Just finished Cloud Atlas. 2 stars - it was okay - nothing earth shattering but it did have its moments.

There were some very entertaining parts. I especially liked the Letters from Zedelghem and The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.

The book overall probably could have used some brevity in parts. 500 pages felt awfully long for this book and it maybe could have been done in 300 instead and been just as effective. I have to say I got bored with most of The Orison of Sonmi 451 and didn’t see much point in Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ ev’rythin’ after except maybe as a segue to continue the novel.

I get the whole point Mitchell makes about reincarnation and in Cloud Atlas how we’re all connected. He used some subtle signs and he had somewhat clever ways to show his readers how these 6 seemingly very different people in the novel were connected. 6 people connected? - maybe he got his idea from the Kevin Bacon game ?

What a trip!
David Mitchell broadcasts his skill of writing dialects in this masterpiece. This book was so artistic and beautiful it made me wish I were an author. A cool story that is told through multiple cross sections of time.

IO should have read the structure of the book before I read the book, took me a while to realise what was happening! Once I did I thoroughly enjoyed all the stories.

More like 2.5 stars probably!

* Lots of spoilers interspersed, and I am too lazy to hide each, so spoiler alert! *

There's an interesting central core of an idea here - one soul reincarnating over the ages and through that soul we see humanity's timeline. There are thematic arcs too mostly centred around what 'power' is. But mostly these are just six very different stories that are barely stitched together.

Each of the initial five stories stop in the middle and are continued in reverse order after the complete sixth story. The sudden changes in tone are jarring and disturb the flow of the book - just when you settle in to one character and tone, David Mitchell decides to switch it up. I would say that the book might have worked better if all stories appeared complete, but the one story that did - Sloosha's Crossin' - I found to be rather disappointing so I am not sure how the others would have worked either.

There is a lot of unnecessary "action" that add to the plot but do nothing to the story or to the thematic arc as such. Adam Ewing's journals are, I suppose, a revelation about slavery and the introduction to the tribal people of Maori and Moriari which tie back later to the Kona and Valleymen of Sloosha's Crossin'. But there are a lot of plot points - the "Arsenick" doctor, the sodomy and suicide and so much more that are completely irrelevant. They add to the action of the story and you want to read it to the end but they do not really contribute to the theme. There is a chase of sorts happening in almost each of the stories and they are nail-biting but end up being cheap thrills - they once again do not contribute in anyway to the holistic whole.

The stories also come with a lot of twists that engage the reader - I found the one on Sonmi-451 completely unexpected and I liked how it tied things up. Things seemed very convenient in that one - the presence of the Kona who educated this Somni, the Yoona before that, the very convenient scene on the bridge of a fabricant doll being thrown away. It was nice how Mitchell sort of anticipated these and brought a twist that made sense of these things. Some of the other twists are baffling - the Arsenick doctor from earlier or Meronym actually having an underlying plan. How Avatar-like was Sloosha's Crossin' huh? Just substitute some of the names and you'd have almost the same story! The other stories also have echoes. There is the sort of Cuckoo's nest in Timothy Cavendish - heavily diluted for the sake of comedy. (There is also a cleverly inserted reference to Cuckoo's nest itself which makes me wonder what exactly Mitchell was trying?!). Luisa Rey, the intrepid reporter who takes on a corporation is like Erin Brokovich and the Frobisher story is almost operatic.

There is also some philosophising thrown about. Most of these, instead of being ingrained into the story, are just spouted by one character or the other. They are explanatory pieces that just go to show what the intelligent story writer is doing with the entire novel as such - something I think one could have done without. If there had been more clarity in the idea and execution these explanations could've been skipped. The CEO in the Rey story goes on for a page or two about power and such and you know all capitals that this is the THEME of the story but this point perhaps could have been made subtler?

Overall, I think this is a good book that is corrupted by trying to be too much. I wish the author had had the courage to just stick with and explore things completely instead of being pulled into making the book a page-turning potboiler. If Adam Ewing had been just a lawyer on a voyage discovering slavery and the ills of the spreading Christiandom, or Meronym just a character in a post-apocalyptic world searching for meaning, maybe I would've enjoyed the book more. But the book as it is seems more tailored to be made into a movie (which I am looking forward to see). Or perhaps as the new trend is, a Netflix series would do more justice to its multiple threads.

First and foremost - I would recommend this book to absolutely anybody. My rating is a bit low but I don't want that to discourage anyone, because this was just a cool book with a lot of things going for it.

I found it difficult to decide on a rating. When I split up the stories, I got Ewing - 2*, Frobisher - 1*, Rey - 3*, Cavendish - 5*, Neo Korea/Sonmi - 4*, Sloosha - 5*. So then I'm like, crap do I average it out? What it came down to for me is that the latter halves of the last three stories left me with the feeling of the last air in an inner tube slooooowly leaking out.

I completely loved the Matryoshka style of the story. The feeling of delayed gratification was like very slowly opening up a wonderful mystery and I loved every second of it. I loved that, as you took each step into the future, the POV in the next story was reading/viewing the prior story, and I loved, especially, the little pokes at Scots. That moment in the Cavendish story when (name removed) jumps up and yells "Are there nor trrruuue Scortsmen in tha hooossse?" had me absolutely dying of laughter. In fact the Cavendish story alone is worth reading all 500 pages of this puppy.

There's a lot of genius and creativity in this and I have no doubt that I will read it again. To say that I merely "liked" the book seems grossly unfair in some way. Unfortunately, I just couldn't give it four stars. It's a brilliant book and I'm glad I read it. It's well worth the effort of reading it. Also, I did not find it confusing but I glanced at the Wikipedia page just a bit. This may have helped.