sextet. 

David Mitchell interviews

Apocalypse, maybe: "In spite of its title, Cloud Atlas is Mitchell's tightest, most focused book, as well as his funniest: the Russian doll structure allows him to return to the same themes - which are, broadly speaking, the struggle between savagery and civilisation, between biology and ethics. 'It's a book about predacity and predation,' he says, 'individuals preying on groups, groups preying on individuals.'

"It is also strikingly political, much more so than anything else he has written: Mitchell's vision of the future is like Naomi Klein's No Logo taken to its ultimate conclusion: a consumer society in the process of consuming itself. The narrator of this section, Somni 451, is a clone genomed to smile and stand for 19 hours on end in an underground fast-food restaurant, genuflecting to the dollar, worshipping the company logo, a sort of Ronald McDonald hologram that performs endless somersaults in the air. At night the fabricants have 'nitemares of angry diners, food tube blockages, lost collars and shameful destarrings'. Language itself is branded: instead of shoes, films, petrol, traffic jams, Somni 451 sees nikes, disneys, exxon and fordjams. For the pure-blood consumers who live overground, spending is compulsory - 'Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime.' Perhaps the most terrifying thing is that Mitchell exaggerates the present only slightly. "

Fantastic voyage: "What went through Mitchell's mind when plotting the book? 'I didn't think about it at all,' he says. 'When I'm writing, I know what I want to have next - this scene, that snatch of dialogue, this passage. The theme of predation, the tendency of a society to eat itself, and the Russian-doll structure, evolved organically as I was writing. My books start with four or five stem cells - a mention of the Moriori tribe in Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, and the revelation that humanity can regress just as easily as it can go forward. And I'd been reading Eric Fenby's autobiography, My Life With Delius, which was such an intriguing relationship. Another starting-point was Italo Calvino's book, If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, which is full of interrupted stories. I wondered how it would be if you went and actually finished off all those interrupted stories...'

"But why not (the cry goes up from readers and rivals alike) write a straight single narrative rather than these serpentining, Gordian knots of plot? He shrugs. The Irish sunlight, pouring through the glass door of his shed behind him, lights up his large ears like twin porch-lights. "It's a structural challenge," he says shortly.

"But why give yourself these challenges? You don't have to...

" 'I do,' says Mitchell firmly. 'It's a kind of escapology, inside which is originality. The tighter the straitjacket, the more ingenious the act of escapology has to be.' "

Cloud Atlas quotes

"As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent."

And

"Souls cross the skies o' time. . . like clouds crossin' skies o' the world."

And

"Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds."

And

". . . I glimpsed all the lifes my soul ever was till far-far back b'fore the Fall, yay, glimpsed from a gallopin' horse in a hurrycane, but I cudn't describe 'em 'cos there ain't the words no more but well I mem'ry that dark Kolekole girl with her tribe's tattoo, yay, she was a saplin' bendin' an' I was that hurrycane, I blowed her she bent, I blowed harder she bent harder an' closer, then I was Crow's wings beatin' an' she was the flames lickin' an' when the Kolekole saplin' wrapped her willowy fingers around my neck, her eyes was quartzin' and she murmed in my ear, Yay, I will, again, an' yay, we will, again."

I've gone forward in time and now I'll be going back. Translation: less than 200 pages to go and a strong inclination to listen to The Highwaymen: "I'll be back again and again and again and again."

Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true.

--David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas and Hesiod's Theogony

I am loving David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I am supposedly reading it with a friend, who became too involved with it to stop at the end of the second section, our agreed upon first discussion point, and I am enjoying it too much to speed through it to catch up with her. We didn't do too well reading War and Peace together either.

Mitchell's overarching structure reminds me of Calvino, and each section (there are six separate storylines and incidentally--hah!-- a character named Sixsmith) is a a different voice, a different location and time, most delightful pastiche. I'll be taking a look at Mitchell's earlier works once I'm done with Cloud Atlas.

And speaking of earlier works, I read Hesiod's "Theogony" at work Monday night. Why depend upon Bulfinch and Edith Hamilton when you can read the earliest written versions of myths just as easily for yourself? In translation, of course. I have much more insight into the birth of Aphrodite, for example, after reading this. S. will be reading this next, while I move on to Apollodorus.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. It's the steaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's only a cactus.
--Enid Bagnold

But what if it's written by a homosexual, Mr. Allen?

MONTGOMERY - An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university
libraries. A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote
homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda."

Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed.

"I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.