The story sets up with a young white man's attempt to blow up a library in a small town in Idaho, where a group of students are preparing to put on an ancient Greek play called Cloud Cuckoo Land. Doerr uses this event to untangle the life-stories of the bomber, the old man who translated the ancient Greek play, and then also jumps through history, from the 1500s and the young woman who saved the last remnants of the Greek play, to the future, where a young woman saves the play, to show how this one book has factored into all of their lives. The novel is huge, long, and very jumpy re: character POV and timelines. I confess that I lost track of the various storylines at times, and at other times, I just had to skip ahead. I can see what a labor of love this was for Doerr to write, but I didn't ultimately find it all that compelling a story. Maybe because there was so much fracturing of narrative between the disparate storylines? I suppose the message of hope the book ends with might be something... though the isolated and primitive semi-Arctic world of that future he describes seems like it would be far removed from the experiences of those vast populations to the south, who I'm assuming would be substantially more affected by our warming Earth.
5 characters and their stories separated through time- how they all connect through an Ancient Greek novel. Through the course of the novel, there are pages from the Greek novel - all that survived of folio - as translated by Zeno. Tells a ridiculous story about a guy unhappy with his life circumstances. He makes a deal with a witch or something and turns into a donkey, later a fish, all on a quest to get to imaginary land in the sky where birds live in castles and delicious food everywhere. Eventually he makes it there and finds out he prolly should’ve stayed home…
Book opens with a strange seemingly outer space experience of 12 yr old girl Konstance alone on an apparent airship with a computer. 2064 year
Then Seymour who’s going to blow up a library on February 20, 2020 - Lakeport Idaho.
Zeno is old man in same library helping kids put on play about Cloud Cuckoo Land - the Greek novel
Anna- a 12 year old Christian seamstress in 1400s in Constantinople, who is unsatisfied with her proscribed life, and yearns for more. Obsessed with a mural she sees about cloud country…
Omeir - Muslim Bulgarian 12 yr old boy with a cleft palate who has oxen and gets conscripted into a military move against Constantinople.
Book unpacks each of their stories - Zeno in the Korean War and in love with another military guy in prison, Rex, who teaches him Ancient Greek. Now an old man who’s taking over translating ancient folio Rex. And putting on a play. Seymour has sensory issues and his safe space in forest is destroyed by new housing development- the unfairness and difficulties of being poor
Ack! Book very detailed and intertwined. In the end, it turns out Seymour who’s been in jail for a bomb incident hired to computer debug Atlas program (kind of like Google maps) ends up 20 yrs later putting on a party for the now grown up kids from the bomb incident.
Zeno saved children by running out of the library with a bomb, and running down to the lake where he gets blown up.
Anna dies after marrying Omeir and bearing 3 sons who survive. Omeir saves the book she’s brought out of Constantinople and walks all the way to Urbino Italy where he surrenders it to the library- originally mentioned by Anna to him- an image of Urbino on a snuff box she took from Constantinople.
Konstance isn’t actually in outer space but in an experimental pod on earth- and she breaks out at the end- years later with a kid reading him the novel which she copied on scraps of paper when in the pod.