CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

Further Reading | Q&A | Reading Group Guide

Q: What’s does the title mean?

A: ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ (Νεϕελοκοκκυγία) was a phrase invented by the comic playwright Aristophanes’ 2,400 years ago in “The Birds,” one his few plays that survives to this day. In “The Birds,” two heroes, Trustyfriend and Goodhope, decide to leave Athens because it has become too corrupt, and—with the help of the world’s birds—build a better city in the sky, halfway between the realm of humans and the realm of the gods. In the centuries since, a ‘cloud cuckoo land’ has been used to describe any number of fanciful worlds, employed in works from Lucian’s second-century A.D. “A True Story,” to a 1925 Robert Graves poem (“Kingfishers, when they die, To far Cloud-Cuckoo pastures fly”), to the 2014 LEGO movie. In my novel, I hope to embrace the full range of contemporary and historical meanings of the phrase, from a beautiful utopia where there is no suffering, to an absurd and over-optimistic fantasy. What is it about seemingly every human generation in seemingly every culture that we tell stories about traveling to better, prettier, more equitable places in far-off lands?

Q: What’s the novel about?

A: It consists, really, of five novels-in-one, each braided around the others, and each of Cloud Cuckoo Land’s five protagonists are connected through time by a sixth novel: an ancient text by Antonius Diogenes (that I invented) about a shepherd’s comical journey to a utopian city in the sky.

There’s Anna, who lives and works in an embroidery house in 15th century Constantinople. She chafes against her over-structured life, and longs to learn to read. There’s Omeir, an oxherd from the mountains of what we now call Bulgaria, who grows up on a diet of his grandfather’s whimsical fables. After Omeir and his oxen are conscripted into the Ottoman army to help drag a super-cannon (one of the largest cannons ever constructed) to attack Constantinople, his path and Anna’s intersect.

Meanwhile, a boy named Seymour in present-day Lakeport, Idaho, is devastated when a forest that he loves is razed to make room for a housing development. As he becomes radicalized, he decides to take an action that will put him in direct conflict with eighty-six-year-old Zeno, an amateur translator and a former Korean prisoner-of-war, who is working with five children on a play adaptation of Aethon’s adventures in the local library.

Finally, in the distant future, a young girl named Konstance becomes trapped alone in a vault with access to a virtual and possibly infinite library. Through her tireless research and quest for answers, an even larger narrative unfolds. Over the course of 600 pages, the shepherd’s story—the novel within the novel—comes into the lives of all five characters at different points and hopefully it unlocks clues to their interwoven journeys until the very end.

Q: Six hundred pages sounds long!

It is a big novel, yes, but Cloud Cuckoo Land is actually just a bit shorter than my previous book. All the Light We Cannot See was 128,000 words and Cloud Cuckoo Land ended up right around 125,000 words.

Q: Fans who only know your work from All the Light We Cannot See might be surprised that the novel opens in the distant future. Do you see the book as incorporating multiple genres?

A: The fragments that we still have of ancient Greek novels indicate that many of them were more experimental and playful than were originally thought: they apparently played with metafiction and historicity, even as they fell over themselves to be entertaining. Though we only have a few extant fragments of Antonius Diogenes’ writing, it’s clear he was interested in mashing up genres: myths, travel narratives, natural histories, romances, ghost stories, historical treatises, etc. I wanted my book to embrace that sense of playfulness, too, and I wanted to continually rotate the story around the running theme of a sieges-inside-sieges, libraries-inside-libraries, worlds-inside-worlds. Because what is a book if not a little self-contained universe that you get to hold in your hands? So, yes, I think it’s safe to say that Cloud Cuckoo Land was my attempt at a literary-sci-fi-mystery-young-adult-historical-morality novel.

Q: What do you hope readers will take away from Cloud Cuckoo Land?

A: I hope readers are reminded of our myriad interconnections: with our ancestors, with our neighbors, with other species, with all the kids yet to be born. I believe that the more we can remember how much we’re all in the same boat—the more we can train ourselves to imagine, recognize, and remember our connections—with the bacteria in our guts, the birds outside our windows, the meals on our plates, and the children in our futures—the better off we’ll be.

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