Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
This book spans hundreds of years as it follows the lives of five major characters in Europe and the United States as they work to overcome various challenges. It’s not an easy book to get into. It literally bounces all over space and time which routinely makes it hard to follow. The novel is a paean to the importance of the written world in shaping civilization over the centuries. The Lakeport, Idaho library is central to the story, and other book repositories are critical to the plot’s development and denouement.
The book opens in the Lakeport library in February, 2020, as Zeno Ninis, an 80-something-year-old man, rehearses a self-written play with a group of fifth graders. The performance focuses on the mythical Cloud Cuckoo Land, which is never quite defined but represents a magical place in the sky or in our minds.
As the kids rehearse, Seymour, a troubled, mentally ill teenager, drives up to the library and walks in with a bomb. He likes books but he wants to blow up the real estate office that shares a wall with the library. Since he can't sneak into that office, he’ll blow it up from next door. Seymour is upset that big developers are cutting down forests to build luxury homes and the real estate office is handling the sales.
Each chapter of the book deals with one of the major characters. We bounce from person to person and from time to time. On page 29 we learn about Antonius Diogenes, a Greek who lived around 2000 years ago. He wrote a 24-folio book about a man who had a series of mystical adventures in which he was turned into various animals and birds as he made his way through life towards his destination of Cloud Cuckoo Land. Antonius’s tale frames the sections of the book. It is also the basis for the play that Zeno wrote and that the kids are rehearsing as the snow starts to fall.
Our next experience is in Constantinople between 1439 and 1452 with Anna, a young girl who lives in a nunnery with her older sister, Maria, who works in a factory of sorts doing embroidery. Anna is too young for sewing, so she gets water and food for the workers and runs errands for the boss. As she gets older, she takes on more involved tasks, including getting food and wine for the family that owns the embroidery business. During one of her wine hauls, the ten-year old hears a man reciting a story. This is the first time she ever saw a book up close. She is fascinated and convinces the man to teach her how to read in exchange for wine. The soon-to-be-tipsy tutor, Licinius, teaches her to read, starting with The Odyssey. Over the years she has become a good reader. Licinius is getting old and frail. Just before he dies, he warns her that, “Books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants.” Her tutor gives Anna his six books as a parting present.
Around the same time, we meet a mother in a village in Bulgaria who gives birth to a boy with a split lip. The villagers consider him a freak who should be destroyed but people can’t quite do that to a baby. They figure that since he can’t suck milk from his mother that he’ll die anyway. He survives. His name is Omeir and he turns out to be a strong, reliable worker and a good person. Many of the villagers avoid him because of his disfigured face, but he and his grandfather provide needed food and labor for their neighbors. His grandfather tells tall tales that while away the work hours.
When Omeir is ten, he helps deliver twin oxen that he helps raise. The boy and the bovines –named Moonlight and Tree – become a team as he raises and trains them. Omeir becomes an ox whisperer. Omeir’s land is Muslim and controlled by the sultan who wants to conquer Christian Constantinople. A few years after the bovines are born, Muslim troops come to the village and plunder goods. They also take Omeir and Tree and Moonlight with them as they go to fight for Constantinople.
Now the book starts to get confusing as the settings shift back in time to 1941 when Zeno - the old guy rehearsing fifth-graders for a play in 2020 - is seven-years old. As part of an immigrant family, he grows up in rough times, but once he discovers the Lakeport library, he becomes fascinated by the books that the librarians read to the children. He takes special solace in books after his mother dies suddenly. Zeno’s father soon becomes involved with a woman, Mrs. Boydton, who doesn’t like kids or books. At the end of the year, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and Zeno’s dad joins the rest of the young men in the village and goes off to war leaving his son with Mrs. B.
Zeno’s father dies in the war so he and Mrs. B are stuck with each other. As Zeno reaches his teens, he realizes that he's attracted to men. Some of his classmates sense that he’s gay and make fun of him. When he turns 17, he joins the Army, which is convenient because it’s 1951 and the Korean War is raging.
