Balls Plus Brains Equals Me, Swooning: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Hey. Huh. So. This is awkward. It's been, what, six months or something? In that time, I've read far too many books to write about in any kind of impressive detail, so I'll do a bunch of short posts about the unremarkable ones, and longer posts about the others. This torturous game of catch-up is actually fine with me, considering the reason for my long absence (new job 2 hours away) and the reason for my reappearance (the desperate need for some sort of life outside of working and travelling to and from work. This need became very clear last week when I basically lost my mind and sobbed for 2 straight days). So yes, I will blog. And no one will read my posts except for my friend Duff (hi, Duff!), but that's okay with me too.

Anyhow, I read Cloud Atlas back in November. It was my first experience with David Mitchell, and I had been unsure of what to expect. I might have even been resistant. See, people are always raving about Cloud Atlas, but every time I picked it up and read the back cover I thought to myself, "Huh. This looks a bit too much like work." Of course, this is coming from the woman who not-so-recently downloaded a copy of Eastern Promises and then let it sit, unwatched, on her desktop for something like two months before finally watching it and having her mind blown by the greatest naked knifefight in the entire history of nakedness and knives and fighting. That's sort of how I felt after finally getting around to Cloud Atlas: Why the hell did it take me so long?

Here's the thing: Cloud Atlas is not one story, but six. And by six stories, I don't mean that the book is a story cycle or a novel with five subplots. It actually takes us to six different but equally intensely imagined and detailed worlds. Six different time periods, each with its own vocabulary and literary style. In one story, Mitchell is summoning Evelyn Waugh. In another, a Grisham-like writer of thrillers. In still another, Martin Amis. The last two stories are the most frightening, and call to mind Philip K. Dick and Cormac McCarthy. We're taken to each world twice, with the exception of the sixth, as the novel follows this format: 1 2 3 4 5 6 5 4 3 2 1.

1. Adrift in the Pacific in 1850, a Yankee notary named Adam Ewing sojourns on the island of Chatham, where he surveys the impact of colonialism.

2. Robert Frobisher, a penniless cad and criminal, travels to Belgium in the 1930s to track down a reclusive, ailing composer. He succeeds, starts working on "The Cloud Atlas Sextet," and seduces the composer's wife. He also finds a book, annoyingly torn in half, called "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing."

3. A journalist named Luisa Rey uncovers a corporate nuclear scandal in 1970s California, and is at constant risk of assassination. One of the scientists who she speaks with is Rufus Sixsmith, who had been Robert Frobisher's lover in the 1930s. She also purchases a record: "The Cloud Atlas Sextet."

4. Timothy Cavendish is a vanity publisher in London in the 1980s. He has a found manuscript called "Half-Lives: the First Luisa Rey Mystery," that he thinks will get him out of debt, but ultimately ends up trapped in a retirement home.

5. Sonmi-451 is a cloned slave in some future state who has acquired intelligence and vision. She is soon to be executed, and her dying wish is to see the end of a film (films are called "Disneys" in the future) she once started to watch called "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish."

6. Zachry is a tribesman in an extremely violent postapocalyptic society on the island of Hawaii after the fall of civilization. His narrative is told in a thick dialect that is difficult to read. Somni-451 returns here as a hologram and ultimately as God for Zachry.

What connects these stories- what effectively prevents the book from being a collection of (brilliantly written) short stories or novellas- is a peculiar reappearing birthmark and, more compellingly, the unifying theme of the endurance of and our need for human communication between generations.

Cloud Atlas is hilarious and terrifying and beautiful and huge. It's also a literary experiment that would be a total slog if it were written by anyone else but the insanely gifted David Mitchell. As it stands, it's a challenging read but enormously entertaining and each story is equally engaging regardless of the reader's personal feelings about the literary genres represented. For pulling this whole thing off without resorting to gimmickry, David Mitchell gets a spot on the top five.