Farewell, Anna Karenina, hello Cloud Atlas, our SAS Book Club for this month. We dig into the month of October with yet another ground-breaking piece of literature that will become a movie by the end of the year. The movie version of Anna Karenina promises to be a refined look at Russian aristocracy in a very confined period of time, while Cloud Atlas promises to be a strange and unusual view of common people over a vast period of time. Although Anna Karenina, the classic, and Cloud Atlas, the ultra-modern novel, are as different as night and day, the two novels do share some common traits.
In their own indelible style, Anna Karenina and Cloud Atlas broke with the literary convention of their day. Anna Karenina examined personal, political and social issues of Russian society. Cloud Atlas examines philosophical and psychological issues that connect us. Both novels deal with the theme of passion and love; both examine how different our lives look with the passage of time. Make no mistake about it: Cloud Atlas is a whole new realm in reading. The novel conjures up the image of many literary greats. It reminds me of Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando, for its sweeping, disjointed story that takes place over a vast period of time. It reminds me of the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez because readers must suspend all traditional thoughts and feelings about reality while reading this novel of interlocking tales.
It also reminds me of the magical realism of Guyanese writer Wilson Harris and his theory of fossil memories, which are those memories that are imbedded in our subconscious but affect who we are, how we live and how we react to situations in much the same way our genes affect us biologically. What makes Cloud Atlas so intriguing is the premise that life is about more than random experiences. It's about more than how what we experience affects our lives. It's about the way our ancestors set our lives in motion through their own distant experiences.
Notice too, the importance of disease and how it transcends its physical manifestation and becomes disease, mentally speaking. Each character in Cloud Atlas battles emotional issues. The structure of this novel is as fascinating as its subject. Cloud Atlas examines the many faces of creativity through diaries, letters and news stories which leave a fragmented record of important facts. Cloud Atlas is an independent film interpreted by three quirky directors who loved and believed in the story. Our mission is to read the book and see just how well the movie interprets the novel. Join the SAS Book Club on Facebook and read the four selected novels that will be released as movies by the end of the year: Anna Karenina, Cloud Atlas, Life of Pi and Les Miserables. Post your thoughts on the novel author Michael Chabon called "a series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes, a puzzle-book." The New York Times wrote, "Mitchell is clearly, a genius. He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine..."