Cloud Atlas

A brilliant and intensely human puzzle of a book. Form echoing content is sublime when it works, and this novel pulls it off marvelously, with just the right amount of self-referential cleverness. It reminded me of walking into the labyrinth, pausing at the center, and making my way out again. It felt hard to make my way into each successive story, trying to keep hold of all the threads; the author asks a certain amount of patience, trust that it will ultimately be worth the effort. But when you reach the middle and begin making sense of all the puzzle pieces, the payoff is deeply satisfying. A novel both intimate and epic, cynical and deeply hopeful. The individual stories, if read alone, would be unremarkable; it is the spaces between them and the context created by their connections that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.