![]() ![]() One of the joys for the reader is in figuring out when Diogenes’s book will appear and what purpose it will serve Anna, Omeir, Zeno, Seymour and Konstance: what trouble it might cause or blessing it might bestow. ![]() It is clear from the opening chapters of Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land that the novel’s characters, in their different time periods, will have something to do with this book inside a book, whether as champion, custodian or threat. By various mishaps and trickery, Aethon has to spend time as a donkey and a fish – a mistreated domestic beast of burden and a wandering, then trapped, wild animal. To get to the city and enter it, Aethon must be a bird and not a human, since humans are wreckers and ruiners expressly banned from this wonderful utopia. Aethon longs to travel to a rumoured paradise, a city in the sky populated by birds. It tells of a shepherd, Aethon, known by his neighbours as “a dull-witted mutton-headed lamebrain”. ![]() ![]() Antonius Diogenes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land is a fabulous adventure story written by Diogenes for his niece, to beguile and console her during an illness. The story crystallises around a book within a book, the existence of which is imagined by Doerr, though its author is a real writer of the ancient world. Following his Pulitzer winner All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is a deep lungful of fresh air – and a gift of a novel. T here is a kind of book a seasoned writer produces after a big success: large-hearted, wide in scope and joyous. ![]()
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