Tag Archives: Cloud Atlas

One Star Amazon Reviews of Cloud Atlas

Posted on by Bill Chance

One of the soul’s great tragedies is to execute a work and then realize, once it’s finished, that it’s not any good. The tragedy is especially great when one realizes that the work is the best he could have done. But to write a work, knowing beforehand that it’s bound to be flawed and imperfect; to see while writing it that it’s flawed and imperfect – this is the height of spiritual torture and humiliation. Not only am I dissatisfied with the poems I write now; I also know that I’ll be dissatisfied with the poems I write in the future.

All we can be certain of when we write is that we write badly; the only great and perfect works are the ones we never dream of realizing.
—-Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Falling Water Fountain, Dallas Arboretum

I read somewhere where someone had listed a bunch of one-star Amazon reviews of one of their favorite books. Interesting. “Cloud Atlas” is one of my favorites… one that comes to mind. I loved it and was enthralled. However, I can imagine it isn’t for everyone.

And I am right.

Avoid it if you value your time
Cloud Atlas is one of those book you just drag yourself through page after page waiting for them to get interesting only it never does. It just drags and and drags and drags. It has these stories that never really come to a conclusion and are totally unrelated which are tied together by a flimsy piece of twine ready to snap at the first breeze.

I had to “slog” through it…
I read a lot of fiction, and this is the worst book I’ve read in a long time. The plot (was there one?) was impossible for me to follow. The book did not ” flow” either. I really did not like this book and only finished reading it to see if it would “take off”, which it never did.

Could not get past the first 200 pages
I have previously read two Mitchell books and liked them both, to a degree, but this one just bored me to tears in its first 200 pages. Maybe the stories conclude in the second half, but who cares? There is not one character in the first four stories that even remotely interests me. And the minutia of dialog and detail is downright tedious. Life is too short to waste hours on a book that just doesn’t make any sense for hundreds of pages. Sorry, but awards aside, this one really is a gimmick in search of a plot.

Not worth the read
While I did enjoy the overall arch of the story and how all of the characters interacted with each other, portions of this story dragged on a bit. I kept reading under the general impression that it would get better, but it did not.

Very tough to read, even harder to like
The story, which is not very interesting, is written in the first person. This means the dialogue is not easy to follow. But, this is probably good because the language changes with the time period of the main character. The 18th century language at least made sense, but when the story moves into the apocalyptic future and the author presents future dialects the language becomes nonsense.

The world is dying, but we never find out why. The big revelation is that some people will treat other people badly if it makes their life easier. Still this could have been interesting if there was a single character I could identify with. For me this story is a lot like The Road, a grim tribulation for the reader.

waste of time
So…I bought this book because I hated the movie so much. But they made a movie out of it, after all, so I figured there must be something to it that just didn’t translate well into film.

Well, I was wrong. I knew in the first 90 seconds into this book that it was unreadable. Still, I soldiered ahead, thinking maybe it was just one of those books that takes a while to get into. Nope. I’m still angry that I wasted an entire night trying to slog through this mess. Thank goodness it was only one night of psychological torture.

Loved it….at first
I was very excited to get Cloud Atlas for my Kindle. Dived right in and loved the first third of the book. Extraordinary writing; Mitchell was weaving a spellbinding tale. Then I hit “the wall” with the chapter on Sonmi. The book turned toward preachiness and difficult-to-follow language and structure. I saw where it was going so I slogged through the chapter hoping for better. The next chapter was worse, mega-preachy and really hard to follow. It was like Mitchell put down a challenge to readers to get through it, and while he was at it bludgeoned us with stuff that made me feel like I was sitting through a basic, and boring, philosophy class. I skimmed that chapter, then gave up. Made it about halfway through, but by that time I didn’t care how it ended. Sorry Mr. Mitchell.

Waste of TimeI have read a few really bad books in my day and this one is one of the worst. The author writes like Herman Melville with a very bad case of ADD. I knew about the multiple stories and the time periods covered prior to starting the book and I expected it to be a difficult just because of this ambitious goal. What I did not expect was the multiple thoughts and vectors the author would take in the same paragraph throughout the book. It was extremely difficult to follow mainly because the book is written so poorly. It wasn’t a bad story and it seems that the author had great intentions with the story line, but the writing style is so bad that it completely detracts from the story and makes the book impossible to enjoy. There is a lot of detail and a great deal of description, but in far too many paragraphs throughout the book, the author goes from one thought to another, one time period to another, one character to another and these numerous vectors within the same paragraph are extremely hard to follow. Especially when the author makes no attempt to tie his thoughts together in the ensuing paragraphs.

