Cloud Atlas is the third novel by British author David Mitchell. It was published in 2004. It won the British Book Awards Literary Fiction award and the Richard & Judy "Book of the Year" award. The year it was published, it was short-listed for the Booker Prize, Nebula Award for Best Novel, and Arthur C. Clarke Award, among other accolades. Unusually, it received awards from both the general literary community and from the speculative fiction community. A film adaptation directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, and featuring an ensemble cast, was released in 2012.
Cloud Atlas is a work combining metafiction, historical fiction, contemporary fiction and science fiction. Its text is interconnected nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the 19th century to the island of Hawai'i in a distant post-apocalyptic future. The title was inspired by the piece of music of the same …
Cloud Atlas is the third novel by British author David Mitchell. It was published in 2004. It won the British Book Awards Literary Fiction award and the Richard & Judy "Book of the Year" award. The year it was published, it was short-listed for the Booker Prize, Nebula Award for Best Novel, and Arthur C. Clarke Award, among other accolades. Unusually, it received awards from both the general literary community and from the speculative fiction community. A film adaptation directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, and featuring an ensemble cast, was released in 2012.
Cloud Atlas is a work combining metafiction, historical fiction, contemporary fiction and science fiction. Its text is interconnected nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the 19th century to the island of Hawai'i in a distant post-apocalyptic future. The title was inspired by the piece of music of the same name by Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. The author has said that the book is about reincarnation and the universality of human nature, and the title references a changing landscape (a "cloud") over manifestations of fixed human nature (the "atlas"). It is not a direct reference to a cloud atlas.
I liked following the different stories and bouncing back and forth between them. I'm not totally sure what the thread that wove them all together was, but the individual stories kept me reading and the book as a whole was fun to read. Having seen the movie before reading the books, I had already formulated pictures of what all the characters looked like, which was probably helpful since there were many to keep track of.
Mehrere lose zusammenhängende Geschichten die zu verschiedenen Zeiten spielen. Ein Großteil davon eigentlich recht interessant - aber am Ende steht man planlos da und fragt sich was der Autor eigentlich sagen wollte.
Und dazu dann noch ein ganzer Abschnitt in einem sehr anstrengendem Stil geschrieben - Keine Ahnung ob der Teil nur in der Übersetzung so schlimm ist.
First of all, this book is a terrific technical achievement - stories within stories that refer back to themselves.
Each story is so different that I needed a few pages of each to get traction. But wow, I did get sucked in.
There are several persistent themes (slavery; the evils of corporate greed) that overall paint a bleak portrait of our world--past, present, and future. There is humor; there is mystery; there is postapocalypse...the protagonists of these stories persevere, although I can't quite say that I felt uplifted by the book's end.
