To begin with, you have to take it on trust that all these elements somehow form part of a whole. Meanwhile the younger Zeno’s early encounters with myth at the local library feed into a belated ambition to be a translator from ancient Greek.
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Pressed into war, Omeir merely yearns to get back to the family farm. Konstance’s avocation becomes clear when she learns the true purpose of the spacecraft’s mission in its weird virtual library. For Seymour, it’s an encounter with an owl in the woods behind his home. For Anna, her awakening comes when she begins learning Greek from a goitrous tutor in Constantinople. Each is a wounded outsider who is initiated into a mystery, embarks on a journey, suffers and eventually effects a final homecoming. It helps that the characters are all versions of a mythic archetype. It’s an amazing feat that drawing from such disparate story lines, Doerr manages to keep the book compelling, coherent and moving.
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What can possibly connect such an odd bunch of people? One minute we’re haggling with Venetian book collectors in a besieged city, the next, a single mother in Idaho is struggling to pay her bills, or someone in a hermetically sealed spaceship is wondering how a beetle got in there. And just to complicate matters, there’s an additional story line set on a spacecraft in the 22nd century, where a young teenager called Konstance is traveling in search of a more promising habitation than the blighted Earth she and her fellow passengers have left behind. Separately, inside the besieged city, the orphaned seamstress Anna has developed herself a side hustle as a cat burglar to raise money for her sick sister, Maria. As events at the library threaten to spin out of control, the scene shifts and we find ourselves 500 years earlier, in 15th-century Thrace, meeting a harelipped character named Omeir, whose oxen have been requisitioned for the siege of Constantinople. It’s to Doerr’s credit that he quickly manages to humanize Seymour, a lonely young misfit who has become a radical misanthrope after developers encroached on the wilderness he loves. The rehearsal is jarringly interrupted by the intrusion of Seymour Stuhlman, who’s armed and carrying an explosive device. As the book opens, Zeno is in his 80s and directing a play he’s written for a cast of children at the local library.
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In present-day Idaho, we meet Zeno Ninis. The novel follows five characters in three different historical epochs, who at first seem like the protagonists of separate books. In fact, there’s a vast notional library of vanished books that includes Aristotle’s treatise on comedy, Shakespeare’s “Cardenio,” Melville’s “The Isle of the Cross,” several books of the Bible, Byron’s memoirs, the second volume of Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” and “Inventio Fortunata,” a 14th-century travel book about the Arctic. You know how many we have left? Thirty-two.” A bibliophile in Anthony Doerr’s new novel, “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” reminds us how many of the works of the Greek tragedians have been lost: “We know that at least one thousand of them were written and performed in Greek theaters in the fifth century B.C. Fire, mildew, carelessness, water, censorship, indifference and a need for cheap paper have annihilated many undoubted masterpieces. Manuscripts are only slightly more robust than the humans who write them. “Manuscripts don’t burn,” says the fiendish Woland in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita.” This stirring claim is often taken to mean that great art never perishes, but it’s certainly not literally true.