One of the Worst Recommendations I’ve Received
I almost put this book down I was so frustrated with it. The only thing it has going for it is that the author successfully writes in six different styles, all accurate to the time period the stories are set in. However, I feel that it is poorly written and poorly executed. The idea of splitting the six stories in half and having them “fold in on each other” sounded clever when it was explained to me, but reading it was a different matter entirely. Since the stories were split up I lost interest in the characters and had a hard time remembering who was who when I got back to the second half of the stories. Many of the characters are stupid or unsympathetic. Also, the whole idea of reincarnation, which is supposed to drive this book, really fails in the stories. The Warner Brothers site claims that the book/movie “explores how the actions and consequences of individual lives impact one another throughout the past, the present and the future.” But, the characters do not impact the lives of their future reincarnations at all. They learn absolutely nothing from their past experiences. Also, at one point near the end of the novel the author flat out explains his title to the reader, even though it was already abundantly obvious (to anyone with a brain) why he named it Cloud Atlas. If you have to explain the title of the novel within the novel you have failed. If you have to outright ask your reader whether your title is “revolutionary or gimmicky” the answer is already pretty obvious.

It’s too late to get a refund
It makes no sense, it’s impossible to follow, the stories aren’t interesting enough to keep reading. And now I’ve let too much time pass and I can’t get my money back. I’m only 8% into the book and can’t even imagine continuing and I read all of the Game of Thrones books! And I hated them, too, but at least there was a story.
Oh well – I fell for the Tom Hanks/Halle Berry movie trailer – at least I won’t waste my money on the movie. Sheesh – Penny Marshall and Cloud Atlas at the same time. I must be losing my mind……….

Clous Atlas
What a piece of crap. I read relentlessly and this is the most unreadable piece of drivel I have run across in a long while. It makes “Atlas Shrugged” seem like “Fun with Dick and Jane”. DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. DO NOT READ THIS BOOK.

More Old Airstreams

Posted on by Bill Chance

A few more photographs taken of an Airstream Trailer graveyard I stumbled across on a trip to Denton, Texas.

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

as1

…time is the speed at which the past disappears.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

as2

“Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

as3

“I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

as4

“Don’t bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Karma

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”

― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Karma, Do-Ho Suh, New Orleans Museum of Art

Karma, a sculpture by Do-Ho Shuh, in the Besthoff Sculpture Garden at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

I rely on those below me to reach this height, and support so many others above, yet we are all blinded by our duties to the beauty around us. Trapped by the darkness of our burden. All we feel is the terrible weight.

Cloud Atlas

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Our lives are not our own, from womb to tomb we are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”—- Cloud Atlas, Sonmi 451

Near where I work, across the highway, there’s this neighborhood that’s really run down. Tucked into the NorthWest corner of the gigantic High Five interchange, there are a few square miles of apartments that are nowhere to be wandering late at night.

When they were built – I imagine in the late 1970’s – they must have been nice… full of young folks hanging around the pools, new wave music pumping out the sliding glass doors, Coors Beer and big hair everywhere. When I moved to Dallas in 1981, a lot of my friends lived in an area just like that, a few miles to the south, around Park Lane and 75. A lot like right now the economy was horrible everywhere in the country except Texas, and young folks were streaming from everywhere to get work. The difference was that interest rates were in the double digits and nobody could buy a house, so the apartment complexes were teeming with these ambitious newcomers. It was an exciting time to live in Dallas.

Within a short few years however, the interest rates dropped and all these people could suddenly buy themselves a house in the exploding northern suburbs. At the same time a new interpretation of federal law made it illegal to have a “singles apartment complex.” Rents fell below the cost of maintenance and these apartments across the city fell… and fell fast. Within a few years it was crack city. Nobody seemed to care, there was plenty of land to the north, but to me – it marked the passing of something special.

