Macayla's Cloud Atlas Blog

Hey guys, welcome to my very last post. It's been, in my opinion, kind of difficult to write posts about this (509 pages!) book. I almost feel like I need to read it again, just to get some of the smaller details I may have missed. If I'm being honest, as I was reading, I felt like my thoughts and theories were a little too scattered to put into words. I felt like all my ideas were sort of half baked. Now that I have finished the book, I have had time to think things through and further develop those ideas. As I mentioned in the previous post, one of the main themes (from what I can tell) is human nature. This can be seen in the basic summaries of each of the stories, but it also goes deeper than the surface level. Characters can be quoted saying things about how its only human nature to be destructive. For example, on page 129 of Half -Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery   Alberto Grimaldi says something very interesting. "The only answer can be 'There is no...

Sifi novels are not usually considered to have any literary merit, but Cloud Atlas  is a different story altogether. The author switches between tenses, presentation of the story, and time periods skillfully. Somehow, he manages to make what should have been a mess, a coherent story. In the first story, its written in the first person past tense, as a journal entry. He uses lingo that is consistent with the time mid-1800s period. In the second story, is also in the first person past tense in the form of letters. This takes place around the 1930s., also with consistent style In the third story, the author uses 3rd person present tense, presented as a novel set in the 1970s. The fourth story is the first person past tense, also presented as the novel, but in the 1990s. The fifth story is an interview, set in the somewhat near future. The final story is "spoken history" from the very far future. The skill at which the author writes all of these stories, I think...

I found this section to be the most interesting yet, for a couple of reasons. Timothy as a character is funny just in his actions, but then the consequences are incredible.  He appears to be our oldest narrator, but also the most childish (and kind of a jerk). He starts off his little story by telling us that he was mugged by a bunch of prepubescent girls he called "Prostitute Barbie,"  (Mitchell 145) with lollipops, which, really, shouldn't be a problem for a grown man around 60.  The next morning he embellishes his story to Madame X, saying he had been mugged by "five louts with swastikas shaved into their skulls." (Mitchell 146) in an effort to not seem weak. He also is the editor of a man who killed a critic and took all the profit. He then was confronted by the writer's brothers who demanded 50 thousand pounds by the next day. He goes through a couple of contacts and asks for money, but no one has any, so he turns to his brother.  Hi...

As I expressed in m previous post, the first section of this book was very hard for me to sit through, but as the language becomes more and more contemporary (and since reading more carefully), I have become very invested in the plot. At first, I was sort of put off by how incredibly different most of these sections are from each other, stylistically. In The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing , or the first portion, is told through daily diary entries by a man named Adam Ewing.  As customary, for diaries, he heads them with the date and no location. This section takes place around the 1850s, the era of the gold rush, so he writes as one of that time period would. Often short concise sentences, but with a few long, intricate explanations of specific happenings.  Personally, this was somewhat difficult to read because of the word choice.  Letters from Zedelghem  is the absolute antithesis of the previous section. One of the very few things they have in...

After my copy of Cloud Atlas  finally came in the mail, I had an interesting talk with my father. My father is by absolutely no means a reader. He used to tell me stories of when he was in his AP English class and how he never read the book. He would always just watch the movie and somehow came up with an acceptable paper on it. When I was about 8 he started playing audiobooks in the car, and one of his absolute favorites just so happened to be Cloud Atlas. It took about 20 minutes before he stopped talking about the book, and every morning he asks me how much I've read and if I like it. Before starting this book, I had a sort of expectation about the novel as a whole. I was thinking it would be this whirlwind action-packed story full of suspense as a result of both the reviews and my father's gushing. I was shocked to find that the first (1 of  6) story was slow and used long outdated language. This made sense for the scene (set in the mid-1800s or during the...