pages are scanned in and released to the public.  He tells the story to a group of children, who decide to create a play based on the story.  Konstance is told the story by her father, one of the few members of the generation ship crew who remember Earth, which has become an environmental disaster.  When the rest of the crew is killed by a plague, she pieces the story together on scraps of fabric, and ultimately pieces together the reality of her world.  It is primarily Xeno's and Konstance's stories that weave together, but no part of any of the stories could exist without the rest.

This is truly one of the most creative and intricate books I've ever read.  Doerr puts all the pieces together very well.  And not only does he keep the whole puzzle together in his head, he writes lines like:

    (on learning Greek) "Boil the words you already know down to their bones, and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, starting back up."

    (describing the frozen north) "...it was so cold that when the hairy wildmen who lived there spoke, their words froze and their companions would have to wait for spring to hear what had been said."