We Need Books and Books Need Us

In his 2021 novel Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr masterfully fits disparate people – across centuries, across continents, across planets – into this story of how humans respond to the fall of empires, to environmental degradation, to civilizational collapse. 

Twining throughout these episodes or escapades, like a vine girding a tree or like an evocative sound track, is another theme: the necessity of books – to help us describe our world, to order our world, to escape our world. 

But stories are so easily lost!

As prisoners of war in Korea, Zeno’s friend explains to him, “I know why those librarians read the old stories to you,” Rex says. “Because if it’s told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.”

Licinius says, “But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.” 

And they die by being banned.

One of the lost, and then found, and then lost, and then found, stories is called “Cloud Cuckoo Land.” It tells the story of a shepherd who seeks a paradisical land in the clouds where turtles carry honey cakes on their backs. 

It was written on scrolls in the second century CE by Antonius Diogenes, a Greek. Then, over a millennium later, it shows up in book form in the ruins of a monastery. In the twentieth century, a mildewed and water-damaged version is discovered in Italy. This same story is translated and worked into a play by Zeno, the Korean War vet, in 2019. Three generations later, Konstance, a girl whose family is part of an effort to colonize a distant planet, reconstructs the play line by line while in interstellar space.

But Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is more than a paean to books and those who preserve, re-discover, copy and translate them. I think the “Cloud” of the book title also alludes to the virtual cloud where books can be stored. 

The reader or listener’s intellectual and emotional interactions with the story are essential in giving life to the story. As Zeno comes to realize: his translation doesn’t need to be perfect. “[T]he children’s imaginations will do the rest.” 

Cloud Cuckoo Land is intellectually interesting. A story holds intellectual interest for me when the information it presents dovetails with knowledge I already hold. If there’s a foothold of certain knowledge, then, when the author takes me to areas I don’t know about, including speculation into the future, I will pay attention to them. 

For example, I am a bird watcher. I appreciate Doerr’s use of many species of birds. As symbols, as in the title. As plot devices, such as the stone-curlews that save Anna and Omeir’s lives and the great gray owl that propels Seymour’s actions. As naturalistic description – birds are everywhere, if only we notice. As art motifs, from embroidery on bishops’ vestments to a painted backdrop of a children’s play. And as fantasy, as in the story about Aethon, the protagonist of “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” who “Lived 80 Years a Man, 1 Year a Donkey, 1 Year a Sea Bass, 1 Year a Crow.”

Everyone has different interests and expertise. Perhaps your love of The Odyssey or of Aristophanes’ comedies that draw you deeply into Cloud Cuckoo Land. Or the Dewey decimal system. Or horticultural practices. Or Istanbul. Or the process of translation. Or climate change scenarios.  

The pieces of the story sometimes feel like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, with “little pieces all over the house: in the basins of sinks, stuck to the bottom of his shoe, in the dustpan,” yet the reward for the completed picture is enormous. 

Cloud Cuckoo Land is also emotionally satisfying. You care about the people. You care deeply about Anna and Omeir in fifteen-century Constantinople, Zeno and Seymour in the present day, and Konstance and her dad in the future. They struggle to survive with resourcefulness and determination. They act on incomplete knowledge. They make mistakes. 

Everyone you care about in this book has a huge capacity for love. They love the people close to them: a sister, a grandfather, a daughter. They love nature and animals – oxen, dogs, owls. 

I was struck by how much the older folks sacrificed for the young ones, and not necessarily their own children. It touched my heart how, when the world was ending, the adults over the thousands of years in this story, helped the young ones to survive. 

Antonius Diogenes writes a fable he calls “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” for his ailing niece. Itinerant tutor Licinius teaches Anna, an orphan of the Orthodox faith in Constantinople, to read Greek. He leaves her his parchments when he dies. 

Omeir, a Muslim boy shunned because of his cleft lip, is cheered by his grandfather’s gentle humor. When Omeir’s sister asks how someone with his face would ever find a wife, 

“It’s not going to be his face that stops them,” Grandfather said, “it’ll be the odor of his toes” and grabbed one of Omeir’s feet and brought it to his nose and took a big whiff, and everyone laughed, and Grandfather dragged the boy into a great embrace.

Bunny, Seymour’s mom, shows infinite patience with her neuro-diverse son, despite exhaustion from working dead-end jobs. “Are you listening, Possum?” is her “I love you.” 

Konstance’s father, himself learning from his elders, bequeaths to her the hope to face an uncertain future. She says to him,

“You said that what’s so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up.”

He inclines his head towards her, blinking fast, as though a thought runs out in front of him, too quick to catch. “It was Grandmom,” he murmurs, “who used to say that.”

Zeno saves the youngsters who are acting in his play “Cloud Cuckoo Land.” The cook Chryse bundles Anna out of the city before enemy soldiers enter. Seymour’s teacher, guides him with a gentle hand. 

A slew of librarians nurture the youngsters.

Undoubtedly, the young folks propelled the action, and their adventures captured my imagination. Not until I finished the book did it dawn on me that I am in the grandparent age bracket. How might I show the love and kindness that so moved me in this novel?

I hope to be more aware of opportunities to give encouragement and actual help to the young people I encounter. Every year, I send a book to my grandsons for their birthdays. This year, I plan to send an illustrated Odyssey to Edin who turns ten. 

You are wondering when I am going to talk about how Cloud Cuckoo Land affects my life. Actually, I have. Reading this book – following the lives of the people (and of the donkey/bass/crow) I care about – gave me respite from my fears for my country, my world, the future. For a time, I could forget about mass shootings, incivility, curtailment of human rights, hurricanes, wildfires, floods, ice shelfs detaching from Antarctica, and drastic declines in bird and insect populations. I could “slip the trap.”  

The writing of this essay, and all my Dr. Bookworm essays, is a way to share my thoughts and feelings with you, to keep the stories going, to bring them to life. I hope some of my personality will come to life for my grandsons and maybe even their kids, and for you, dear reader – no matter your continent or century. 

Tell me: What do you read to “slip the trap?”