- Would these novellas have the same effect if they were full length novels?
- Would we accept the characters as unquestioning as we do in a novella?
- Would we find the plots believable?
- Would it hold our attention? (I know Adam Ewing wouldn’t)
- Would Mitchell still be lauded as a genius if the novel was longer?
- Is the length of the novella’s crucial to the novels succes?
- What is Mitchell trying to say by including at least one homosexual/bisexual character in each novella?
- Is Mitchell biting off more than he can chew, you know, traveling all throughout history and all?
- What’s with the clouds?
- Do you think the dialect in Sloosha’s Crossin’ adds to its verisimilitude, or do you find it laughable?
- What is an Orison?
- Do you think each story could be stand on its own outside the context of the novel?
- Have you any read anything similar to this novel?
- Is this even really a novel?
I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. They’re rolling around in my head as I read, distracting me and perhaps taking away from my enjoyment. Perhaps I’m missing the point. As a reader, this novel frustrates me because I feel it places itself “above” other traditional. Sometimes I feel Mitchell wrote this novel in this form just for the sake of being different, whick irks me. Other times, I feel incredibly envious and (dare I say it) awed.
I can’t discern any definitive answers about this novel, which is also how I felt about Myra Breckinridge. But, I loved Myra Breckinridge. Not so much Cloud Atlas. But this must mean the two novels have something in common, right? Anyone have any ideas?
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Mel,
Great questions…I only have a few minutes, so I can only address a couple:
I looked up orison & it said it is a prayer.
I think the dialect in Sloosha can be compared to the oral literature/Old English…Beowulf, etc. Zachry has returned to the oldest from of the narrative…the Oral Tradition…storytelling of the great epics…This section can be seen as an epic that is passed onto future generations.
I’ll come back later…
I like a lot of your questions, and the biggest umbrella response I can try to answer to is, would we appreciate all of these odd novellas if they stood singularly? I think I may. All of these stories have experienced some public acclaim through various other novels. Some of them even hugely recognized, Alodus Huxley, Conrad, to name a few that we can pull from the text. It certainly does give this novel a funny little twist that it has spanned such a large volume of texts/forms/plots/narratives et cetera. I just wish it would have started with a scope telling the oral story, I feel like he cheated us out of a couple important forms. eh, still good to me.
I personally think that this easily could have been a collection of novellas with common themes. I feel like the connections between the sections are bit contrived. It’s cute how characters find the second half of things they are reading/watching, and it’s about characters reading about other characters, but that’s all it seems to be to me. Cloud Atlas seems gimmicky to me, which is a shame because I enjoy the writing.
Good questions…and I’m right there with you, with Halloween and the Election being MAJOR distractions and time consumers of any productive work. Hang in there, it appears that just through the process of writing your blog you are coming closer to defining a thesis.