Cloud Atlas

Maybe I have to stew on this novel before I find something cogent, interesting (at least to me) to say about it. Of the six stacked, yes I am a computer guy, these stories stack on top of one another, starting with the “Journal of Adam Ewing” which then breaks before the climax and pushes “Letters from Zedelghem” which pushes “The Luisa Rey Mystery” etc until the “Sloosha’s Crossing” story which is allowed to complete and then pops back “down” to the “Orison of Sonmi”, which completes and pops down to “Timothy Cavendish” etc. until we are back with Adam Ewing which ends the book.

I wanted to love this book for the ambition of its structure, but of the narratives only the Luisa Rey story is strong on its own, and of the stories yes, the stories have tie-ins and yes, they share the “incarnated” main soul, but my only take away is that we go from the very racist era of Adam Ewing to the post-apocalypse future Hawaii, an arc that is the decline and fall of mankind on earth.

The book has many interesting aspects that circle around each other searching for a coherence that I never discovered.