Cloud Cuckoo Land is the highly anticipated follow-up to author Michael Doerr’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See. Even before the public could get their hands on it when it was finally released in late September of 2021, Cloud Cuckoo Land had already been longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction alongside such heady, rave-reviewed competitors as Intimacies: A Novel and The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois.
The takes it title from a utopian city featured in The Birds, a satire by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes. This city in the clouds has since become an allusive metaphor used to describe any circumstance in which people act according to their own perceptions regardless of any facts that contradict that view. At the time of the book’s publication “Cloud Cuckoo Land” was often engages to describe the state of mind a significant minority of Americans rejecting all evidence to the contrary to instead persist in a delusion conspiratorial belief in everything from the 2020 Presidential election having been rigged and stolen to vaccines for treating Covid-19 being a secret deep state plan to install tracking devices in all Americans. The term applies equally well to the communist witch hunts and Red Scare of the post-WWII years and the actual witch hunting hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts.
For his actual narrative purposes, Doerr goes all the way back to the source (of sorts) with the discovery of an ancient manuscript allegedly written sometime during the first century after the birth of Christ. This big novel pursuing big ideas is not content with going backward, however, as the narrative moves along a trek that spends time in Constantinople in the 1400’s, Idaho in the 1950’s, the year of Covid itself and thence well on into next century.
Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize winner All the Light We Cannot See was a hefty enough text at almost 550 pages, but his follow-up tacks on an additional hundred pages as he continues to play on that team of authors reacting in stubborn defiance toward the overall trend of shorter novels dominating serious American fiction.
