The Atlas (novel)

Transcription

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] VERONICA BELMONT: It spans a few different genres but I think all together it just makes for a really interesting story. ETHAN NICHTERN: I was like, whoever wrote this is gonna be remembered as one of the top authors of the early 21st century. MATTHEW HART: It's like watching a firework display. The spectacle of the artwork itself is what's drawing your attention. ETHAN NICHTERN: I read it pretty early on and then kept recommending it to people over the last 5 or 7 years and it's like this is a pretty amazing work of human fiction. MATTHEW HART: Cloud Atlas is a book that repays the sort of linguistic generic study that academics brings to it, but it's also just a great story. AMY LAU: Mitchell really plays with the subgenres of literature and he puts it all together in one book and the amazing part about Cloud Atlas is it all ties together. TOM MERRITT: I like so many different kinds of genres. I was just…it was like having a sampler platter. You know, like a Whitman sampler box, I was just eating all the chocolates. VERONICA BELMONT: A lot of people complain that David Mitchell was trying to show off a little bit. "Look how smart I am, I'm writing in all these different styles" but like Tom said, he absolutely pulled it off. SAMIR CHOPRA: You respect the writer for being so ambitious. It's not clear to me that he's pulled off everything that he wanted to do, but you've gotta respect the attempt. [MUSIC] TOM MERRITT: I do think that Cloud Atlas defies genre classification. When I try to describe the genre I generally fall back on conceptual fiction. It seems to fit loosely in there. ETHAN NICHTERN: It's this notion of an interwoven narrative throughout time and space. VERONICA BELMONT: It's 6 nested stories and they have some similar themes across the stories and similar characters. SAMIR CHOPRA: So you go from the oldest story to the newest story, then from the newest story back to the oldest story. So the structural aspects of the novel are very front and center. AMY LAU: In the first half of the book when you get the fractured narratives, the reader has to go through the book and figure out what's going on for themselves. Then the second half is kind of like the "aha" moments where it's like "oh okay, I get what he was doing in the first half." MATTHEW HART: Well he's doing something which, you know, prose writers have done for centuries which is to construct a larger work out of a series of smaller stories. What's really interesting about it is that he then decides, "okay I've got this structure in mind. I'm gonna deal with it by creating not just different stories, but stories that operate in totally different generic registers." You've got something like The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, which is really invested in travel writing of the 19th century and is doing a kind of historical work. SAMIR CHOPRA: Who does he quote as an inspiration? He quotes an American classic. He quotes Herman Melville and Moby Dick. TOM MERRITT: And then you've got Letters from Zedelghem which is your Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh sort of style. AMY LAU: The section's written in this letter format and basically Robert Frobisher is this British musician. MATTHEW HART: Frobisher is the classic tortured bisexual modernist artist. TOM MERRITT: Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery. MATTHEW HART: It's a pastiche of the airport thriller, but it works as an airport thriller. It really is thrilling. TOM MERRITT: The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, probably your closest to a mainstream novel, right? MATTHEW HART: This picaresque novel about a down on his luck, aging publisher. TOM MERRITT: I just really hated Timothy Cavendish. VERONICA BELMONT: Really? TOM MERRITT: Uh yeah, I had no sympathy. VERONICA BELMONT: I kind of loved him. MATTHEW HART: Then we jump from that to Korea in some, you know, future world. "Fabricants" and "Pure Bloods". A kind of Blade Runner style world. TOM MERRITT: And Sloosha's Crossin' An' Ev'rythin' After. VERONICA BELMONT: Just straight up post-apocalyptic. TOM MERRITT: Yeah. MATTHEW HART: There he's clearly read and enjoyed the sort of subgenre of post-apocalyptic fantasy novels. VERONICA BELMONT: Margaret Atwood. TOM MERRITT: Oh Atwood, yeah. Good call. VERONICA BELMONT: Very Atwoodian. SAMIR CHOPRA: What you get at the end are Mitchell's unique creations that have taken all these distinct elements and combined them into something new and unique. MATTHEW HART: He's obviously committed to his vision of how he wants to organize the novel and that means that he has to compromise somewhat with accessibility. ETHAN NICHTERN: Not to be too tongue-in-cheek about academia but that's how you know you're gonna get read in English departments for decades to come is if you write something that's tough to read. TOM MERRITT: It's a good book club book because I saw in our book club people telling each other, "No no no don't give up yet, it does get better you just have to persevere." Sort of encouraging each other to keep going. AMY LAU: He expects a lot of his reader, but it's a good kind of expectation because it forces you to engage with the text. MATTHEW HART: One of the things that makes this such a significant novel and a novel that people love so much is Mitchell's virtuosity with language as well as genre. It's one of the things that makes Cloud Atlas such an impressive work of art. SAMIR CHOPRA: His voice inhabits a lot of different characters. He manages to speak like a woman, he manages to speak like a man, he manages to speak like a non-human and he sets them in different times and places. AMY LAU: This is one of the things where Mitchell stands out from other writers. He's able to jump from 19th century speak to some made up dialect far in the future. ETHAN NICHTERN: Since he's so nailing the voice of the time and place there's a sense of sort of drudging through a little bit. MATTHEW HART: It's certainly one of the dangers of any novel that's constructed out of very different parts that there's going to be the question, "Does it all hang together?" SAMIR CHOPRA: I think it's quite clear that you could read each one of the stories as a distinct story and they would still be interesting, which sometimes makes you wonder has it really worked as a novel or am I reading a kind of collection of short stories instead? MATTHEW HART: That's a real danger with this sort of artwork and I think it's one that Mitchell avoids, but perhaps only just. TOM MERRITT: I thought he pulled it off very elegantly. I love the way each story picks back up from the previous story. MATTHEW HART: He ties them in together in so many different ways, I mean, partly through the reincarnation conceit. The idea that these…the protagonists of these stories are essentially the same person born again. AMY LAU: I would say what ties the whole narrative together from my reading of it is all the ethical questions that come up again and again in a different time and in a different space, but it's still the same basic questions like "how do you treat another person or another being that's come from a different background than you?" VERONICA BELMONT: One of the things that really jumped out for me was the idea of slavery and not just in the literal sense, but being held against your will, being forced to do things against your will. That theme I think came back in almost every story. ETHAN NICHTERN: The other theme I think that's important is the notion of interdependence. The way states of mind and psychological dilemmas sort of re-iterate themselves through time and space. MATTHEW HART: When you're reading the book, you're not focused upon the overarching themes of the novel. Most of the time you're thinking about what it's like to read Cloud Atlas, about the strangeness and the wonder and the crazy experience that reading this series of interconnected narratives brings. Water Isaacson: Steve called me in 2004 and I'd done a biography of Ben Franklin, was about to publish one on Einstein. He said, "Why not do me next?" I didn't realize he was sick and I didn't really turn him down I just said, "Yeah, let's do it but let's wait 20 or 30 years till you retire" and then his wife said to me and other people said to me, "Hey if you're gonna do Steve, you gotta do him now."