As the apartments fell into disrepair the surrounding commercial district fell too, though more slowly. There was a nice multiplex movie theater right across the highway from my work that hung on until a couple years ago – until it too went under and has been sitting vacant.

Now, though, there are stirrings of revitalization, spates of rezoning, threats of demolition of the more neglected properties, contentious City Council Meetings, rumors of big money beginning to move. And suddenly, the movie theater is renovated in an amazingly short time and reopens as a Studio Movie Grill.

I’ve been prattling on about the cycle of a neighborhood that you don’t care about because I’m thinking about the first film I saw in that Studio Movie Grill, a film unstuck in time, a movie about decay, about cycles and revitalization, about evil crimes and disaster, about friendship and love… I went down this weekend and saw Cloud Atlas.

I was eagerly awaiting this movie. The book, Cloud Atlas, was… is… arguably the best thing I’ve read. It is massive, subtle, complex, and with a unique structure. I clearly remember reading the thing and thinking, “Well, there will never be a movie done of this thing, it could never be done.” I was wrong.

You see the book consists of six separate stories – far apart in time, and in tone. They are arranged from the oldest, set onboard a sailing vessel in the South Pacific in the nineteenth century, and progress through time until the sixth one occurs in the far dystopian future. There is no transition between stories -each one ends suddenly, unexpectedly, literally in the middle of sentences and the text then jumps to the next, where the previous story appears as a work of fiction. After the far future story ends(it is the only tale told in one piece) the book winds back down, finishing the tales, one by one, until it ends where it began. The structure looks like this:

  1. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing
  2. Letters from Zedelghem
  3. Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery
  4. The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish
  5. An Orison of Sonmi-451
  6. Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After
  7. An Orison of Sonmi-451
  8. The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish
  9. Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery
  10. Letters from Zedelghem
  11. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing

How do you do this in film? I had no idea. I waited for the movie to come out and decided to see it, on opening weekend at the new Studio Grill across from where I work. Ordinarily, I would go to one of the art-house cinemas… but we want to support the place.

I have to say that I enjoyed the Studio Movie Grill. The seat rows are set wide apart, and each seat has a swiveling table built into it. There is something enjoyably decadent about having a nice draft of wheat beer while a waitress brings you some grilled chicken during the opening trailers. It’s not cheap – but I think I’ll go back. They are building an Alamo Draft House near where we live – that sounds even better.

The film – at first I was taken aback. They solved the problem of the complex structure of the book by making it more complex. Abandoning the orderly stair-like nested structure of the book, the movie jumps willy-nilly from story to story… seemingly at random.

Soon enough, though, I realized the jumps were not random. They were stringing the scenes together by theme. This emphasizes the connections between the stories, the eternal ideas across time, and that works in a fast, visual medium. The fact that the movie jumps across such a wide swath of space-time helps in that it is never a problem to figure out where you are.

I don’t know how confusing all this is to someone that hasn’t read the book… but I don’t think you will have a problem. Of course, you could save yourself the trouble by reading the damn thing. Really, read it.

What didn’t work? Well, first, the language. It’s hard to follow sometimes, really tough to figure out what the hell they are talking about. They should have used only a taste of how the characters actually spoke… and then slipped back to contemporary English. The same handful of actors play multiple roles – and that is generally cool. The only problem is that having certain characters jump across racial lines was a bit awkward – some of the makeup is too obvious and distracting. Now, I do have to say that Hugo Weaving makes an imposing and effective evil Nurse Noakes. The credits show all the characters the major actors play (watch for one of Hugh Grant’s performances – you will not recognize him).

The connections between the stories are much more obvious in the movie than the book. Even little things – all the stories (except maybe for one) – at a moment of extreme tension and risk to the heroes – have someone smashed over the head of the bad guy unexpectedly by an off-camera rescuer. Watch for a blue glass button – it ties together the first and last stories.

So did I like it? I loved it. Not everyone will (it doesn’t look like it’s doing well at the box office). It’s a difficult movie, very long (almost three hours – which went by quickly for me), extremely ambitious – obviously an attempt to make a big-budget, big-star, big-time art house film. It’s surprisingly violent and relies a lot on its special effects. It requires work on the part of the viewer, and a lot of people don’t like that.

