It took me several tries to get into the rhythm of Cloud Cuckoo Land. I felt at first I was stuttering through a series of confusing and incomplete pieces of stories. I was and it was all for a profoundly rewarding purpose! Cloud Cuckoo Land is in fact a tapestry with a theme. It presupposes that in Ancient Greece, the writer Antonius Diogenes wrote a fantastical story of a boy who seeks to become a bird so he can fly up to a wondrous land in the clouds above, but is turned into a donkey and a fish with resultant adventures and hardships.
A series of wonderful characters with the earliest in time a girl in 15th Century Constantinople who discovers an early codex of the Greek original as she scours a deteriorating monastery for ancient books to sell. Anna is one of few people who can read the Ancient Greek and the book remains central to her life and experiences as we follow the vignettes involving her. We also follow Omeir, from his birth with a disfiguring cleft palate to his teen years as he becomes a wanderer near the outside of Constantinople in this period of great upheaval. Anna is the one who brings us the voice of the original story that she ultimately shares with Omeir.
In the 1940s, Zeno, a young child of a widower father lands in Lake Port, Idaho where his father takes a job. His father gets involved with a woman who stays in Zeno’s life forever. Zeno is different, often bullied and he is smart and loves reading. He spends time at the local library where the two elderly librarians school him on Greek mythology and more. When he later serves in Korea, Zeno meets Rex, an ancient literature scholar who teaches him what there is time to teach about ancient Greek.
Seymour, a boy with autism, lives with his mother in a manufactured home on several acres, inherited from her grandfather. The nearby woods, where he befriended an owl and learned to love and care for nature and is developed, causing great distress to Seymour.
In his 80s, Zeno, an amateur translator has spent many years translating Cloud Cuckoo Land, doing his work at the local library in Lake Port, now staffed by new people who know and care about him. It takes only a little to talk him into working with a group of older elementary school students, to introduce them to Cloud Cuckoo Land and they all decide to put on a play based on the story. Zeno is the director. Seymour is elsewhere in the library on dress rehearsal night, now in his 20s and with malicious intentions.
And we meet fourteen year old Konstance, who lives in the distant future on the Argos, a space ship transporting its passengers toward an Earth-like planet hundreds of years away. Argos is managed by a computer, Sybil and when we meet Konstance, we know something is very very wrong. They are sixty years into the journey and it is the passengers’ descendants who will populate the new planet, Earth having succumbed to its environmental disasters.
Here’s the thing: Each of these stories, are fabulous, detailed yet entertaining, can’t put them down and want the next installment of the protagonists’ experiences ASAP as we jump from time and place throughout. I listened to the audible version of this and greatly enjoyed the quality of the narration. It takes just under fifteen hours to listen to this and it was a sit in the car to finish parts and then play it nonstop while I did chores book.
They Called me Bookworm 