brian 's Reviews > Cloud Atlas

pile story atop story, set 'em in different time periods, offer up a thin connection between each, and everything seems a bit more than it is. for me cloud atlas is exactly the sum of its parts. maybe less? (i'd love to hire 6 authors to independently write 6 stories set in different time periods, throw the whole mess together as one work, and watch people find all kinds of connections and deeper meanings. they would. they could.)

now don't get me wrong, i love all that 'russian doll' tale-within-a-tale borgesian-wormhole fuckoff, but the fact remains: all that clever stuff is worthless if not in service of a few well told tales (or some seriously innovative ideas: while mitchell has fun with a clever structure, there ain't nothing innovative here. see: borges, calvino, dick, joyce, etc). and this is where mitchell falters. a trite story about corporate intrigue? post-apocalyptic 'primitives' scavenging through the ruins of our time? sci-fi story about an 'almost human' finding her (more than) humanity in a futuristic corpocracy? a 'misunderstanding' gag right out of three's company to resolve frobisher's tale? impossible to unring a bell, but would it were, i'd challenge any five-starrer to jump back & read these stories as standalones: they're weak. and, no: the thread holding 'em all together just ain't enough to elevate five mediocres to one great. if you're gonna throw out some of that 'deliberately cliched' nonsense, back it up. 100 yrs earlier mr. joyce included a deliberately poorly written chapter in ulysses… with reason. am i overlooking something, oh legions of mitchell devotees? if so, dish. admitting the luisa rey chapter is shite but explaining that it was meant to be shite just don't cut it.

david foster wallace complained that television had become impossible to critique in that it critiques itself: i.e. those t.v. ads, 'don't just sit there. okay, just sit there.' it betrays enormous & self-aware insecurity on the part of the 'television people': rather than polish the turd, they joke about how turdish the turd really is. and, by extension, what a willing turd-swallower YOU are. but it's all good as it's in the guise of a fun, knowing riff on the (hyper)truth, ain't it? well, mitchell employs similar trickery. authorial dogwhistles blow all over the place in the guise of postmodern 4th-wall-breaking innovation. and i call fraud. loudly. if borges ever asked and/or apologized to the reader about a story rather than get that story in top-fucking-notch shape… i'd slap that blind bastard across his jowly cheeks. (and, yes, this kinda stuff can work if it was more the point, a kind of Greek Chorus commenting on the narrative; but as a few asides drawing the reader out & excusing the text? oh, just fuckoff.) when one character writes this about his musical composition:

”a sextet for overlapping soloists”….each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky?

i wanted to kick mr. mitchell in the shins.
if ya wanna read a less middlebrow & mediocre tale of reincarnated lives told over different periods of history in which our protagonists are linked by a common birthmark (no, really. the same birthmark gag. i'm not shitting you)… check out mishima's 'Sea of Fertility' tetralogy*.

a. hemon's article in the the new yorker on the making of the movie makes me root for it, but i predict a maudlin & turgid turd of epic proportions.

* Spring Snow
Runaway Horses
The Temple of Dawn
The Decay of the Angel
(read 'em!)