Cloud Cuckoo Land
By Anthony Doerr
Don’t be so quick to dismiss yourself. Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.
This is a story about stories. About a love of story. About how the love and life of a single story shows us the resilience and necessity of story itself. It suggests that the way stories are told will morph and change over time, but the essence of story is hard-wired into the human experience.
The book includes several very interesting characters, but the protagonist, it seems, it a story that travels through time.
“The 2019 discovery of the late Greek prose tale Cloud Cuckoo Land inside a badly corrupted codex in the Vatican Library briefly set the world of Greco-Roman scholarship aflame. Alas, what archivists were able to salvage of the text left plenty to be desired: twenty-four mangled folios, each damaged to some degree. Chronology confuses and lacunae abound.”
With this introduction we move back in time to the story’s origins circa 1400 Bulgaria, and forward to its existence in a digital future.
I found Doerr’s fantastical fable endearing in its obvious love of stories, libraries and and the printed word. I also felt a disturbed by his futuristic world where print takes a back seat to VR and other technology-driven access points to information and experience.
This story is so rich and full of messages, that I couldn’t find a single, coherent theme to feature. So I hope to, instead, offer a few quotes as a glimpse into the breadth of thinking about stories that Doerr invited me into.
He begins by showing us beautifully how the love of story takes root in the heart. Set in 1400’s Bulgaria, we are introduced to a character’s thirst for letters, words and knowledge
As she sweeps the workroom floor, as she lugs another roll of fabric or another bucket of charcoal, as she sits in the workroom beside Maria, fingers numb, breath pluming over the silk, she practices her letters on the thousand blank pages of her mind. Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds. Weary Ulysses sets forth upon his raft from the case of Calypso; the spray of the ocean wets his face; the shadow of the sea-god, kelp streaming from his blue hair, flashes beneath the surface.
He claims books as the “Repository of Memories”:
The wind lifts one of the quires from his fingers and Anna chases it down and brushes it off and returns it to his lap. Licinius rests his eyelids a long time. “Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.
He suggests that books sustain us in the worst of suffering:
Singular and plural, noun stems and verb cases: Rex’s enthusiasm for ancient Greek carries them through the worst hours. One February night, after dar, huddled around the fire in the kitchen shed, Rex uses his piece of charcoal to scratch two lines of Homer onto a board and passes it over …. Through gaps in the shed walls, stars hang above the mountains. Zeno feels the cold at his back, the light pressure of Rex’s frame against his own: they are hardly more than skeletons…..
Zeno breathes, the fire sputters, the walls of the shed fall away, and in a crease of his mind, unreachable by the guards, hunger, or pain, the meaning of the verse ascends through the centuries:
“That’s what the gods do,” he says, ‘they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.” Rex looks at the Greek on the board, at Zeno, back at the Greek. He shakes his head. “Well, that’s just brilliant, Absolutely bloody brilliant.”
He points to the fragility of books:
One evening at the end of the month, walking the eastern section of the city, scrounging for food, Anna is rounding the great weathered bulk of the Hagia Sophia when she stops. Between the houses, tucked against the harbor, the priory on the rock stands silhouetted against the sea and it is on fire. Flames flicker in crumbled windows, and a pillar of black smoke twists into the sky.
Bells ring—whether to urge people to fight the fire or for another purpose, she could not say. Perhaps they ring simply to exhort the people to carry on. An abbot, eyes closed, shuffles past carrying an icon, trailed by two monks, each with a smoking censer, and the smoke from the priory lingers in the dusk. She thinks of those dank, rotting halls, the moldering library beneath its broken arches. The codex back in her cell.
Day after day, the tall Italian said, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world.
One bad-tempered abbot, the tall scribe said, one clumsy friar, one invading barbarian, an overturned candle, a hungry worm—and all those centuries are undone. You can cling to this world for a thousand years and still be plucked out of it in a breath.
He plays with story and truth:
“Do you think it’s really true, Anna? A fish so large it could swallow ships whole?”
A mouse scrabbles across the stone and rises onto its hind legs and stands twitching its nose at her with its head cocked as though awaiting her answer. Anna thinks of the last time she sat with Licinius …, he wrote, mythos, a conversation, a talk, a legend from the darkness before the days of Christ.
“Some stories,” she says, “Can be both false and true at the same time.”
He shows us the many ways stories have traveled over time:
She wraps the old goatskin codex and the snuffbox in Maria’s hood and puts them in the bottom of Himerius’s sack. Then she sets the bread and salt fish on top and ties the bag shut. All she owns in the world.
Anna escaping with the codex.
As she nears the breakwater, she pauses to bail the skiff with the earthenware jug, as Himerius used to do. Somewhere inside the city walls, a glow rises: a sunrise in the wrong place and time. Strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away.
He invites us to grieve for lost stories:
Books have always seemed to him like clouds or trees, things that were just there, on the shelves at the Lakeport Public Library. But to know someone who made one? “Take the tragedies alone,” Rex is saying. “We know that at least one thousand of them were written and performed in Greek theaters in the fifth century B.C. You know how many we have left? Thirty-two. Seven of Aschylus’s eighty-one. Seven of Sophocles’s one hundred and twenty-three. Aristophanes wrote forty comedies that we know of—we have eleven, not all of them complete.
He warns us of the empty promises of technology:
How many times, as a little girl, was she assured that Sybil contained everything she could ever imagine, everything she would ever need? …all right here, the collected cultural and scientific output of human civilization nested inside the strange filaments of Sybil at the heart of the ship. The premier achievement of human history, they said, the triumph of memory over the obliterating forces of destruction and erasure.
But it wasn’t true. Sybil couldn’t stop a contagion from spreading through the crew. She couldn’t save Zeke or Dr. Pori or Mrs. Lee or anybody else, it seems. Sybil still doesn’t know if it’s safe for Konstance outside of Vault One.
There are things that Sybil doesn’t know. Sybil doesn’t know what it meant to be held by your father inside the leafy green twilight of Farm 4, or how it felt to sift through your mother’s button bag and wonder about the provenance of each button.
He illuminates the healing power of story:
One morning in Anna’s twenty-fifth winter, on a night cold enough to freeze the water across the top of the kettle, her youngest son descends into fever. His eyes smolder in their sockets, and he soaks his clothes with sweat. She sits on the stack of rugs where they sleep, puts sthe sick boy’s head in her lap, and strokes his hair, and Omeir paces, clenching and unclenching his fists. Finally he fills the lamp, lights it, and goes out, and returns covered with snow. From his coat he produces the bundle wrapped in waxed oxhide and hands it to her with great solemnity and she understands that he believes the book can save their son as he believes it saved them on their journey here more than a decade before.
Finally, he invites us into the cosmic potential of story:
Toward the end of her life [her] memories intermingle with memories of the stories she has loved: homesick Ulysses abandoning his raft in the storm and swimming toward the island of the Phoeacians, Aethon-the-donkey wrapping his soft lips around a stinging nettle, all times and all stories being one and the same in the end.
If you’ve read to the end, thanks! This is a long one. So is the book. I read it twice. It is a book to not only digest, but to also metabolize. To take in.