Jake

The Idle Book Club 2: Cloud Atlas

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The synchronicity of Frobisher's and Sixsmith's deaths didn't occur to me until last night. Both of a gunshot to the head in a hotel room, both apparent suicides-- the sort of thing that's not a huge plot point but is obviously intentional, one of those little things that differentiates a story from a mere series of events.

I dig shit like that.

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The synchronicity of Frobisher's and Sixsmith's deaths didn't occur to me until last night. Both of a gunshot to the head in a hotel room, both apparent suicides-- the sort of thing that's not a huge plot point but is obviously intentional, one of those little things that differentiates a story from a mere series of events.

I dig shit like that.

This just blew my mind. Sixsmith had some skill with forgery right? What if he killed Frobisher and faked the suicide note? He was in the same city at the time....

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Well... that seems rather out of character. Again, I don't really think of it as a piece of the puzzle, as it were, so much as just taking the opportunity to make a couple of apparently disparate parts of the story resonate with each other.

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Well... that seems rather out of character. Again, I don't really think of it as a piece of the puzzle, as it were, so much as just taking the opportunity to make a couple of apparently disparate parts of the story resonate with each other.

I wouldn't claim that Mitchell meant for this to be a valid reading, but when you say "out of character", how much do we actually know about Sixsmith's character? He is a very minor character, 40-50 years after the events of Frobisher's story. Who knows what kind of jealousy/rage he might have experienced as a young man.

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Well, you can infer anything you like from the text (as I discussed at the end of the pre-discussion thread), but the basis for that interpretation of the character seems, to me, a bit flimsy, and contrary to everything we're told about Sixsmith's. So, yeah, technically possible for it to be in character, but the only basis for the interpretation that I perceive is a wish to exaggerate the resonance between Frobisher's and Luisa's stories into symmetry. It's unnecessary, IMO, but if it makes the story more powerful for you then knock yourself out.

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I figured out that they were reincarnations about halfway through the Zachary part when he's talking about how the Valleymen have no fear of dying because they know they will come right back as the next baby born if they lived civilized lives. I knew right then that David Mitchell was talking about his six characters because each one is living a life to further or fix civilization in his or her time in their own way and that then gave them the 'right' to come back as a new reincarnation.

I loved how each story was told using a different form of writing that was very endemic to his particular timeframe:

Ewing = Personal Journal

Frobisher = Letters to a lover

Rey = Trashy pulp novel

Cavendish = Memoir

Somni = Interrogation

Zachary = Oral Folktale

I thought just that by itself was a brilliant way to describe each era without really saying anything. Like other posters have said each one has its own plausibility or implausibility built in with Rey it is the hardest to see but when Cavendish described Hillary V. Hush as a fat man it reminded me of one of Rey's co-workers, also a fat man who maybe wrote the novels under a pen name describing the real Rey?

Per the Sonmi discussion of product names taking the place of products "driving a ford" or "snapping a kodak" it reminded me a lot of Jennifer Government which had a very similar Libertarian dystopian future landscape where people's entire identity is predicated upon the company they worked for and the entire system is set up to encourage as much economic activity as humanly possible.

The language Zachary used was very interesting to me. Its similar to pidgin english that people speak on Hawaii today but sort of devolved as if the people speaking in that manner only had each other to talk to for hundreds of years, which I thought was really smart of Mitchell.

I felt the conclusion of the novel was a bit preachy in terms of pretty much coming out and saying competition = bad cooperation = good. I felt he was belaboring the point a little too heavily there.

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If the reincarnation theory is literal, it seems to have a pretty big flaw. How can Cavendish be a reincarnated Luisa Rey? Rey is 20something in the 1970's, while Cavendish is in his 60's less than 40 years later. Even if Luisa Rey is fictional, and the author is the real birthmark-bearer, aren't we told that Hilary V Hush is also alive and sending manuscripts to Cavendish?

It seems weird to go to all the effort of spelling out this reincarnation theory and then not following through with it fully. Unless it's a sign that all the talk of reincarnation in the past/future stories is hocus pocus, and nudgingly letting the reader know not to take it so literally.

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If the reincarnation theory is literal, it seems to have a pretty big flaw. How can Cavendish be a reincarnated Luisa Rey? Rey is 20something in the 1970's, while Cavendish is in his 60's less than 40 years later. Even if Luisa Rey is fictional, and the author is the real birthmark-bearer, aren't we told that Hilary V Hush is also alive and sending manuscripts to Cavendish?

It seems weird to go to all the effort of spelling out this reincarnation theory and then not following through with it fully. Unless it's a sign that all the talk of reincarnation in the past/future stories is hocus pocus, and nudgingly letting the reader know not to take it so literally.

I don't remember reading what year it was in Cavendish. Seemed like it could be near future from how English society had deteriorated so

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I assumed that was Meronym, but you might be right.

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Oh was he referring specifically to protagonists? Well then, that was me not paying attention then.

