Sunday, April 24, 2005

Hell, I can't even juggle one ball properly

Finally, just now, finished Cloud Atlas.

I know some of you well and others of you less, but for all of you this much I believe: you could find a worse way to spend some of your time than wrapped up in the sentences and pages that comprise this book. It will surprise you often and it will keep you up past your bed-time; you'll wonder where it's going and when you've got there you'll wonder how it got there and when you're past that you'll wonder where it's going from there and how it'll happen. It's a damned amazing piece of work. For every sentence I read that activated sparks in my brain there were sentences to either end of it I'm sure will have that same effect next time--because, already, I can see this being a book I'll come back to, again, someday. There aren't many...well, all that many books that have had that effect on me.






I've offered up a loose comparison to Infinite Jest and to clarify it goes something like this: David Foster Wallace and David Mitchell are both jugglers of prose and story. But, where David Foster Wallace throws a multitude of balls into the air--balls which fly in every which way all at once sometimes falling into his hands to be tossed back up again, sometimes disappearing completely, sometimes appearing about thirty inches behind him, sometimes crashing into each other somewhere a billion miles above your head, the punkish bravado of his routine almost fatiguing merely to watch--David Mitchell juggles with a mere six balls, each describing finely-calibrated arcs through the air, between himself and yourself. But watching each ball slip from his fingers and up through the air, one after the other following each other until they reach their apex where, one after the other they slip back down through the air and back into his hands--watching it happen is a thrilling experience in itself. Except when you look close, you realize they're not balls he's juggling. They're entire worlds, each as finely crafted, as intricate as the next. It's when you realize that--and not realize it in the way that I just told you that, but realize it in the way that you're feeling it, deep inside your brain when the ideas happen and down in your gut where the emotional resonances and what-have-yous happen--that whole new avenues of significance begin to open up before you with each passing page. At the risk of rambling too long--I'd suggest this isn't merely an exciting book, but an important book; yet it remains on this side of the "literature for people" line, rather than the "literature for snobs and classrooms" line. Which is pretty much totally sweet, as far as I'm concerned.

Or, in short, what are you waiting for?

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