Cloud Cuckoo Land

 Cloud Cuckoo Land

By Anthony Doerr

This is a paean. Not only does Doerr say as much in his afterward, but so does a New York Times book

review. Seems like people really like to use that word when they can. So: paean. That much is clear. A paean (why not squeeze as many as we can in?) to books.

The book that this book focuses on is a fictional Greek myth called, as the title suggests, Cloud Cuckoo Land. It is one of several threads that connects the many characters and settings that inhabit this book. Chronologically, there is: Anna, who lives in an about-to-be-besieged 15th-century Constantinople; Omeir, who is drafted into the military machine about to do the besieging; Zeno, a motherless son of a Greek immigrant trying to make a life for himself in rural Idaho; Seymour, of the same Idaho town, who is also trying to make sense of his place in the world; and Konstance, who, in the 22nd century, on a spaceship that has embarked on a 500-year journey to an exoplanet the inhabitants of the Argo hope will be a replacement for the ravaged earth they left behind. 

It is, chronologically, Anna who stumbles upon Cloud Cuckoo Land while trying to discover ancient manuscripts for paying Italians. In doing so, she sets the rest of the story in motion. The book is one of two possessions Anna takes with her while fleeing Constantinople; the other is a snuff box with an image of Urbana, Italy. During her escape, Anna runs into Omeir, a harelipped outsider who does not speak Anna's language. Still, the two stay together and make it to safety, a feat that Omeir believes is owed to Anna's mysterious book. And so as his final act, Omeir, his wife Anna long dead, takes the book to the city on the snuff box so it will be safe for all time.

Four centuries later, Zeno is in a North Korean prison camp when he meets and falls in love with a classics scholar named Rex. The two are soon separated, but not before Rex teaches Zeno some of the old language. In their last meeting, Rex encourages Zeno to try some translating, which he does upon his retirement from a highway department job in Idaho. Not long after, a discovery of an ancient text -- which turns out to be Cloud Cuckoo Land -- is made, and, amateur though he is, Zeno sets about making a translation. Which somehow captures the imagination of a group of fifth graders who urge Zeno to help them stage a play based on the old story.

It never happens. That is because Seymour, reeling from the destruction of a forest that killed a beloved Great Gray Owl to build condos, brings bombs into the library during play rehearsal so he can exact revenge on the development company just a few feet away. Zeno dies removing the bombs from the library. Seymour ends up in jail, where he matures and works to atone for his crime. Eventually, he does so by bringing back the 5th-grade survivors and presents them with a bound copy of Zeno's translation of Cloud Cuckoo Land.

One of those survivors is an Australian woman who will become the great grandmother of Konstance, who, spurred on by her father's quotations from the book, pieces a full story together. This gives her the courage to break out of the Argo, which has become beset by a pestilence, when she realizes that it is not actually hurtling through space but in fact sitting on the Icelandic tundra as part of a corporate experiment. 

So it all comes together. The story helps give meaning to five lives and, we can presume, many more. A paean indeed.