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“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight.

These repositories and their keepers, Doerr asserts, play an essential role in introducing humanity to ideas and helping ensure those ideas endure.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: With its emphasis on the importance of sharing and preserving stories, “Cloud Cuckoo Land” is, ultimately, an ode to libraries. Second, the myth is a form – first tablets, then parchment, then a codex, and later pixels – in need of translation and care. First, the myth is an idea – an instructive tale about the hunt for someplace better: an aerial nirvana. Letters are packed onto a parchment “like the tracks of a hundred shorebirds.”Īethon’s narrative plays two important roles in the book. Embroiderers conjure “a nightingale from thread and patience.” A leering merchant hunches like a vulture. Birds and more birds – owls, terns, osprey, grouse – fly off the page. One of the joys of the novel is its vivid, energetic language. His characters struggle, search, and learn, mirroring the travels and trials of Aethon himself. Omeir has a part to play as well.įueled by deep imagination and insistent compassion, Doerr weaves together his storylines with brisk pacing that never feels rushed. Anna’s discovery of the “Cloud Cuckoo Land” codex transforms her into both myth-sharer and protector. Twelve-year-old oxherd Omeir, a gentle soul conscripted into the Ottoman army with his two mighty oxen, wearily marches south. Orphaned, inquisitive Anna longs to read and cares for her ailing sister within the city walls. The local public library – a place of refuge and possibility for both men – becomes their meeting ground, with potentially explosive results.įinally, Doerr takes readers to 15th-century Constantinople in the months leading up to its siege. Seymour, who is increasingly overwhelmed by the outside world and devastated by the destruction of a nearby forest that offered soothing shelter, walks a darker road. In present-day (although pre-pandemic) Idaho, two very different men cross paths: Zeno Ninis, a Greek American translator in his 80s, and Seymour Stuhlman, a troubled 17-year-old loner who’s most at home in nature.Įlderly Zeno, lonely and buttoned-up, has searched for a sense of home and purpose since being freed from a prison camp in the Korean War. Part of a select group escaping climate-battered Earth for a habitable planet light-years away, Konstance faces the twin challenges of survival and fact-finding after stumbling on a mystery in the ship’s virtual-reality library. There’s Konstance, a 14-year-old aboard a ship called the Argos decades in the future she shares her quarters with a filament-and-light Artificial Intelligence entity named Sybil. 6 summer hearings wrap up: What did we learn? In ways both subtle and overt, the myth connects the novel’s chief characters, all of whom face their own journeys in vastly different parts and periods of our world. Here, “Cloud Cuckoo Land” refers to Doerr’s own made-up myth about a hapless shepherd named Aethon journeying to a utopian city “floated in the heavens.” Purportedly written by Diogenes in the first century, the tale threads through the book fragments of text from recovered pages introduce each chapter. “Cloud Cuckoo Land” may sound to some like a ridiculous title, but readers paging through the book’s opening pages will discover – or be reminded – that the name comes from Aristophanes’ 2,400-year-old play “The Birds.” The good news: Doerr’s creation lifts off quickly, soars, and then, like the various wildfowl wheeling through the story, lands with practiced finesse. In some hands, this could have been a big mess.

A huge sweep of a story, “Cloud Cuckoo Land” features no fewer than five plotlines and as many key characters contending with big events, challenges, and questions. In this ambitious follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “All the Light We Cannot See,” Anthony Doerr delivers in a big way.