Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021) by Anthony Doerr

Book Review

Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021)

by Anthony Doerr

  I literally did not know who Anthony Doerr was before a chance conversation with a fan this summer.  Doerr has one previously published novel, the huge hit All the Light We Cannot See, which was published in 2014 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.  I'm not a big fan of the Pulitzer format- they don't have a longlist/shortlist format, they just announce the prize and then give you a couple runners up.  The winners are never a surprise- just find the three top selling works of "serious" literary fiction and look for the book that has the most widespread critical acclaim, tie breaker to the author with the higher profile, that's your winner.  Doerr published two books of short stories before he published Cloud Cuckoo Land, so that's like a classic ascent for an American writer of literary fiction working in the 21st century.

   Seven years later, we've got Cloud Cuckoo Land, his first book of any kind since All the Light We Cannot See.  Along with many others, I noticed the similarities between Cloud Cuckoo Land and Cloud Atlas (2004) by David Mitchell.  Beyond both books having "Cloud" in the title, both titles reference "imaginary" books as a unifying principle- there is no Cloud Atlas in Cloud Atlas, and Cloud Cuckoo Land references a fictional lost text by an ancient Greek author.   Both books combine past, present and future.  Here, the past is represented by a girl street urchin living in pre-Ottoman Constantinople and a Slave farm boy living outside the city.  The present is represented by the residents of a small town in the Pacific Northwest experiencing suburban sprawl.  The future is a girl living on a star-travelling generation ship that has escaped a dying planet Earth. 

    Cloud Cuckoo Land is already a certified hit- Number 3 on the Amazon sales list for "Fiction" and a National Book Award finalist.  I'm not a fan of Cloud Atlas or David Mitchell, so I'm not going to harp on Doerr for knitting a similar tapestry.  Nor would I expect the large audience for "fiction" on Amazon to care about whether the two books seem particularly related, I mean obviously, Doerr and the publisher must have considered it during the editing and publishing of Cloud Cuckoo Land.  I am surprised by the near universal critical acclaim.  I haven't seen a single takedown, and really I didn't read anything in the run-up comparing the two books. 

   Well, I'm not going to crap on Doerr's parade. If Cloud Cuckoo Land can be a National Book Award Finalist it can win a second Pulitzer.  If it wasn't such a big literary event, I probably wouldn't powered through it in a week like I actually did, but having done so, I didn't feel like there was a great pay off. Of course, Cloud Cuckoo Land is good, but I wasn't wowed.  And I couldn't make it half way through All the Light We Cannot See when I gave the Audiobook a spin last month.