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Cloud Atlas / David Mitchell

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I remember when we lived in London, this novel was in all the bookshop windows. It had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004, and may have outsold the winning title that year.  With the movie coming out in 2012, I thought it time to play a little catch-up and read this 500-page novel.

It consists of six separate, but remotely interconnected stories that take place in different locations and in different times.  The opening story is set in the South Pacific in 1850 and was immediately captivating and had me pulling out atlases and googling facts to find out if they were historic, or merely fiction.  When the first story broke off in mid-sentence I cursed my Nook, thinking that it was a transcription error in the electronic copy.  No, it was just the concept of the book, the first narrative a fragment of a diary that a subsequent character reads, only later finding the remainder propping up one leg of a bed in a Belgian chateau—that’s the level that in which stories are interconnected, and the fact that the main characters in each episode are revealed to share a comet-shaped birthmark.

There was one segment, an episode that takes place after environmental and societal collapse in the far future, that really bogged me down with its nearly impenetrable lingo. It was a little like reading A Clockwork Orange. Maybe that’s why it took me a month to finish this book, because after I left post-apocalypse Hawaii, things moved along quickly again.

Anyway, Cloud Atlas might be considered difficult, but it’s fascinating and rewarding.  Some of the stories were so compelling that I wanted the whole book to be about them.  All in all the segmented structure works, which I’m not so sure was the case with the movie version, based on what I’ve heard.  A very unique and memorable novel.

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