Cloud Atlas (20th Anniversary Edition): A Novel

David Mitchell

Dec 2008 · Sold by Random House

About this ebook

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A new edition of a timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future—from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction
 
Features a new afterword by David Mitchell and a new introduction by Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
 
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize
 
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, 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 novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.
 
As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

Ratings and reviews

A very unique book with multiple writing styles, I really like the different settings but I feel like the characters and plot could have been better handled and expanded upon, it feels like a book more about it's style than it's substance, though it's substance isn't necessarily bad either.

At the end, I'm still sorting out what I think of this book. In one sense, I feel let down by it. Common elements and images appeared in each story that built suspense throughout the novel, which gave me the expectation that as the book came to its conclusion something would fall like a lynchpin and completely alter the significance and context of each of the stories, uniting them into a coherent whole. This was not to be. Each story was it's own, with only vague connections to the other stories. The relationship between the stories enriched them somewhat, but less than I had hoped. I found myself devouring the book just to get to the end and find out why these stories mattered so much to each other and when I got there, I didn't find it. The moral--the common thread--seems little more than a platitude, and for that I'm disappointed. Finally, the characters in one story seemed contrived and shallow to me, specifically, the female reporter and her boss were, to me, caricatures of Lois Lane and Perry White, and I found myself distracted from the story by the cliched dialogue. In another substory, I think setting it in Korea made an interesting story out of what would otherwise have been yet another dystopian cliche, and I don't know whether to admire the choice of setting or condemn that it may otherwise have been unimaginative. BUT. . . Cloud Atlas still gets 3 stars from me. I didn't love it, but it had many redeeming features. First and foremost, the mood of the book was achieved remarkably, and I was particularly impressed at how the author selected such different writing styles to achieve different tone and mood from one story to the next. The prose, tempo, and flow of the writing was fantastic. The book really pulled me into the characters' worlds (except for the noted exceptions), and I couldn't set it down. I enjoyed the read, and I enjoyed how engaging the book was, but some of it had a bit of a pulpy and sentimental cast, and after I finished, I had a feeling like I'd been reading too much fiction and needed to dig into something more significant.

The series of vignettes make for an enjoyable read, although I found myself frustrated by the time the 6th story began. The technique bore fruit in the last 1/2 of the novel, where character references to the effects of the present on the future become obviously prophetic. The connections between the characters seemed a little forced at times (the recurring "comet-shaped birthmark) and the Orison-451 story was a far too familiar science fiction that borders on cliche. It was worth the read - and the frustration of restarting a story for the 6th time at midpoint is rewarded through the last 1/2 as a special insight for the reader into the actual (rather than potential) effects of each characters actions. I wish there was a more direct correlation, but an interesting technique nonetheless.

About the author

David Mitchell is the author of the novels Ghostwritten, Number9Dream, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Bone Clocks, Slade House, and Utopia Avenue. He has been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize and has won the John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial, and South Bank Show literature prizes, as well as the World Fantasy Award. In 2018, he received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, given in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work. In addition, David Mitchell together with KA Yoshida has translated from the Japanese two books by Naoki Higashida: The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism and Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism. Born in 1969, Mitchell grew up in Worcestershire and, after graduating from university, spent several years teaching English in Japan. He now lives in Ireland with his wife and their two children.