Finishing David Mitchell’s
postmodern work of fiction “Cloud Atlas”
felt like an accomplishment that must result to a written praise for it (though
subpar to it’s already given attention from better minds out there). It was an
attachment that took exactly 8 days through countless hours of caffeinated eagerness
amidst work related pressure, short attention span, struggles of Shakespearean qualities
over levels of love and hate; which resulted from the author’s intention to interrupt
the story while it is in its full swing, resuming 100 pages later, color me
frustrated. There is, however, so much to love than to hate Mitchell (if being
articulate to a fault counts) for writing this oeuvre of multiple genres with sheer
genius. It is, honestly, one of the strangest books I’ve read, so far. David
Mitchell takes his readers into different worlds of separate times. Stories
that serves as a glimpse into the past, a peek into distant future and of
course he weaves a story this era has so repeatedly witness in real-life or on
silver screens.
There were six different stories
in the book. That bowled my head agoogly.. Like the opus Cloud Atlas Sextet each are poles apart in terms of style, characters,
setting, plot and conflict but held an idée fixe: a sudden mention of names of certain
characters that appeared in the previous story/ies, a birthmark or a blemish in the shape of a
comet, an ubiquitous melody like a hovering leitmotif that tugs on a phantom
limb, that tells you they are one and of different strand.
“My head is a Roman Candle of inventions. Lifetime’s music, arriving
all at once. Boundaries between noise and sound are conventions ... Hear the
instruments in my head, perfect clarity, anything I wish for. When it’s
finished, there’ll be nothing left in me, I know.”
“The
Pacific Journal of Adam Erwing” was in a form of a memoir circa 1850
authored by Adam, an American Notary leaving Chatham Islands, “Letters
From Zedelghem” an epistolary account of an aspiring musician (addressed to
a certain Mr. Sixsmith, his lover) who seeks cultivation in the practice of
composition and was therefore taken as an amanuensis by a prolific composer
doomed to obscurity, Vyvyn Ayrs, “Half-Lives-
The First Luisa Rey Mystery” an action packed narrative about a reporter
and her fixed intention to expose a corruption and murder in a nuclear power
plant, “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” was about an aged
publisher who finds himself suddenly confined into a nursing home, “An Orison of Sonmi- 451” a sci-fi
allegory in the form of a dialogue between Sonmi (a clone) and her executioner
(?). It covers her life as a fabricant-waitress at Papa Song’s Diner and her
great escape into the world of the purebloods, “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’After” written in an almost
incomprehensible and seemingly outdated language and in the perspective of
Zachry, a valleysman who befriended a Prescient Woman, Meronym whom he escaped
Sloosha’s Crossin’ with after finding his entire tribe completely exterminated.
This book whose characters
breathed in an imperfect, chaotic world and who are actually preyed upon by amounts
of cruelties and obscenities, rings a certain truth or a myth that one will
find indelible all throughout the narrative’s (though dense and utterly
exhausting) story-telling. That is: we live, we suffer, we die but we do not
remain dead for long, as Frederich Nietzsche philosophized “We exist for an eternity of eternities”.
It is true for Adam Ewing, Robert Forbisher, Luisa Rey, Sonmi 451 and Timothy
Cavendish. They exist, disappear yet return bearing the burden of the previous
life. A strange and deplorable notion that birthed 529 pages work of fiction by
author David Mitchell.
The idea of “eternal returns”, a
philosophical notion that has been a subject of curious fascination by other
writers (and thus led me to Milan Kundera’s
“An Unbearable Lightness of Being” whose opening lines read “The Idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often
perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we
once experienced it, and that the reccurence itself recurs ad infinitum! This
also led me to another writer whose work “An
Abundance of Katherines” was hum drum in comparison but has at least the
same implication) has always been
something that fascinated and terrified me (too) because if it is so, what a
heavy burden life is, noh? Milan Kundera further quotes Nietzsche “But whether it was horrible, beautiful or
sublime, it’s horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing” a rather
frightening thought but which was echoed by David Mitchell in his final lines of
Cloud Atlas “He who do battle with many
headed hydras of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must
pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you
understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean! Yet
what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”.
Cloud Atlas is a full display of
David Mitchell’s literary giftedness as it veers away from the traditional novel
by shifting genres yet setting each to a boiling point that makes one want to reach
its final pages—the sextets final note—in such a rush. Iit took me 8 days,
however. I enjoyed this in so many levels (peripatetic boredom?). I especially
liked “Letters to Zedelghem“ which was a beehive of musical concepts, like Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus”, it was an analysis of music and man. As a
practicing musician this was the story which I find much interest in, made my
ears ring and of which I understood the book’s intention explained in musical
terms:
“a sextet for overlapping
soloists: piano, clarinet, cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in its own
language of key, scale and colour, In the first set, each solo is interrupted
by its successor; in the 2nd, each interruption is recontinued, in
order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan’t know until it’s finished and by then
it’ll be too late, but it’s the first thing I think of when I wake, and the
last I think of before I fall asleep ... the artist lives in two worlds.” –
p. 463
It is true that there are writers that require
time, heart, mind, and soul from its readers (as
Mira, my best friend and fellow book lover once told me while I was
reading Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus”) and I would just like to add – a modicum
of tolerance if they tend to bang us with some verbal acrobatics because one
will never know to what extent a book will affect him/her after.
“Echoes of Scriabin’s White Mass, Stravinsky’s lost footprints,
chromatics of the more lunar Debussy, but truth is I don’t know where it came
from. Waking dream. Will never write anything one hundredth as good. Wish I
were being immodest, but I’m not. Cloud Atlas Sextet holds my life, is my life,
now I’m a spent firework; but at least I’ve been a firework.” --- Robert
Forbisher, Letters to Zedelghem
“I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o’that kayak. Souls cross ages
like clouds cross skies, an tho’ a cloud’s chape nor hue nor size don’t stay
the same it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the clouds
blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ west an’ the
compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’clouds.” --- Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’
Ev’rythin’ After
“Nietzsche’s gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it
again, for an eternity of eternities. Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We
do not stay dead long. Once my Luger lets me go, my birth, next time around,
will be upon me in a heartbeat. In thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at
Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun,
composing this same letter, me resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet.
Such elegant certainties comfort me.” --- Letters from Zedelghem
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