That certainly would lend credence to the hypothesis you mentioned on the first page. Then again, who knows about the mechanics of reincarnation? Do souls respect time the same way that we do? Do they stay in a body for an entire lifetime, or do our souls sometimes leave us partway through? It must seem so, sometimes. That's probably overthinking it though.

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If the reincarnation theory is literal, it seems to have a pretty big flaw. How can Cavendish be a reincarnated Luisa Rey? Rey is 20something in the 1970's, while Cavendish is in his 60's less than 40 years later. Even if Luisa Rey is fictional, and the author is the real birthmark-bearer, aren't we told that Hilary V Hush is also alive and sending manuscripts to Cavendish?

It seems weird to go to all the effort of spelling out this reincarnation theory and then not following through with it fully. Unless it's a sign that all the talk of reincarnation in the past/future stories is hocus pocus, and nudgingly letting the reader know not to take it so literally.

I don't have any issue with this. I always thought the idea of reincarnation was outside of time itself. Take a look at this: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg.html for a real mind trip.

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FWIW, a lot of good points have been pointed out here and via twitter about the role of fiction in the book. (Somni seeing the Cavendish movie, etc.) that I wish we would've talked about in greater detail. Definitely feel like we're learning how to do this.

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I have not read the book, enjoyed the cast. A comment, and a question.

Because I haven't read the book, I was shocked when you mentioned a character who was obviously male and then mentioned the love of his life, another man named "Luis Array". That sure was an interesting twist in the book that was completely not real!

Chris mentioned the weird anachronism of calling a camera a "Nikon", a car a "Ford", etc. The book is less than a decade old, and you kind of have to re-remember that the iphone is only 5 years old. It's just one of those things that an author in 2004 could not know about the next 10 years. Do you think if you had first read the book 10 years from now, reading things like that would be less bothersome, more a look back in time at what the futures from the past look like? This is more tangential to the actual book conversation, but it's one of the stronger thoughts I had about reading and discussing books in general while listening.

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Chris mentioned the weird anachronism of calling a camera a "Nikon", a car a "Ford", etc. The book is less than a decade old, and you kind of have to re-remember that the iphone is only 5 years old. It's just one of those things that an author in 2004 could not know about the next 10 years. Do you think if you had first read the book 10 years from now, reading things like that would be less bothersome, more a look back in time at what the futures from the past look like? This is more tangential to the actual book conversation, but it's one of the stronger thoughts I had about reading and discussing books in general while listening.

I took Chris's point as being "no matter what, technology changes fast. any author of the internet age can't do something like what mitchell here did and not think it's going to sound dated" specifically for the reasons you're describing.

For me the futurist use of brands as common nouns dates the book itself (as opposed to it always being (and feeling like) a futurist story written in 2004). I think the book would've benefited from not going down that route as the rest of the book feels pretty timeless.

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I took Chris's point as being "no matter what, technology changes fast. any author of the internet age can't do something like what mitchell here did and not think it's going to sound dated" specifically for the reasons you're describing.

For me the futurist use of brands as common nouns dates the book itself (as opposed to it always being (and feeling like) a futurist story written in 2004). I think the book would've benefited from not going down that route as the rest of the book feels pretty timeless.

Oh absolutely, it does sound dated I agree. Do you think it would be as jarring to you if the book had been written in 1994 rather than 2004? I'm not as taken out of the moment for older books set somewhat past their present day that talk about someone sitting down at their IBM for example.

Do you think then, as kind of a blanket statement, someone writing about the future should not use current branding in their work? Exceptions as always if they are using it for a specific reason rather than attempting to give the writing a sense of place. I think a book can feel like it's old without necessarily feeling dated or out of it's time.

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Do you think then, as kind of a blanket statement, someone writing about the future should not use current branding in their work? Exceptions as always if they are using it for a specific reason rather than attempting to give the writing a sense of place. I think a book can feel like it's old without necessarily feeling dated or out of it's time.

This discussion brought to mind Infinite Jest's naming of years after brands. That didn't bother me at all, and I think there's a few reasons why - it's near-present day, so the brands have more relevance anyway, but I think the main reason is that IJ doesn't seem to be trying to biuld a plausible future for us, it takes place more in an alternate-reality skewed world. Also, of course, it's aiming at satirical. Cloud Atlas, even with the whole Yerbas Buenas thing, still seems to be trying to take place firmly in our world and our timeline. And lastly, placing brands-as-nouns is sort of an all-in bet - it's much easier to believe that people would still be talking about Whoppers in the future than that they would have replaced "burger" or "sandwich" in the vocabulary.

Still, though, I find it hard to believe that anyone in 2004 thought "ford" was going to be the dominant auto brand ever again, especially in Asia.

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I took Chris's point as being "no matter what, technology changes fast. any author of the internet age can't do something like what mitchell here did and not think it's going to sound dated" specifically for the reasons you're describing.

For me the futurist use of brands as common nouns dates the book itself (as opposed to it always being (and feeling like) a futurist story written in 2004). I think the book would've benefited from not going down that route as the rest of the book feels pretty timeless.

