Book 6: "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell
Monday, January 26th, 2009 11:52![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeWhy have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. 'Admire me, for I am a metaphor.'
The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing
Letters from Zedelghem
Half-Lives - The First Luisa Rey Mystery
The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish
An Orison of Sonmi-451
Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After
This fascinating novel consists of six stories, but each of the first five stops half-way through, and the second halves come after Sloosha's tale in reverse order, so that the book starts and ends with the same story. Each story mentions the one before, with Adam Ewing's journals being found by Robert Frobisher in the library of Zedelghem, while Frobisher's letters are discovered tucked into a Gideon's Bible and given to Luisa Rey. Each story involves a reincarnation of the same person, three times as a man and three times as a woman, all of whom have a birthmark shaped like a comet. Some of them are self-centred shits, while others are more serious, socially-responsible individuals, but each time echoes of their past and future selves resonate through each of their lives.
Half-way through the book, my favourite sections were "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" and "An Orison of Sonmi-451" and "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After", while my least favourite was "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish", but while reading the second half of each story, I grew rather fonder of Timothy Cavendish, and less interested in the stories of Adam Ewing and Robert Frobisher (who wrote the letters from Zedelghem), so in the end my favourites were "An Orison of Sonmi-451" and "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After" and my least favourite was "Letters from Zedelghem".
The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing
Letters from Zedelghem
Half-Lives - The First Luisa Rey Mystery
The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish
An Orison of Sonmi-451
Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After
This fascinating novel consists of six stories, but each of the first five stops half-way through, and the second halves come after Sloosha's tale in reverse order, so that the book starts and ends with the same story. Each story mentions the one before, with Adam Ewing's journals being found by Robert Frobisher in the library of Zedelghem, while Frobisher's letters are discovered tucked into a Gideon's Bible and given to Luisa Rey. Each story involves a reincarnation of the same person, three times as a man and three times as a woman, all of whom have a birthmark shaped like a comet. Some of them are self-centred shits, while others are more serious, socially-responsible individuals, but each time echoes of their past and future selves resonate through each of their lives.
Half-way through the book, my favourite sections were "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" and "An Orison of Sonmi-451" and "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After", while my least favourite was "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish", but while reading the second half of each story, I grew rather fonder of Timothy Cavendish, and less interested in the stories of Adam Ewing and Robert Frobisher (who wrote the letters from Zedelghem), so in the end my favourites were "An Orison of Sonmi-451" and "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After" and my least favourite was "Letters from Zedelghem".
