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CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

2/4/2022

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​Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is, quite simply, the best novel I’ve read in a long time. (Thanks to Hunter Rawlings and David McCullough for recommending it to me.)  All the way through I kept asking myself How does he do it?
Part of the answer has to do with his skill in  structuring the half dozen narrative lines of  his story. (None is a sub-plot; they are all independent stories that intersect in surprising ways.)  In a interview with Joshua Mohr , "The World the Book Can Build," Doerr gives away one secret about structuring the story - ,the number 24:
“I built hundreds of outlines and naps and laid lots of strips of paper out on the kitchen counter.  Ultimately relying on the number 24 – the number of books in the Iliad and Odyssey, and the number of letters in the ancient Greek alphabet – helped me to commit to a certain shape.”
The interview can be found in Poets and Writers for November / December 2021. The first part of the interview  is available here.
     Outstanding question:    It’s easy to imagine how Doerr got to Aristophanes and Apuleius, but how did he find his way to Antonius Diogenes, whose long-lost tale still manages to shape this novel?  Does Doerr keep a copy of Photius’ Bibliotheca on his bedside table?  Whatever the answer, Cloud Cuckoo Land has never been more enjoyable than in Doerr’s novel. 
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