We now flip to Lakeport, 2002 to 2011. We learn that the 6-year old Seymour has serious adjustment issues. He can’t tolerate people or noises. His single mother, Bunny, struggles to make ends meet and to help her son get through life in decent shape. They live in a trailer outside of Lakeport. Seymour has trouble adapting to school and Bunny is called in to see the principal several times a week. The one place where Seymour is happy is the forest on a huge swath of property owned by a local rich guy. Seymour is relaxed and happy as he communes with nature. He makes friends with an owl – that he names Trustyfriend – who lives in what Seymour sees as a magic place. Seymour talks to the owl and imagines that Trustyfriend talks back to him. It’s a type of therapy that helps calm down the human. After a few months of this, Seymour begins to wear earmuffs in school when he’s not in class and he calms down enough so that Bunny no longer has to go to the principal’s office.
As Seymour goes through elementary school, he spends a lot of time in the Lakeport library, learning about owls and other animals and many other things. His behavior improves. One day when heading to his magical woods, he sees a sign indicating that the land will soon be developed into “Custom Townhouses” for rich people. He is not happy.
Our next marker (page 109) reads The Argos: Mission Years 55-58. We meet Konstance who lives on a starship that is heading to a distant solar system where an Earth-like planet will be home to humans fleeing a world ravaged by climate change. She is five years old and is one of 86 humans heading for a new life in a new world. They grow their own food and recycle and purify their water. A super-computer, Sybil, runs everything. The kids go to a school that has every bit of human learning in its storage units. Konstance’s dad is a farmer while her mother is a seamstress who fixes clothing which needs to be repaired since you can’t go down to a store to buy a new shirt.
As Konstance gets a bit older, one of the books she learns about in school is Cloud Cuckoo Land, which is about Aethon, the central character in Diogenes’s book, who went on a marvelous journey where he magically became many different animals as he experienced the world. Aethon is slow-witted but wildly curious about life. He gains wisdom as he experiences different situations. Konstance’s dad reads it to her at night before bed. She loves the book which triggers her imagination as she falls asleep.
Now we go back in time (probably around 200 years back but it’s hard to tell) to the Lakeport library on February 20, 2020. Seymour, now a 21-year old and an environmental activist/terrorist, has entered the library with two pressure cooker bombs. He flipped out when developers knocked down the trees in his forest magic land, including the big pine that Trustyfriend lived in. In high school he joined the student environmental group and after he graduated he fell in with some radicals who will do anything to push their Green agenda. He is under the spell of a young woman who knows exactly how to manipulate him into doing things that the leaders of the organization will not do, like blow up stuff.
The kids are rehearsing the play upstairs, but Seymour is confronted by one of the librarians, Sharif, that he shoots in the shoulder. He didn’t mean to, but bombing a building is new to Seymour.
Zeno hears the gunshot. The students are lost in the play, which recounts the adventures of Aethon. Seymour hears sirens - the police know that something is going on. Zeno carries on as if there hadn’t been a gunshot.
Constantinople 1452 Anna turns twelve but nobody notices. Her sister, Maria, is feeling sick. She has been traumatized by various people along the way so this is no surprise. Anna has heard that for a certain amount of money, nuns can cast a good spell to make Maria feel better. Anna sells various things (that she probably stole) to get money. She also joins forces with a boy, Humerius, who is paid to find books and parchments and bring them back to Italian collectors. Anna goes into dilapidated buildings and takes out whatever she can. She is small and can get through the windows since the doors are rusted shut.
During her first foray into a ruined building she finds ancient books and codices that the Italians buy for a good price. Some of the writing is in Greek, which her tutor taught her how to read.
Back in Bulgaria, Omeir and the sultan's troops are heading east to take Constantinople. He’s worried about how his grandfather and mother will do without him but he can’t get away. He notices that something is being built in a huge tent. It turns out to be a super cannon that can shoot projectiles that can knock down the city's thick walls.
Inside the walls, the people are getting nervous but they take some comfort in the fact that, despite repeated attempts, no enemy has ever taken their city. Anna continues to find written materials – papyrus, slate, vellum – which the Italians buy. She learns that they are from the city of Urbino, the only other city she has heard of. She is excited about the prospects of someday seeing places other than the city where she lives. A lot of what she finds is damaged by water and rot. This reinforces one of the main themes of the book – words and writing really are fleeting and easily lost to time.
