Cloud Cuckoo Land connects five main characters using a fictional Ancient Greek codex called Cloud Cuckoo Land. This story is present and plays a significant role in all of the characters’ lives. Anna, a young girl who discovers Cloud Cuckoo Land, and Omeir, a boy conscripted into the Ottoman Empire, meet in 15th century Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire’s siege of the city. Zeno is a Korean War veteran who attempts to translate the remains of Cloud Cuckoo Land and organizes a play based on it for a group of fifth graders he befriends. Him and Seymour’s paths, a teenager caught up with ecoterrorists, converge on one fateful night in present-day Idaho. Finally, a young girl named Konstance is trapped in a room with an AI called Sybil aboard a generation starship named the Argos, headed for a distant planet. While walking through a virtual atlas of Earth before it was rendered uninhabitable, she discovers that what she has been told since birth was all a lie.
I think that the way that Doerr slowly pulls together elements from the different time periods is fascinating to read and piece together. It may be a little bit difficult to keep track of all of the separate parts at first, but I think that’s part of the fun. Recognizing how one event inevitably leads to another in some other character’s storyline and Doerrʼs beautiful use of language has made this book one of my favorites of all time. I would recommend this novel to anybody.