Cloud Cuckoo Land
By Anthony Doerr
My dad was never much of a reader. He had a few authors he liked and we always knew to get him something by John Irving or Tom Robbins when a new book was announced. When he was diagnosed with cancer and sentenced to hundreds of hours in different hospital rooms, waiting for doctors or the chemotherapy to finish, we set about finding different things to occupy his time. I made him playlists of podcasts, we brought a portable DVD player, and one of our cousins had just finished a book that everyone was talking about, it may have even been awarded the Pulitzer Prize at that point. That book was All the Light We Cannot See. He never finished it, but I can imagine that cover in the corner of every room we visited, next to his bottle of water and bag full of snacks. I don’t think I’m ever going to read that book, trauma is one hell of an demotivator.
I heard that Anthony Doerr had written something else, that at least some people were talking about, a bright blue and gold cover that when you looked at it just right, showed a book framing the title. Cloud Cuckoo Land is six hundred and twenty pages of perfectly fine story by an author who won one of the most prestigious awards there is. I do wish I had read All the Light We Cannot See so I could speak to it in response to this, but I can’t and I’m sure there’s someone out there who has. If you’ve read any of his other works, and what I have to say rings true throughout, maybe the issues I have run deeper than this book alone.
Right off the bat, there are too many perspectives. I want to say there’s two really solid books here, bouncing between different time eras and plot. Maybe there’s even three. The problem in Cloud Cuckoo Land is that by the time you start digging one of the plots, when it really starts to take off, he pulls the rug out and you have to reorient yourself with characters you may have forgotten about and a story that’s been relegated to the back of your mind. Even within the different characters, there are some having flashbacks to their youth alongside a modern day setting. It’s infuriating to read and made an at times otherwise enjoyable story insufferable. I repeatedly found myself saying “that was so cool!” turning a page, and groaning “this again?” It drove me crazy and felt more like Doerr hiding insecurities about his writing behind multiple layers of stories, rather than the framing device it was supposed to be.
What peaks my curiosity most about Doerr’s other writing is how he uses mental or physical disabilities, and to what effect. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, one character has a cleft lip that everyone looks at as a dark omen, the threat of violence is a companion to him everywhere outside of his home. Another character is an eco-terrorist, holding up a library with homemade bombs and an inherited gun. The moral of his plot, that if only he weren’t autistic, or had received proper mental health care, then maybe he’d be like his classmates, protesting climate change peacefully. No part of that felt right. Worse so alongside the other characters characterized by how they were differently-abled. When another character was described with a slight limp, gait changed from his time as a prisoner-of-war, it struck me as yet another way in which the people of this novel were defined by their physical differences. While that didn’t end up being the case for the man with the limp, it wasn’t until several chapters later that I was able to set that descriptor aside.
Hyper critical analysis aside, I enjoyed ninety percent of the actual writing. There were too many to juggle, but all the stories fit nicely within each other. It wasn’t until the end when the stories were wrapping up that any of it took a turn for the worse. The only character who didn’t feel cliche was Zeno, and I wish more of their endings looked like his. Anna and Omeir wrapped sweetly, and would have felt fully earned had they not been coupled with Seymour and Konstance, who both felt so painfully twee that it was almost as if his publisher had rejected a prior ending for being too dark. I know we’re all living in a time of mass shooters, forced quarantine, and climate disaster, but if you’re going to write about these topics, you aren’t doing them justice by wrapping them up in a clinically manicured bow. Sometimes everything doesn’t work out in the end and going out in a blaze of glory as the only alternative feels like a betrayal of the book I was just made to slog through. I wouldn’t recommend Cloud Cuckoo Land to any future readers, but I would love to talk about it with anyone who has read it.