Cloud Atlas
About
By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks | Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
A postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in twenty-first-century fiction, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending, philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profound as it is playful. In this groundbreaking novel, an influential favorite among a new generation of writers, Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity.
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite… . Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter… . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life… . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, 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 narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, 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 videogame, 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.
Unchaptered
p. 12
Glass and peace alike betray proof of fragility under repeated blows.
p. 64
A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.
p. 69
That love loves fidelity, she riposted, is a myth woven by men from their insecurities.
p. 166
…conduct your life in such a way that, when your train breaks down in the eve of your years, you have a warm, dry car driven by a loved one—or a hired one, it matters not—to take you home.
p. 168
Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.
p. 185
Truth is singular. Its “versions” are mistruths.
p. 282
…there ain’t no journey what don’t change you some.
p. 320
Travel far enough, you meet yourself.
p. 344
…ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only “rights,” the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.
p. 356
“Freedom!” is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.
p. 396
Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.
”& only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!”