![]() ![]() It serves as well as the literary glue that binds together the narrative and the central protagonists of Doerr’s novel. In this case, Cloud Cuckoo Land serves as the purported title of a long-lost ancient work by Antonius Diogenes, rediscovered as a damaged but partially translatable codex in 2019, that relates the tale of Aethon, a hapless shepherd who transforms into a donkey, then into a fish, then into a crow, in a quest to reach that utopian city in the clouds. Classicists will recognize “Cloud Cuckoo Land” as borrowed from The Birds, the 414 BCE comedy by the Athenian satirist Aristophanes, a city in the sky constructed by birds that later became synonymous for any kind of fanciful world. ![]() This passage, in ancient Greek and in translation, is the key to Cloud Cuckoo Land, a big, ambitious, complicated novel by Anthony Doerr, the latest from the author of the magnificent, Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See (2014). “Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you.” ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |