Omeir stays away from people, preferring the company of animals. For example, on the other side of the wall around Constantinople lives a farmboy, Omeir, who has a cleft lip that scares his superstitious neighbors, who fear the boy has been cursed. Others are set clearly within concurrent time frames. Sometimes the connections among characters aren’t visible immediately. The comment is also suggestive of another theme, that of humanity’s relationship to the natural world and the importance of its stewardship. That speech neatly sums up one of the novel’s major and pleasurable themes: the safeguarding of forgotten works of art. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.” If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. When Licinius is on his deathbed, he tells Anna, “But books, like people, die.

It is the fantastical adventures of the shepherd Aethon, who wants to become a bird and fly away. When her sister Maria falls critically ill, Anna is able to comfort her by reading to her from Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes. More than anything, Anna wants to learn to read, and when she finds a suitable book she begins the laborious process with the help of Licinius, a tutor she overhears reciting from Homer’s The Odyssey. Constantinople is a bookish city, noted for its libraries. In 1413, 13-year-old Anna spends her days inside the heretofore impregnable walls of Constantinople, making a meager living with her sister, embroidering the robes of priests. The cast of characters includes a teenage ox driver, a young seamstress, a student infuriated by climate catastrophe, a closeted Korean War veteran, and the sole conscious occupant of an interstellar vehicle. Added to that, it focuses attention on a lost, resurrected manuscript that exemplifies the power of literature and of librarians by envisioning a magical place between Earth and Heaven.Ĭloud Cuckoo Land (628 pages Scribner) is set in 15th-century Constantinople, contemporary Idaho, and aboard a generational starship in the not-too-distant future. His latest novel, the follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See, not only clocks in at more than 600 pages, but follows five major protagonists across three meticulously detailed timelines.

Cloud cuckoo land book review