By Anthony Doerr (Amazon's #47 Best Book of 2021) ★★★★★
Cloud Cuckoo Land is an ambitious, sprawling novel that intertwines the experiences of 5 main characters across 3 storylines: one set in and around Constantinople in 1453, one in Idaho in from 1950-2020, and another in the future aboard an interstellar spaceship barreling away from an Earth that had become unlivable for humans. How could that possibly come together to make a coherent novel? Well, all 3 storylines have some connection to an ancient text called Cloud Cuckoo Land, a whimsical tale that follows a man as he tries to find the titular golden city in the sky, where wine flows through the streets and the struggles of life are nowhere to be found.
Count me among the very few who didn’t fall in love with Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See, and so perhaps my expectations were appropriately in check for Cloud Cuckoo Land, his first novel since that heavily decorated effort. I got about two thirds through the book, and said to Steph “I’m really enjoying it. If he (Doerr) pulls it all together, it has the potential to be great. But I’m worried it’s going to be a lot of words to get to a fizzled finish.”
Well, without spoiling anything, Doerr connects things in a way that was more than satisfying for me. Put a checkmark in the great box. The writing’s excellent, and possibly worth reading twice -- once to simply enjoy and immerse yourself in the story, and a second time to pick up on a lot of subtle hints and connections that Doerr sprinkles throughout. I caught some of those on the first pass; I know I missed plenty, and given that, I think this was an even more brilliantly crafted novel than I realized.
Previous Best of 2021: #3 - Project Hail Mary
Next Best of 2021: #1 - We Begin at the End