The next chapter takes us to Korea in 1951 where Zeno is driving supply trucks to support the US combat troops. He and his companion, Blewitt, hit a mine. Both are injured and captured by the Chinese. They expect to be shot but they end up marching to a prison camp. They undergo some light torture and are offered the chance to get cigarettes in exchange for going before a movie camera and criticizing the US. They pass on the opportunity. Blewitt and Zeno adapt to life in the camp. One day they find a broken body that looks dead. He’s not dead. He’s British Lance Corporal Rex Browning who was beaten severely for having a bad attitude. Zeno and Browning bond. Rex is a teacher of the classics and Zeno was always interested in Greek language and culture. Rex teaches Zeno to understand, read and write Greek. Zeno is romantically attracted to Rex who seems interested in him. They keep it platonic but a bond develops. Over the next two years, Zeno and Rex swoon for each other but don’t do anything but read and learn Greek together. Rex is teaching Zeno The Odyssey, which Rex of course had memorized.
Back to the future. On the starship Argos, Konstance turns ten years old. Real pancakes – not the fake ones made in the food synthesizer – are the birthday food of choice. Now that she’s ten, Konstance can go to the adult library and check out all of human knowledge. Library Day is once a week and it’s a big deal since you can visit anywhere that ever existed through sophisticated virtual reality which is literally lifelike. Konstance visits Istanbul, which used to be Constantinople. She sees how beautiful the city was and how it was almost impenetrable. The key word here is “almost” for those of you paying attention. She also learns that it will take almost 600 years to get to Beth Oph 2, their new home planet, so no one alive on the ship now will get there. Bummer.
Back in the distant past (1453), Omeir and the army continue towards the big city. Despite being an outcast because of his disfigured face, he and his fellow road-building troops bond and he develops a sense of worth. In the city Anna has enough money to give the nuns to buy a cure for her sister, Maria, who has been getting weaker. (She had been beaten regularly by one of her masters and may have had some type of motor skills damage.) For whatever reason, the potion works and Maria can walk without help now. Anna is still doing her thing, foraging for books all over the old, abandoned parts of the city. She finds a codex in pretty good shape and is excited about how much money it will fetch. However, she gets nothing since the Italians have left the city which they fear will fall to the Muslims – no dummies they. The next morning, Master Kaliphates, the boss of the seamstresses, also leaves. The workers go home to await their fate. Anna and Maria stay – they’re orphans – and help fortify the walls with anything they can find. Anna takes a look at the codex she found. It’s in Greek and she understands a lot of it. It was written by a guy named Diogenes and is about a character named Aethon. Despite the impending attack, reading the text has made her happy.
Back in outer space, Konstance is twelve years old. During school, an alarm goes off - a virus has infected the ship and people are ordered to lock down and stay in their compartments. She still can use the library and she checks out ancient Greece. (She uses a virtual reality tool called a Vizer to produce the images of the world.) She and her father have been reading Greek classics so she’s interested in the history of the country. She virtually goes to Thessaly, the land of magic in Diogenes’s codex, and is enthralled by what she sees. There are lots of things growing and many happy people. It does seem to be a magic land. The plague gets worse and the lockdown becomes stricter. One thing she and her parents can’t understand is how a sealed space ship developed a virus more than 60 years after it left earth. Her dad reads Aethon's tale to her, which she finds fascinating. A bit later, her father makes her a biomed suit that can keep the virus away from her. He puts her in a secure room where the virus can’t reach her. Shortly after that, Dad and Mom die.
Konstance begs Sybil to let her out of her locked compartment but the computer is programmed to keep Konstance safe from the virus so she can’t leave. There is no activity anywhere. She still has the library’s unlimited resources so she looks up her father’s history. He was from Australia but he left because climate change had ruined his family’s farm. He ended up on the starship with his wife and Konstance. She also sees that, as a teenager, her father had Diogenes’s book called Cloud Cuckoo Land. She becomes fascinated with it as she finds out that the definitive edition was translated by Zeno Nunis two hundred years earlier. She wonders who he was. She uses the cyber-library to do research and finds out that he was a Korean War veteran and that his heroic actions saved a group of fifth graders from a bomb explosion in 2020 in Lakeport, Idaho.
Konstance believes that she may be the only person left alive on the ship. She’s been isolated for over eight months and has heard nothing from any other human. She understands that the only way she gets out of this mess is if she figures out how to outwit Sybil.
We’re only halfway through the book.
