Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (2021)

 

My book club of library colleagues chose this to read over the holidays, since it is quite thick, but there are plenty of empty pages separating the different parts. This is a hard book to describe. Our rare books colleague put it best, though I can't remember her exact words, but it is about the history of a manuscript through time, pausing at certain critical times of its history. But it is all told in a series of intertwined stories that I was not sure would come together in the end, but did. I will touch on each story chronologically, though we get pieces of each throughout the book.

First of all there is the 24 leaves of a manuscript in Greek, supposedly reccently found. (My colleages researched this and said that there is no such manuscript per se, though the author is real and old manuscripts are uncovered all the time.) This is a fanciful tale of a shepherd with a hard life that dreams of something more, but ends up being turned into a donkey and has more adventures. 

Then there are two stories around the Fall of Constantinople (15th cent). One is of Anna, who is an orphan that works in a sewing factory in Constantinople, but learns to read and is the one that finds the old manuscript. Wonderful character with gumption. The other story is of Omeir, a hare-lipped boy from Bulgaria, who gets swept up by the Ottoman army to work his oxen on behalf of the war machine. My favorite character,

Zeno grows up in Idaho. His mother dies young, his father goes off and gets killed in WWII and he ends up a POW in the Korean war. He learns Greek from a fellow soldier and ends up translating the manuscript in understandable language, when it is found, and works with kids on a play based on the story in current times.

Seymour is a troubled teen in current Idaho, who is hyper sensitive to sound and gets involved with some strange thinking folks online, and tries to blow up the library.

Konstance is a child in the future. The world has gone to pieces and she is travelling to some distant hospitable planet with ther family and others. They have all the knowlege of the world in a virtual library and Sybil is the future Siri or Alexa.

This is a book for librarians. There is an old library in Constantinople, there is one in Idaho, and then the huge wealth of knowledge in the virtual library of the future, but it is experienced as a real library through a futuristic VR set-up. And librarians are still great helpers. Loved the book.