Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . .

Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.

But the story doesn’t end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

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.

I can recognize the skill and care that went into crafting six different styles of narrative, but I wasn't drawn in by the stories very much. The Sonmi tale was the most engaging, but it was a bit silly and concluded with something akin to “it was all a dream,” which I always find annoying. Don't get me invested in a character and a story, then invalidate the whole story at the end!

The rest of the stories I just couldn't generate much interest in, and the central tale's use of phonetic dialect was so obnoxious I skipped most of it.

I'm also not sure this is a novel, so much as six slightly related short stories. The overarching theme that allegedly connects them seems fairly shallow to me, and the mechanisms by which they refer to each other also pull the old, “Ha, it's not real” trick that is so irritating to me.

In short, I can see why people like this, but it didn't work for me at all.