I will not lie, this novel did not sit well with me at first. I found it quite hard to transfer
from one era to another and adapt my comprehension from one language to the next with every chapter shift and every language change. Cloud Atlas is a different animal for my limited book-reading experience.
from one era to another and adapt my comprehension from one language to the next with every chapter shift and every language change. Cloud Atlas is a different animal for my limited book-reading experience.
But it can’t be denied, that this award-winning book is brilliant in its own way--the author more than anything. He did take me to six different worlds with six different lives that are in someway connected together. And that’s how it is from start to finish inside his own universe. The common themes: love and humanity; the prose: fantastic and almost romantic. If you get past the initial confusion and hard-labored reading of Zachry’s chapters, wherein David Mitchel managed to create a barbaric language befitted the post-apocalyptic world at the center of the novel, you’ll find that his envisioned world and history may not be far away from the timeline we are living now. And thus, can be easily understood.
One character who stood out the most for me was Robert Frobisher, a bi-sexual English musician who told his story through letters sent to his then male lover Rufus Sixsmith. There is a kind of melancholy and delicate beauty with which his words were crafted together, and this with the help of imagining the kind of music that he was composing during his time in Zedelghem, where most of his plot happened. And if you get the chance to watch the movie--and you should--you’ll find that Ben Whishaw did a terrific almost perfect job of portraying the character of Robert. It was like Ben as Robert were a mashup of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Perfume by Patrick Süskind and Richard II in Shakespeare’s Richard II. His tragedy was a thing of beauty, and his words, forever ingrained in my broken heart.
Ben Whishaw as Robert Frobisher in Cloud Atlas film
Cloud Atlas was a challenging read for me and almost took me a year to finish, but I’m glad I did not let go and labored on until the very last page. In the end, it’s really all about love.
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