Reviews - Cloud Atlas : Cartographie des nuages

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5.55k reviews for:

Cloud Atlas : Cartographie des nuages

Manuel Berri, David Mitchell

3.99 AVERAGE

runningonwords415's review against another edition

4.0

mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

greghammond's review against another edition

5.0

dark emotional reflective medium-paced

jazzyguy13's review against another edition

4.0

Cloud Atlas starts a bit slow, with the Journal of Adam Ewing reading a bit like the beginning of Moby Dick (but without the fun homo-eroticism). But then we get the much more entertaining Robert Frobisher, whose letters begin with his escape from a hotel, and each subsequent part only builds on the thrill - Luisa Rey's corporate investigations, Timothy Cavendish's increasingly bizarre mishaps within the publishing world and his travels away from it, and the fascinating sci-fi interrogation of Sonmi-451 (which I won't describe at all, because half the fun is realizing what the terms mean, like a "disney" and a "starbuck," and what "souls" are). Once you reach the halfway point up history, the return visit to each story is like riding a bike downhill - inertia's already got you going at 100 mph.

Each story resolves amazingly well too, offering each character victory and loss in satisfying increments. Mitchell's emphasis on these tales' interconnectedness becomes a bit heavy-handed in each story's second-half, elements that could have been interjected the slightest bit more into the the first half of the book, but they're still powerful passages that manage to tie together all these disparate settings and characters into one long narrative.

My biggest criticism lies in the middle story, the only one allowed to exist as a whole and not be split into a cliffhanger-ending first half and a resolving second half. The flow of it works very well, and the setting perfectly blends a world that calls back to a time before the book's 1st chapter while still maintaining it's sci-fi leanings in the previous chapter. My problem is that it just ends, without giving us much to go on what happens to its characters. Perhaps Mitchell figured the audience wouldn't care - this chapter is the furthest into the future that the book goes, so none of the narrator's decisions impact anyone else's - but I was maddened over wondering what the details of his life were. If anyone needed a few wrap-up paragraphs, it was him, but alas, we're only given a few snippets of consolation, and then we're back into futuristic Korea.

Overall though, Cloud Atlas is phenomenal, and definitely worth the read. I can only hope the movie that's coming out later this year is half as good.