This book is my current read as the #1 on the New York Times best seller list by Pulitzer Prize winning author Anthony Doerr who wrote the best WWII novel I’ve read yet, All the Light We Cannot See that at first I found hard to read with two different parallel stories during WWII of a 12 year old girl in France and a 12 year old boy in Germany and of course their lives eventually cross. A powerful story! Worthy of all the awards! And now . . .
Well Cloud Cuckoo Land (I’m only 1/3 through) is going to be just as powerful in a different way and actually a little more difficult to read with multiple parallel stories (6 so far) taking place in the 1400’s Constantinople & Bulgaria, the 1940’s-50’s and 2020’s U.S. and Korea, and on a space ship in the future enroute to a new planet after the self-destruction of Earth. Wow! My mind is exploding as it covers so many important subjects! And already I can see how powerful a novel it is going to be, again using mostly the lives of children. I will give a final report when finished. Each story relates back to the two original Greek stories below and the importance of reading and of libraries. The future story has a Futuristic World Library on the space ship like what Google Books is trying to make now. 🙂
The title cloud-cuckoo-land denotes a realm of fantasy, dreams or impractical notions. It is from Greek Νεϕελοκοκκυγία (= Nephelokokkugía), from νεϕέλη (= nephélē), cloud, and κόκκυξ (= kόkkux), cuckoo; this compound was coined by the Greek comic dramatist Aristophanes (circa 450-385 BC) in The Birds. Then later the Greek Antonius Diogenes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land is a fabulous adventure story written by Diogenes for his niece, to beguile and console her during an illness in the 1400’s. Be prepared for snippets of Greek throughout this newer and more involved story! 🙂
¡Pura Vida!