Cloud Atlas

Full review at sff book review

Six intertwined stories that range in time, setting and narrator as well as style and theme. I can't say I loved all of the stories but I did love how cleverly they were connected, how some stories connected back to the previous two tales and how each story concludes. Overall, this was an enjoyable book even though I would have hoped for a more glorious, big ending.
The most fun I got out of this was looking for all the little hints and clues as to how exactly every story connects to the one before and after. My favorite stories were Sonmi-451's and the Luisa Rey mystery. I did like most of Timothy Cavendish's story but with reservations. The other tales were harder to get through, either because David Mitchell chose a particularly difficult style (I'm not an English native speaker) or because I simply didn't care about the characters.

Overall, I'd recommend this to people who like fix-up novels and don't mind committing to a larger tale. It was utterly gratifying every time another connection was revealed and while the ending disappointed me a little, I'm very curious to see this incredibly creative novel as a film adaptation.

I'll keep it spoiler-free at the risk of being vague.

I recommend going into Cloud Atlas without knowing too much about Cloud Atlas. If you're already familiar with the novel's structure, then Mitchell's repeated, explicit attempts to bash the concept into your skull will be tedious. Nonetheless, there is a beauty to some of the more subtle and nuanced connections between the stories. I don't mean to bash the book with my two-star rating, as I do genuinely believe, in accordance with Goodreads rating guidelines, that “it was ok.”

There is a lot to chew on in Cloud Atlas: religion, immortality, oppression, discrimination, capitalism, metaphysics, and more. (Mitchell has some genuinely interesting ideas about some of these topics.) Plato, Nietzsche, Freud, and Solzhenitsyn are all there too, in addition to other thinkers whose influence I am perhaps too ignorant to notice. It's debatable whether the heavy thematic concepts are a good match for the pulpy or comedic tones of certain sections, but that might be a matter of personal preference. (In different ways Mitchell seems to paradoxically take his concept both too seriously and not seriously enough.) In contrast with my desire for greater subtlety in other aspects of the work, I wish that some examples of prejudice within Cloud Atlas had received more explicit challenges. While the characters' racism is generally addressed, some men in the story express a misogynistic sentiment that in my view Mitchell doesn't adequately explore, in my opinion.

A flawed work for sure, but at least a thought-provoking one. If this “genre” of interconnected storytelling had more time to mature, I wager that it could be a vehicle for some genuine masterworks, but the pool of writers capable of writing in such different styles as Mitchell does is probably rather small. Frustrating in some respects, and not a life-changing work of literature (at least not for me). Perhaps my expectations were too high, but it's a book that has stuck in my mind, and that has to count for something.

An excellent and well-crafted piece of fiction. Cloud Atlas isn't always the easiest to read, especially in its first and last chapter, but it's certainly worth reading. It's really hard to discuss this book without somehow spoiling something, especially given that pretty unique story structure, but I enjoyed ruminating about its themes on an unending recurrence of not just life but humanity, civilization, morality, and also the call to action of being a less selfish species. Of the different protagonists in this book, perhaps the one that really stuck with me the most is Sonmi, even though I had at first found her perspective hard to read. She's perhaps the most detached of the narrators, but because she is part of but othered at the same time, Sonmi gives some of the most astute and cutting insights into humanity's insatiable drive to consume at the expense of just about everything else, least of all one's conscience and morality.