Even when I read it nearly a decade ago a few years into my soon-to-be gone 20’s, Cloud Atlas, English author David Mitchell’s most famous novel, felt like a glorious, expansive mansion that was built without plumbing. It is a sight to see and inspires awe and wonder, but once you look a little more closely, it is not a place you want to spend anymore more time then you need within. It is not his worst novel (that distinction goes to his tepid debut Ghostwritten), but viewing what came after (and before with numer9dream), one sees this massive, complex novel as an artist’s attempt at something bold and brand new and succeeding in what might be a hollow and shallow endeavor. It has a handful of striking moments within certain sections, and its themes weaved throughout each of the six nested narrative is staggering feat, but in the end it results in little more than shock and awe. I won’t talk too much about the plot, since I am assuming if you are reading this review than you know more than an enough from reading it or seeing the movie to skip past the introduction, so I will stick to a few points I re-discovered and a few I discovered for the first time. With a book like this, it is bound to be uneven, with some sections being stringer than others, with the first Luisa Rey section being my favorite and the middle section, which feels like a sloppy mixture of the other five, being my least favorite and still nearly unintelligible. During the modern section that focuses on Timothy Cavendish’s ghastly ordeal, there are a few scary moments I noticed this time that offer glimpses into Mitchell’s scarier side, which he would show off in The Bone Clocks (to date, his masterpiece) and Slade House especially. My rating from 2010 has not changed, and despite finding new wrinkles in this book to appreciate, my feelings have not changed either.
Rating: 4/5
No comments:
Post a Comment