Fortunately, he finds Rex and they have a one-week visit in London. He misses Rex, and does his best to send letters, hoping to find him.
Eventually, they go home to their respective countries. By the end of their time together, Zeno is in love. He and Rex sleep next to each other every night on the dirt floor. He writes famous Greek lines from literature in the sand or scratches them into wood, and Zeno learns to interpret them. Zeno has never met another man like him and is extremely sheltered. Rex is an academic from London, where he is out and lives an open lifestyle. Zeno Ninis is a young man from Idaho in the 1950’s. The night they escape, their world does not come to an end, like they thought it would. They’re poor farmers, and it’s the only book they ever read. He flees as the invasion starts, and he meets Anna. His family has loved him and kept him alive, even when babies like him would have been left to die at the time. He has a cleft palate and throughout his life, he has been seen as a cursed, evil boy. Omeir is one of the men who joined Constantinople’s conquerors, but he deserted the night of the attack. The assumed timeline of Antionius Diogenes life means that this book was written is over 1,000 years before Anna finds it but knowing that Phobius knew of and could obtain a copy of it in the late 800’s means that the book could be as young as 600 years old, on papyrus. The book is one of her only possessions, and she keeps it with her as she escapes. As the city falls under attack, she flees. She has been taught to read and begins to read the story to her sister.
Water, mold, animals, and time have taken away most of the words. The ruin is an ancient monastery, and the papers that she finds are almost completely ruined. Anna, a young girl in Constantinople in the 1450’s, discovers bundles of old papyrus in an abandoned ruin. Now that you know who Antonius Diogenes is, replace The Wonders Beyond Thule with Cloud Cuckoo Land. It is that “pang” from which Cloud Cuckoo Land rises. It is lost to time.įor writers and readers alike, the thought of a great novel being lost to time sends a pang right into one’s heart. There are no copies known on Earth, and there have not been for centuries. TLDR: Nothing exists of Diogenes’ Thune except a synopsis written 600 years later, and a few scraps of damaged papyrus. And his last book won a Pulitzer so that’s saying something. Two other ancient works reference Thune as a historical source, but offer little clue about the novel’s content.Īll of this information about Diogenes is so obscure that the only reference on the author’s Wikipedia page is a guide to Greek literature written in 1870. Using his synopsis, historians have pieced together several pieces of the plot. At the point he writes it, historians believe that the book is over 600 years old. According to Phobius, the novel is an epic journey with graceful descriptions, clarity, and vivid narration. In this Myriobiblos, he provided a synopsis of Thune. Stick with me and you will not be disappointed. An ambitious novel deserves an ambitious review. Most of the information I found just made me more and more impressed with what Doerr did here. Yes, I had to study some ancient Greek literature. Then I thought – do I really want to review this book? And again, I decided that I should. The three situations weave together as each character is touched by the story told in the old manuscript, “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” by Antonius Diogenes.Įvery once in a while, you come across a beast of a novel and wonder, should I stick with this? This was one of those novels for me. Finally, Konstance, a girl on the ship that has left earth in search of a new planet 592 years away, is calmed when her father tells her of the land in the sky where the birds live among golden buildings and unlimited food stores. A group of children put on a play called “Cloud Cuckoo Land” in 2020 Idaho. A girl named Mary smuggles the pages out of town as she flees the invasion. An ancient, stained manuscript is found weeks before the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr is a literary tribute to the precarious life of books.
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