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Antonius diogenes cloud cuckoo land6/6/2023 ![]() ![]() It would rob the reader of some of the joys of the book to say too much about how all these disparate threads come together, but the novel reads like it’s half its actual length. Doerr has packed it dense with what are clearly hours and hours of deep research-the chapter on the building of the biggest cannon in the ancient world is just one example–and yet it flies. It helps that Doerr’s prose is extraordinarily clear and clean. He effortlessly mimics a half-dozen different voices, ranging across junior-high English assignments, academic jargon, and YouTube videos, while his narration occasionally drops in a devastating aside or beautiful piece of description. Like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, to which people are already comparing it, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a blend of invention and history, science fiction and fable, romance and war story. ![]() But in contrast to Mitchell’s sometimes cold and cerebral detachment, Doerr’s novel hums with sympathy for all his characters, even the most unpleasant one. Seymour, in the hands of another author, could easily be a cliché, a Trenchcoat Mafia wannabe who a steady diet of shady Internet videos has radicalized. ![]()
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