Back in Constantinople in 1453, 60 cannons, plus the really big one, shelled the city. The walls still stand but it’s a matter of time until they fall. The leaders push everyone to the extreme. Omeir’s oxen, Tree and Moonlight, need rest but there is no rest until the city falls. As the cannon fire, Anna reads her codex about the adventures of Aethon and is enthralled by the lyricism of the text. This kid is a nerd. She reads the words to her sister, Maria, who is fading again but loves to hear the story. A group of priests brings out a sacred painting of Christ’s crucifixion that has always warded off attackers. It doesn’t work this time as the cannons fire and the priests drop the painting which crashes to the ground.
At the same time Omeir is sad because Tree, one of the twin oxen, died. He was just worn out from lugging heavy battle equipment. In the city, Anna’s sister, Maria, dies. She also was just worn out. It is the 55th day of the siege and the walls are crumbling. Anna cuts her hair and sneaks out of Constantinople. Omeir also is done with battle. He frees Moonlight, the other oxen, and heads home.
Anna finds a skiff that she rows out of the city. She has her codex that Diogenes wrote and a bit of food and a few clothes. She heads west towards Urbino which she pictures as a special place because that's where the Italians who bought her books live. Her boat flounders a few miles from the city. She abandons it and goes to the land. Someone knocks her out and steals what little food she has.
As fate would have it – and fate is a big deal in this novel – Omeir, who also is escaping, finds Anna sleeping. He fixes her head injury and gives her a roasted partridge that he had. They don’t trust each other but they do travel together toward Omeir’s home in Bulgaria. He notices that she is protecting a cloth-wrapped package that contains moldy animal skins with text on them - Diogenes codex of Cloud Cuckoo Land. They barely survive the trip back to his village but they do. He thinks that the trip with her was one of the most memorable of his life and neither one of them can understand each other since they literally speak different languages.
It’s rough at first since none of Omeir’s family members trust Anna who doesn't even speak their language. Eventually Omeir’s mother warms up to the Greek girl and teaches her their language. Omeir and Anna get married and have a family. At one point, their son was very ill so Anna took out her copy of Cloud Cuckoo Land – the one that Zeno ended up translating – and read it to the boy as she had done with her sick sister, Maria, years before. It worked and the boy recovered. Over the years, Anna read Aethon's tale to many children in the village, sometimes for fun and sometimes to cure illnesses.
Omeir and Anna were together for decades. She dies at 55 and Omeir passes eleven years later. Before he left this world, he cleaned up and preserved Anna’s codex of Cloud Cuckoo Land. He took it to Urbino, Italy, to present to the learned men who bought books from Anna decades earlier. The scholars are delighted at the work and begin to negotiate with him over price. He asks for a meal for himself and oats for his Donkey, Clover. A deal was stuck. A masterpiece was preserved.
In 1953, Zeno, who was twenty years old, survived the prison camp and returned home. Zeno gets a job with Lakeport and plows snow and is a groundskeeper. He lives with Mrs. Boydton, who was his father’s girlfriend. She is sick with Huntington’s chorea so Zeno drives her to her medical appointments. Before the war ended, he lost contact with Rex who tried to escape. Zeno checks with all sorts of British military organizations but he can’t find out what happened to Rex. Friends try to fix Zeno up with dates. He occasionally goes out with women but he’s gay, which is hard to be in a small Idaho own in the 1950s. Zeno spends a lot of time at the library where he delves into Greek literature. In 1970, out of the blue, Zeno gets a letter from Rex inviting him to his birthday in May. Rex is married to Hillary now, but Zeno heads over to England to see his friend. Hillary turns out to be a male who sort of cross-dresses and is a real vamp, although a sweetie. Zeno was happy to see his old friend as well as see a bit of England. As Zeno is about to get on the plane to go home, Rex gives him a Greek-English lexicon to help Zeno with his Greek. Rex also delivers a pep talk about how much Zeno can contribute to the world.
Zeno and Rex keep up a lively correspondence with each other, usually about technical aspects of Greek translation. Zeno gets quite good at it. Rex dies suddenly of a heart attack a few years after Zeno’s trip to visit him. A few years later, Mrs. Boydton passed on. Zeno redecorates the house and sets up a serious study where he can translate Diogenes’s Cloud Cuckoo Land into English.
Meanwhile, back in the Argos, the ship is on its way to a new planet with only one person on board. Konstance explored the world the starship left behind. It is ravaged by climate disasters, especially concerning growing food and producing clean water.
