Cloud Atlas weaves together six narratives spanning centuries and continents, from a nineteenth-century voyage across the Pacific to a post-apocalyptic future on the Hawaiian islands. Each story is nested inside the next, read or watched or overheard by the protagonist of the one that follows, and the novel breaks off each tale at a cliffhanger before resuming it in reverse order in the second half. Along the way David Mitchell moves fluidly between genres: seafaring journal, epistolary romance, corporate thriller, comic memoir, dystopian interrogation, and oral folktale. Threaded through all six are recurring echoes of exploitation and resistance, suggesting that a single act of courage or cruelty ripples forward through time.
Books mentioned in Cloud Atlas (10)
Utopia by Thomas More: “Who can deny Old Rēkohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster?”
The Epic of Gilgamesh by Unknown: “Sixthmonth 18th, Epic of Gilgamesh; Seventhmonth 2nd, Ireneo Funes’s Remembrances; Ninthmonth 1st, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.”
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway: “the grim woman two seats ahead, reading A Moveable Feast, isn’t she that Inland Revenue gorgon who gave me such a grilling a few years ago?”
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque: “That left All Quiet on the Western Front (in whose page corners a creative schoolboy had long ago drawn frames of a cartoon stick man masturbating with his own nose—where are they now?) and Jaguars of the Skies”
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: “His old-school English accent reminds Luisa of the tiger in The Jungle Book.”
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville: “I explained, yet again, that the gangster-chic market was saturated; and that even Moby-Dick bombed in Melville’s lifetime, though I did not deploy that particular verb.”
The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells: “Some music will be drawn from an abortive opera based on The Island of Doctor Moreau, whose Viennese production was canceled by the war”
A Thousand and One Nights: “I’ve thought of this balcony as my own belvedere, from A Thousand and One Nights.”