The Village Voice: Books: Only Connect . . . and Connect . . . by Jessica Winter

Enjoyed this book, Cloud Atlas, a random pick-up at Powell's City of Books. The sequences within sequences work a delight, if you trust that they will reward you.

The review comes from the Village Voice via the site ReviewsOfBooks.com .

The Village Voice: Books: Only Connect . . . and Connect . . . by Jessica Winter: "Only Connect . . . and Connect . . .
by Jessica Winter
August 17th, 2004 11:10 AM

David Mitchell echoes Sterne, Melville, Huxley, Waugh, Bradbury, and Amis fils.

Cloud Atlas
By David Mitchell
Random House, 509 pp., $14.95

'As an experienced editor,' proclaims down-at-heel London literary agent Timothy Cavendish, 'I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.' Woe betide Mr. Cavendish, then, were he to discover that he's a character in Cloud Atlas, a veritable gadgetorium of narrative contraptions. David Mitchell's third novel is so tricked out, in fact, that advance proofs came with a disclaimer from the publishing director of Random House, who confesses that he thought pages had gone missing from his manuscript when it vaulted mid-sentence?mid-word, actually?from the South Seas diary of a 19th-century notary to the epistolary plaints of a penniless composer in 1931 Belgium. The epic unfurls as no less than a journal within a series of letters within a mystery novel within a movie (or, perhaps, a lovingly detailed description of said movie) within a convict's last interview within an old man's reminiscence. Each new narrative irruption opens a fissure in the preceding groundwork (usually leaving behind a cliff with a protagonist dangling off it) until Mitchell hits his novel's deep-earth kernel?a futurist folktale of sorts, spun 'round the campfire in a Twainian vernacular?and then tunnels back out again...

Indeed, once Cloud Atlas reaches its halfway point, it begins falling into sixfold lockstep with the generic demands of third-act resolution—each strand eventually ties itself into a neat bow of explain-it-all confrontation and/or death-defying great escape. (Two denouements in particular could have been processed at the Robert McKee factory.) But so long as the heads are still popping off Mitchell's Russian doll like champagne corks, his novel glows with a fizzy, dizzy energy, pregnant with possibility and whispering in your ear: Listen closely to a story, any story, and you'll hear another story kicking inside it, eager to meet the world. "