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Wednesday
A few weeks ago I finished listening to one of the most satisfying novels I’ve encountered in a while, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land (major spoiler alert). Doerr, who won a Pulitzer for the All the Light We Cannot See, has created a fictional narrative that he attributes to the first century author Antonius Diogenes. Then he links this made-up story to three different eras: the mid-15th century when Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks; the 20th century, when 3-D and X-ray technology manage to read the damaged manuscript and share it with the world, including an octogenarian living in small town Idaho; and the not-too-distant future, when the world has been decimated by extreme climate events, including an unending drought in Australia.
While Diogenes did write a work—The Wonders Beyond Thule—we know of it only through a few papyrus scraps and a confusing summation by another writer. Doerr, who initially considered recreating one of Aristophanes’ lost plays, stepped into this vacuum instead. He got the idea in part from the city in the sky that appears in Aristophanes’ The Birds.
Throughout Cloud Cuckoo Land Doerr provides us with excerpts from his invented manuscript, which is about a man who wants to be transformed into a bird so that he can live in this utopian city. It’s a silly story, full of magical mishaps so that, instead of a bird, Aethon finds himself transformed first into a much-abused ass and then into a hunted fish. Eventually, however, he makes it to Cloud Cuckoo Land, only to discover a version of “there’s no place like home.”
I fell in love with Doerr’s vision of how even a silly story can mean the world to different people: to an abused Christian girl, who discovers the manuscript in an abandoned monastery and then saves it from the city before it is sacked; to an Ottoman ox-driver, who saves her from slavery, marries her, and comes to regard the book as magical so that he travels with it to Urbino after her death so that the book will be saved; to a 20th-century Korean War veteran, who learns Greek from a fellow inmate in their North Korean prison and sets out to translate the work upon returning home to Idaho; to the children of his town, whom he is directing in a library performance of the story when they encounter a boy—an eco-terrorist in the eyes of the law–bent on blowing up the real estate office next door; and to a little girl in the future, who is the last survivor of a ship bound for a distant planet and who remembers it from her father having recited it to her as a child. (It so happens that his grandmother was one of the children performing the story when they encountered the bomber.)
The story of how a story survives, redeeming and sometimes saving lives along the way, fits my view of the power of narrative. In this case, the story makes its way from Constantinople to Italy to a reader in Idaho to outer space. That frequently all hope seems lost, as countless times it does, just serves to highlight the resilience of narrative.
With this in mind, I focus today on two of the novel’s turning points. In one, Anna in Constantinople encounters an episode from The Odyssey, which a Greek teacher is having a classroom of boys memorize. Odysseus has made it to the island of the Phaeacians after leaving Circe’s island and is about to enter Alcinous’s court. She listens mesmerized from outside the window, and passages from the work become some of the tools she uses to navigate her world:
Anna forgets the handcart, the wine, the hour—everything. The accent is strange but the voice is deep and liquid, and the meter catches hold of her like a rider galloping past….What palace is this, where the doors gleam with gold and the pillars are silver and the trees never stop fruiting? As though hypnotized, she advances to the rooming house wall and scales the gate and peers through the shutter…
The tutor resumes the verse, in which a goddess disguises the traveler in mist so that he can sneak inside the shining palace…
In return for pilfered food, the teacher teaches her how to read the manuscript and then gives it to her when he is dying. And although the man in charge of the textile shop where she works destroys the manuscript upon discovery, she is able to read Cloud Cuckoo Land when she unearths it.
Another key incident takes a bit more explaining. Konstance, the girl in the spaceship, discovers that many of the images of the world in the ship’s computer have been doctored, with all the bad parts left out. It’s as though Moms for Liberty and other rightwing groups bent on erasing the past have seized control and created a more “acceptable” reality. One of those responsible for doctoring the images is the bomber, who did it for years in prison (his labor contracted out) and then continued after he was released.
While he does what the company orders him to do, however, he also puts in little images which, if clicked upon, will reveal the reality behind the images. Konstance discovers this while tracking down Aethon’s story, which her father recited to her throughout her childhood, so that, once again, the journey of shepherd-ass-fish-bird saves someone. For Konstance discovers that not only are the images faked but so is her space journey itself. In actual fact, the rocket has never left the ground—it has all been a multi-generational experiment with everyone aboard (all of whom are now dead except for Konstance) having served as human guinea pigs for potential space travel. Konstance manages to hack her way out of the ship and join a tiny Scandinavian island community, survivors of catastrophic climate change.
Recently I wrote about a 2018 Salman Rushdie New Yorker article written in response to Donald Trump’s non-stop lying. Rushdie said that, at such times, we need literary classics more than ever because of their “commitment to truth.” Seeing literature as essentially a “no bullshit” zone, Rushdie wrote that the job of contemporary writers is “rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality.”
In the final paragraph of Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, we see Konstance as a mother reading Aethon’s story to her son. Who knows how he himself will use it to connect to reality in the uncertain world that lies before him?