Cloud Atlas

a novel

509 pages

English language

Published Jan. 5, 2004 by Random House Trade Paperbacks.

ISBN:
978-0-375-50725-0
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Goodreads:
49628

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4 stars (43 reviews)

Cloud Atlas is the third novel by British author David Mitchell. It was published in 2004. It won the British Book Awards Literary Fiction award and the Richard & Judy "Book of the Year" award. The year it was published, it was short-listed for the Booker Prize, Nebula Award for Best Novel, and Arthur C. Clarke Award, among other accolades. Unusually, it received awards from both the general literary community and from the speculative fiction community. A film adaptation directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, and featuring an ensemble cast, was released in 2012. Cloud Atlas is a work combining metafiction, historical fiction, contemporary fiction and science fiction. Its text is interconnected nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the 19th century to the island of Hawai'i in a distant post-apocalyptic future. The title was inspired by the piece of music of the same …

7 editions

Weiss nicht so recht was ich damit anfangen soll

3 stars

Mehrere lose zusammenhängende Geschichten die zu verschiedenen Zeiten spielen. Ein Großteil davon eigentlich recht interessant - aber am Ende steht man planlos da und fragt sich was der Autor eigentlich sagen wollte. Und dazu dann noch ein ganzer Abschnitt in einem sehr anstrengendem Stil geschrieben - Keine Ahnung ob der Teil nur in der Übersetzung so schlimm ist.

(btw: Hab den Film davon noch nicht gesehen)

Review of 'Cloud Atlas' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

This was good. Not mind-bendingly great - and I'm sad it wasn't better. It is still a good book. I like stories within stories, I like strange connections through time. I didn't pick up on strong enough connections throughout the stories. I guess I'll see the movie, which should be a bit more condensed and might make the connections clearer.

Things which are good about this book:
A new style for every story. Mitchell switches well between voices and they all read very well.
Great cliffhangers at the end of each first chapter.


Not so lovely:
* Terrible resolutions. The last half of this book could have been really explosive, but I felt each story wrapped up in very small ways.

Review of 'Cloud Atlas' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Cloud Atlas is a really hard book to review; it starts off as a Journal circa 1850 documenting a voyage home from the Chatham Islands, then it’s a series of letters from a 1930’s English musician to a Belgium composer, then a journalist from 1975 investigating for a novel that will blow the whistle on a new nuclear power plant , a 21st century publisher is fleeing from gangsters in a movie dramatization, a dystopian future story told from genetically-engineered clone’s perspective and finally the post-apocalyptic future where technology is all whipped out. Confusing? Well this book does all come together in to make Cloud Atlas a truly interesting book to read but I don’t think it worked as intended.

I think author David Mitchell is too clever for his own good in this book. The stories do all come together and he really shows off by writing each section …

Review of 'Cloud Atlas' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

David Mitchell is without a doubt my favourite living author.

Cloud Atlas is his finest work so far. Mitchell is superb at constructing a related series of stories and characters that simply jump off the pages. The writing style changes so completely and convincingly from one story to another that it's almost hard to believe that they were written by the same author.

It should have won the Booker!

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Subjects

  • Fate and fatalism -- Fiction
  • Reincarnation -- Fiction