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March 05, 2009
round one: the cloud school
Cloud Atlas: A Novel
This book has a unique and maddening structure: there are six loosely related stories representing six genres successively wrapped within one another so that for the first half of the book you are starting and leaving the beginnings of things. After reading the central story at one go, you are back a the end of story five, then four, and so on. This structure did not endear this book to me; I resented constantly being interrupted. Moreover, it didn't help my experience as a reader that the book was in such high demand from the library that I could never renew it, but had to keep returning it and then waiting sometimes several weeks to be able to check it out again. That just made the bifurcated stories feel even more disconnected.
This is the book that won the 2005 tournament. Some people really liked it. I would not discourage you from giving it a chance, but I'm not making any promises.
The Finishing School
This is actually more of a long short story or a novelette than a novel. Unlike the protracted ordeal of Cloud Atlas, I read this book comfortably in an afternoon. It's a lark; but don't pay much, if anything, to read it--it will be done all too quickly. Perhaps it should packaged in a volume together with Spark's better known work of teachers and students, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Annoyance almost made The Finishing School the winner, but after cooling off, I reconsidered.
Winner: Cloud Atlas
05:19 PM | Permalink
Comments
I loved Cloud Atlas, but I probably would have hated it if I'd had to keep interrupting it (even more, as you point out)--I listened to it on audio, and it confused the hell out of me when the first story just stopped, I was convinced there was an error with my player or the file. And I think I missed some wordplay in the futuristic story by not seeing the words. But the different readers were great--I think I'll have to give it a listen again, soon. His other book, the title escapes me, about the boy growing up during the Falklands war was excellent as well, some genre experimentation there, but not disruptive.
I haven't read The Finishing School--man, it's been ages and ages since I read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie! That takes me back. I'll have to see if our library has them.
Posted by: Wendy at Mar 6, 2009 10:52:13 AM