Konstance has figured out that Sybil knows everything and yet she knows nothing since she will not let Konstance out of her pod after almost a year of being isolated. Whatever virus was in the air is long gone. Konstance makes ink from the food concentrate she lives on and begins to draw her take on the Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Konstance found a trove of real books that her father had hidden, including Cloud Cuckoo Land, which he read to her many nights. Using Sybil’s virtual reality, Konstance drops into the Lakeport library as the kids are rehearsing the play. She sees that the students are producing Zeno’s translations of Cloud Cuckoo Land, the book that she just discovered. She reads that a bomb went off and that five kids were saved by Zeno. She wonders who they were. She of course uses her Vizer to go back in time to track down the kids, one of whom was her great-grandmother, Rachel Wilson. Small universe, isn’t it?
Konstance finds schematics for the ship and sees that it really isn't a spaceship. It’s a sealed capsule. There was no record of its launch because it was never launched. It is still on earth, 65 years after it was supposed to head for the stars. Konstance needs to get out but Sybil, who doesn't know this is a sham, is programmed to not release her. Konstance finds a way to make a tool to literally bust her out of her pod and the ship. She finds herself in Greenland, where the journey began 65 years ago. The ship didn’t go anywhere, but was certainly a journey for the 86 people who were on the Argos. All but one died. Konstance has a three-year-old son and she reads him Cloud Cuckoo Land, just as her father did to her many years before.
Zeno retired in 1995 and translated lots of Greek classics. He spends a lot of time at the library where a new hire, Sharif, tells him about a new discovery of an olds Greek book by Diogenes. It is the version that Anna carried with her as she left Constantinople. Zeno is really excited since in one of his publications Rex wrote about how that book was missing and was highly sought after by scholars. The piece was “Part fairy tale, part fool’s errand, part science fiction, part utopian satire,” but very interesting. Zeno goes to the library every day and throws himself into translating it, but he is frustrated by the poor quality of much of the text. The librarians, Marian and Sharif, encourage him when he is ready to give up so he keeps at it. In the summer of 2019, massive fires plague the West, including Idaho. It’s hard to work in the library but Zeno plugs along on the ancient text of Cloud Cuckoo Land. The local kids are curious about what he’s doing. The old man tells them that he’s translating something that was written thousands of years ago. He summarizes the tale of Aethon's many adventures and they are enthralled.
Back in Lakeport in 2019, Seymour is making plans to bomb the real estate office/library with help from Mathilda, her contact with the eco-terror group. He is smitten with her as she encourages him to be brave and bomb away. The weather keeps getting worse with several devastating hurricanes wreaking havoc. Major fires seem to have broken out everywhere. Mathilda pushes Seymour to the point where there is no doubt that he will set off the bomb. He runs into some of his friends from the high school environmental club who are going to Boise to protest the lack of action on climate change. He disdains them for not doing enough.
At the Lakeport library in February of 2020, Zeno, who is now 86-years old, is happy as he produces the play with his fifth-graders. He is at peace, doing what he loves. One of the kids has figured out that two of the chapters of Zeno's translation are probably in the wrong order. He agrees and is pleased that the students are so into the book and play.
On February 20 after Zeno goes downstairs and sees that librarian Sharif has been shot by an intruder. Zeno and the kids and the librarians are hostages now. He needs to keep the kids calm so he goes back to the rehearsal and tells the kids to continue. Seymour won’t let Sharif get medical help. Seymour’s job is to lead Green revolt by blowing up the real estate office by setting a bomb off in the library and he wants nothing to interfere with that. Zeno approaches Seymour and tells him that he is going to get help for Sharif.
Zeno calls for help for Sharif. He sees that Seymour is acting weird so he grabs the pressure cooker bombs in the two backpacks and runs out of the buildings as someone from the eco-terror group remotely starts to dial the cell phone number that will detonate the bombs. Seymour decided not to do it, but the backup plan worked. Zeno is killed but everyone else is safe. He is a true hero.
Seymour was tried and convicted of various terrorist crimes and served 36 years in prison. He learned a lot of advanced computer programming while inside, He is a genius and is enlisted to check for programming errors in a huge virtual reality database that contains the history of the world. This, being developed by the Ilium Corporation (the same company that produced Konstance’s “starship”) is the precursor to the Vizer world that she explored on the Argos.
