Tuesday, 30 January 2018

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell




A 30p investment at the Barbican library worth – at the very least – every penny!

Jokes aside, Cloud Atlas was a rather enjoyable read, but also a very uneven one. Some of its chapters were brilliant (Timothy Cavendish and his misadventures in the nursing home, Massa Ewing sailing in the Pacific and facing death, Robert Frobisher writing the Cloud Atlas Sextet), while others were, well, not so brilliant.

Luisa Rey’s story reads like little more than a Tom Clancy novel (if you are looking for Californian greed and corporate aggression I think you are much better off opening a token Ellroy novel), the interview to Sonmi-451 would probably leave Vonnegut of Dick rather unimpressed, and I’m not exactly sure of where I stand on Sloosha Crossing as, despite me being a pseudo-bilingual (if not trilingual) reader, I really struggled with the imagined dialect of the future…

It is a best-seller after all, but one that I’m really glad to have read (although it’s not going to enter my list of favourite books anytime soon).

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