The brands would have already sounded fully dated in 2004. Nikon, Sony, were already on the decline if not gone from the public lexicon by the time the book was written, at least compared to the way those names fully captured the public mind 30 years prior. Given that he name-checked Orwell and Huxley in that segment, and almost all the brand names were things which were stalwarts of the 20th century but didn't make it much further ("disney" being a notable exception, though its use as "pop film" seems to evoke an older definition of that company), it seems like a deliberate throwback to mid-20th century dystopia fiction. Not literally -- I didn't read it as "you are reading some torn out pages from a portrait of a grim future written in 1975" or something -- but it feels at least like a future which takes place in one of those type of worlds, more than a literal future of our own world. Whether that choice was something you agree with or not, I don't think Mitchell was trying to sound current with the brands.

I could be majorly reading too much into it, or I could just want that bit to be something that it's not. I just don't think it would be giving Mitchell too much credit or benefit of the doubt to say that his use of those particular brands as nouns was deliberate for tone and setting beyond an immediately-dated attempt to be futurey-sounding. He has such a good and specific handle on deliberate word use everywhere else. I'm not denying that it felt dated to me -- it did -- but it felt dated to me in exactly the same way a story taking place in the future but based on the society and lexicon from the '30s or '40s would, meaning that, like the rest of the book, the language and structure of how that chapter was told had its own unique and secondary sort of "sidecar" of preconceptions and feelings that came not from the events or even the language, but just the type of story I was reading for that chapter. Again, could be an over reach, and as usual I don't feel like I'm explaining myself fully, but that's something that came to mind when I was reading.

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Especially the use of 'Ford' seemed to me a deliberate reference to Brave New World, which has the same sort of reverence for Ford.

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Yeah, I'll take that. As Sean said, wish we would have talked more about the role of fiction in the structure of the novel.

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Yeah, I'll take that. As Sean said, wish we would have talked more about the role of fiction in the structure of the novel.

Any chance of, in the future, doing some sort of short, supplementary, follow-up podcast to discuss things like this? I'm not just talking about Cloud Atlas specifically, but any book in general, that could use more discussion. Or is the plan for the book podcast to always be strictly one pod, casted once per month? Or I guess there could be a short errata style section of the next book-cast, to discuss topics related to the last book.

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Basically, one is not enough hours to talk about books, and the natural additional conversation has to spill over somewhere.

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Having only gotten the book in the mail like a week ago, I'm still working through it. At my desk, with dictionary.com open, because the first few pages have contained a lot of words I had never heard of before.

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I feel guilty listening to the podcast before reading the book but someone mentioned Sean being upset about the film trailer?

The movie is really great and he shouldn't be upset (unless it was like... they visulaized things that he wanted his imagination to create on its own or that kind of thing). From what I understand it's not a direct translation in terms of structure (in the Q&A I saw the Wachowskis described it as "more of a tapestry than an onion") but it certainly worked for me and they succeeded in pulling off an incredibly ambitious epic cinematic experience.

I'm just writing this in hopes that fans of the book will look forward to the movie instead of dreading it. I really liked it a lot.

EDIT: I broke down and listened to the cast just to make sure I wasn't being a complete idiot.

Sean & Chris, some of your fears are justified in that you do see Tom Hanks' face pop up all over the place and the birthmarks are all fairly close to comet-like images, but I have a couple points in spoiler tags which may make you feel a tiny bit better.

-It's not just Hanks and Halle Berry that repeat. Most of the supporting cast including much smaller parts are used multiple times. While you still get the more familiar facial recognition, there's also a much more subtle overall feeling of similarity going on which ties into similar plot points and thematic connections nicely.

-Tom Hanks does not play the primary protagonist of every story. Although regrettably true with a couple of supporting actors, mostly everybody gets to play good guys and not-so-good guys. Also, Some of the make-up is goofy but much of it is really remarkable and, since practically everybody has some degree of heavy make-up going on, the whole film gets a kind of consistent feel. I didn't get any explicit message that these actors represented the same soul in different lives. I took away a much more general theme that life connects to life and there's unseen connective tissue everywhere.

-Jim Broadbent's Cavendish is a highlight of the movie for me.

-Almost all of Sonmi's storyline takes place in an interrogation room. The Wachowski-esque visuals seen in the trailer are much like flashbacks or occasional visualizations put under her narrative interrogation.

-Attua (sp?) gets more screentime than you might think, although yes there is rope-swinging involved.

Of course anyone that loves a book may not like the movie just because it's not the book (Ask me about L.A. Confidential sometime), but my feeling is that they did an incredible adaptation and made a movie version that is really good.

I urge everyone to watch Tom Tykwer's adaptation of Perfume starring Ben Whishaw. To me, that shares a much closer similarity to Cloud Atlas (film)'s tone than any of Wachowski's work (although there are several signature shots that bear their style). Also, Ben Whishaw is fantastic.

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