While checking on Lakeport, Idaho, to find errors, he learned more about what happened on the day that the library and real estate office blew up. The kids rewrote Zeno’s ending for the play and made Aethon's last act a wonderful one as he returns to his old life as a simple farmer, but one who now has the wisdom of the world as his constant companion. During his far-ranging travels, he has learned that all humans, even bad ones, help shape the world, which is a very precious, special place that ends up self-correcting when bad things happen. If things are bleak now, wait a bit and see what happens. If that doesn’t work, do something about it.
Seymour was released in 2057 at age 55. His work involves further checking of the Ilium Corporations’ Atlas of Everything. He finds that recently the company is providing false information - fake data - that will help them make more money. He makes it his life’s work to undo all of the bad things that are in their virtual reality code.
Seymour got in touch with the five kids who were rehearsing the play in the library that day. They are having a reunion which he asks to attend. They agree. Rachel Wilson and her husband (Konstance’s grandparents) are there. Seymour apologizes for what he did to them and Zeno and others on February 20, 2020, when the bomb went off. He then shows him a news device that he’s been working on with Ilium Corporation, a Perambulator, that lets you virtually see what happened in the past and also move around to go to different places in the visual view. You can literally enter the library. It is very high tech and is what Konstance will use on her trip on the Argos. The reunion folks go back to that day before the bombing, when things were wonderful. They have a great time.
Bob’s Take
This was a very confusing book. You have to be on your toes (what does that even mean?) to keep track of the leaps and bounds of the book as it moves from here to there, and from then to now and to the future, and all over space and time. Being ADD/ADHD is an asset in pursuing this novel. One friend expressed frustration at trying to keep things straight. I can relate.
The journey of the Diogenes book/codex is remarkable. It is real and was probably written by a Greek over 2000 years ago. The tale of the text's survival is a fiction, but is an homage to the importance and persistence of the written word.
The main theme of the book is that books and words really matter. Libraries are central to the architecture of the novel. The Lakeport library is the fulcrum but the Library on the Argos and the library where Anna found the codex are important.
Librarians matter. Seymour, Zeno, Konstance, and the fifth-grade class that Zeno works with are all regularly helped by librarians, although in Konstance’s case, he/she is a computerized one.
Damaged and disadvantaged people succeed and become productive humans.
• Zeno is gay and shy and thinks that he’s stupid.
• Anna is an illiterate orphan.
• Omeir is a disfigured human that many people think of as the work of the devil.
• Konstance is a sheltered creature in a totally artificial environment. But they rise above their stations in life
• Zeno ends up writing a definitive translation of a Greek work and ends up really happy in life.
• Anna becomes a successful wife and mother and preserves a great work of ancient literature.
• Omeir survives a rough childhood and a terrible war and becomes a pillar of his village. He literally saves the Cloud Cuckoo Land codex.
• As a twelve-year old, Konstance figures out that the starship Argos is a complete sham and defeats a super-computer in escaping from her prison and having a productive life.
• Seymour’s success is a stretch. It took him 40 years to be good, although he would not make the cell phone call to detonate the backpack bombs in the library. He does good work while in prison and even better work after release as he undermines a corporate attempt to add false, self-serving data into critical digital architecture.
Religion can be problematic. Belief differences were a major driver of the war between the Muslims and Christians in the book, and today, 600 years later, those two groups still are at odds. The Saracens attacking Constantinople weren’t motivated by theology. They just wanted to plunder the city as their reward for taking it. The Christians behind the walls had little knowledge of the religion of the Saracens attacking them. They just wanted to be left alone.
Climate change launches the spaceship and triggers Seymour’s anger that leads to the bombing. But when Konstance (great name - she is that) figures out that the spaceship never left the planet, the world she returns to is still functioning. Humans figured out how to meet the challenges of climate change.
Anthony Doerr, the book’s author, won a Pulitzer for 2014’s All the Light We Cannot See, a book about a young French girl and a young German soldier whose paths cross during World War II. I enjoyed it but I wasn’t blown away by it. I was really impressed by Cloud Cuckoo Land, although I’m pretty sure that I didn’t understand a lot of it.
I thought this was a great book. It’s beautifully written and it has a sweep and scope that is rare in literature. The characters are unforgettable. The author’s messages are nice, sort of Ted Lasso-ish.
It was wicked good. Books are wicked good.
