I read this Calvin this morning and was surprised that it was originally published in 1993. I am wondering in 1993 what Calvin's Dad's other options were? Credit? Soft Cover? Book-on-tape? Movie Adaptation?
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In other news I had my teeth drilled today, which was not a terrible experience all in all. I will be happy when the numbness goes away though.
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I am wrapping up a book I have been reading for a couple of weeks now, Cloud Atlas. I have n't read any of the reviews (many of them calling the author the new Messiah of the book world) until now. I am in the last throws of this book, which may seem a strange time to read reviews, but I am glad I did. While interesting, inventive and engaging, this book is also fatuiging. Here are snipits of a few reviews --
San Francisco Chronicle:
David Mitchell's new novel, "Cloud Atlas," is a remarkable achievement, a frightening, beautiful, funny, wildly inventive, elaborately conceived tour de force. It places us not in one intensely imagined world but six: six different time periods, milieus, vocabularies and literary styles. Each of these tales more than earns its keep. Collectively, they constitute a work of art.
There's a motorcycle stuntman quality to Mitchell, who has two determinedly unconventional books under his belt, and it seems that with each new effort he'd like to add a few more cars to leap over. And a bus. And perhaps a building or two. There were moments in "Cloud Atlas," which has been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, when you fully expect him to fall short. It never happens. In each story, I felt engaged in an entirely human quest.
That isn't to say you won't be tempted to rest your brain at times or avert your eyes. To read "Cloud Atlas" is to feel perpetually off balance, often disoriented, occasionally repulsed. But the rewards outweigh the struggle, and in the end, Mitchell offers his readers enormous and surprising satisfactions.
The New York Times
With ''Cloud Atlas,'' Mitchell has returned to the rather nutty method of ''Ghostwritten'': the novel gives us six separate stories, spanning the planet, that cover roughly 1,000 years of time. On one hand, Mitchell's strategy is boldly antithetical to what most narrative-driven novels have been up to since Cervantes. On the other hand, what Mitchell is doing is basically James Michener's ''Alaska'' with an I.Q. transplant.
''Cloud Atlas'' has already been published in England. The reviews have been messiah-worthy. (One critic wrote that the novel makes ''almost everything in contemporary fiction look like a squalid straggle of Nissen huts.'') In The Observer of London, Robert McCrum called ''Cloud Atlas'' ''a remarkable new novel by a significant talent,'' and made its Booker Prize nomination (''Number9Dream'' was a finalist) sound inevitable -- although The Sunday Telegraph caused a brief stir when it disclosed it would not review ''Cloud Atlas'' because its critic found the novel ''unreadable.''
''Cloud Atlas'' imposes a dizzying series of milieus, characters and conflicts upon us: a ship sailing amid some islands around New Zealand during the mid-19th century, wherein an American notary named Adam Ewing befriends, at risk to himself, a stowaway Moriori named Autua; a Belgian estate called Zedelghem in the 1930's, wherein a sexually indecisive aspiring composer named Robert Frobisher serves as amanuensis to an older, more accomplished composer; California during the 1970's, wherein a plucky journalist named Luisa Rey attempts to disclose an ''Erin Brockovich''-style industrial conspiracy; London during the here and now, wherein a 60-ish book editor named Tim Cavendish finds himself accidentally imprisoned in a home for the elderly; Korea in the (just) foreseeable future, wherein a genetically engineered ''fabricant'' named Sonmi-451 is interrogated for her crime of wanting to be fully human; and Hawaii in some distant and thoroughly annihilated future, wherein a young goatherd named Zachry bears unknowing witness to the final fall of humanity into superstition and violence and war.
The Guardian
Cloud Atlas asks the simple questions of our own time, which has a Darwinian vision. A missionary explains to Adam Ewing, son of the American revolution, his idea of a "ladder of civilisation" that will extinguish those races unable to join progress. Zachry's tribesmen believe Sonmi was "birthed by a god o' Smart named Darwin". Humans, someone says, have the intelligence of gods and the souls of jackals. Greed will destroy the world. Ewing, at the end of the book which is close to its beginning, as it has come full circle, sees the "natural" ideas of dominance and fitness as "the entropy written within our nature". He has saved the life of the last Moriori tribesman, whose peaceable family were destroyed by Maori warriors. The Moriori saves him, and individual acts of heroism and rescue stand against tooth and claw across the narrative web. Ewing goes back to become an abolitionist. Sonmi is a (briefly) freed slave whose presence has its half-life after defeat. Zachry becomes again the last of his peaceful tribe, and its storytelling memory. Ewing also says that "Belief is both prize and battlefield", and what Mitchell does is embody simple beliefs and make them vital and important.
If nothing else the review of the book make me feel a wee bit smarter. It is nice to know I am not the ONLY ONE this book wore out. It is not the sort of diverting story I have been reading of late. Perhaps a little workout like this one is good for the grey matter.
