Seymour is a young man who is intent on placing a bomb in that library. Eighty-year-old Zeno is leading a group of fifth graders in a production of ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ at the public library. Konstance, 14, lives aboard The Argos, a spacecraft launched 65 years earlier headed to a distant planet that is to be man's new home. Doerr uses this imagined tale to tie his characters together, even though they are separated by geography and time. Moreover, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of works that we know of but have been lost, some of them comedies about men being transformed into donkeys. On his journey he is turned into a donkey, a fish and a crow.Īlthough there is no actual ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land,’ there was a first century writer named Antonius Diogenes. The ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ in the novel is a first century tale written by Diogenes that tells the story of Aethon, a foolish shepherd who leaves home in search of Cloud Cuckoo Land, a fictional place where there is no pain and turtles walk around carrying honey cakes on their backs. Anthony Doerr tells their stories in ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land,’ a book that he calls a “paean to books.” A story that allows them to “slip the trap” of their fear or misery. Five characters living in three different centuries and four different places are all saved by a story.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |