Everyone loves Cloud Cuckoo Land, and if you enjoy reading there’s quite a good chance you’ll enjoy this book, too. I think it’s about 7% overestimated, but the majority of book readers like this book for very good reasons – it’s really well written, the characters are engaging, the story is intricate and interwoven without ever feeling like you’ve totally lost the plot, and there’s a decent sense of mystery / coming to understand the purpose of a foreshadowed event or two. Do I think the payoff in the end is mind-blowingly good? No, it’s not a revelation. I didn’t feel as though I learned something in depth about human nature, and yet it was very much a story that kept me engaged and interested because it’s about humans being super human over time.
The book follows multiple perspectives over centuries, each individual somehow connected to Cloud Cuckoo Land – a fictional book written by the real Antonius Diogenes. Five people, separated by space and in some cases time, are impacted by the story that serves as the architecture of the novel. The joy of the novel comes in part from the way the reader is drawn into each story – including the story of Aethon, the fictional protagonist of Cloud Cuckoo Land who is searching for a fictional land of peace among the birds, being propelled instead on an Odyssey-like journey. The book impacts two people around Constantinople near the end of the Ottoman Empire, a young man and his single mother in the early 2010s, an elder gentleman around the same time period, and a girl in the nearish future living her life aboard a spacecraft. Of course there’s sweet connections to be found among these characters, but it’s also truly enjoyable to learn about each of them in their own right. I’m not keen on saying much more about the actual plot because I think it’s best if you know just enough, not too much. The book itself is rather a puzzle.
I don’t think it would take much convincing to read this book – definitely put yourself on the incredibly long waitlist at your local library and enjoy it when it arrives, at long last. At 630 pages it’s a bit a door stop, but it doesn’t feel like a slog. It’s about survival, and that feels just about right in these times.