But in the end, I gave a damn about the characters – and that’s the important thing. The movie is different from the book – less subtle, more flashy – but in the end that’s actually a good thing. Instead of one, we have two… or more accurately, instead of six, we have twelve great stories.

What I learned this week, September 14, 2012

Posted on by Bill Chance

5 Simple Mind Hacks That Changed My Life

  1. Making yourself impervious to criticism.
  2. How to make a final decision.
  3. The key to getting over mistakes.
  4. How to stop overreacting to minor issues.
  5. How to have a more active life.

I’ve been working on #5 lately. Shame I’m always so exhausted when I get home from work.

The Worst Rock Band Ever

I love the systematic method used in this article. He has Motley Crue barely beating out Creed as the worst ever. But he has one line about Creed that is money: “Rock and roll is supposed to be fun, not like passing an impacted stool, and then telling all your friends about it.” I wish I had written that.

The 10 Most Damaging Chick Flicks Ever Made

Too bad they also send some of the worst messages to women in the history of mankind. Horrible stereotypes, insulting characters, idiotic relationship advice… it’s all there. Some chick flicks are better at hiding it than others, but generally, you can count on the same thing each time. The worst part is, women are actually starting to believe the lunacy they see in these movies!

The 7 Most Overrated Blockbuster Movies of the Last 20 Years

News You Can Use:

10 Reasons There Won’t Ever Be an Aquaman Movie

5 Great Pieces Of R-Rated Life Advice from the Movies

Fiction:

A Village After Dark

by Kazuo Ishiguro, author of Never Let Me Go

I know I keep posting stuff about Cloud Atlas – but I’m really excited about the film (even though I know it might not be that good – the possibly of glorious failure is strong) – Plus… more importantly, I want to give everyone every opportunity to read the book first. It’s an amazing read, in many ways… in every way.

Plus, how can you miss Hugo Weaving playing Nurse Ratchet.

A woman, Annie Clark, that went to a local High School, has hit the big time as St. Vincent. She has released an album in partnership with David Byrne – Love This Giant. This is truly the best of all possible worlds.

Same as it ever was.

What I learned this week, August 10, 2012

Posted on by Bill Chance

The extended trailer for Cloud Atlas is out:

I am so excited and stoked for this film… I started to write a blog entry about it, but when I did a search, I realized I Already Did – almost a year ago. Go read my old entry. Then go find a copy of the book, Cloud Atlas and read it. Before October, when the film of this unfilmable book comes out.

134 Terrifying Closeups of Bugs

I wish I had a decent Macro lens.

Beutiful bikes and a cool video.

Hey, an album of bicycle music – Bicycle

Nora and One Left

Beautiful Bikes and a cool video – The Porteur bicycle

Reform Is Not Enough: The Federal Government Needs a Complete Makeover

American government is a deviant subculture

This behavior by high-ranking public servants should be considered scandalous. People in Washington consider it business as usual, and don’t even raise an eyebrow.

Right and wrong no longer matter in this deviant subculture. Sealed off from personal responsibility by accumulated bureaucracy and thick walls of special interest money, our government is covered by a putrid mold of cynical gamesmanship and everyday hypocrisy. People scurry around its baseboards seeking short-term advantage, but big change is so inconceivable as to be laughable.

Even reformers have given up. What is politically feasible, they ask? The answer is clear: nothing.

Change will nonetheless happen, political scientists tell us. How? Through a crisis….The main challenge then will be not merely to reform Medicare and other unsustainable programs. The challenge will be to change the culture of government.

Literature’s greatest serial killers
I have read all but one book on this list. My favorite – Anton Chigurh, of course.

I’m sort of suprised Dexter (or Voldemort) isn’t on here – but I’m not sure that a popular series is considered “Literature.” I dunno, it’s not Crime and Punishment (or Macbeth, or even Lolita), but that still feels a little snobbish to me.

  • Macbeth
  • Raskolnikov
  • Humbert Humbert
  • Tom Ripley
  • Patrick Bateman
  • Anton Chigurh
  • Bruce Robertson
  • Annie Wilkes
  • Frank Cauldhame
  • Hannibal Lecter

..

Cloud Atlas

Posted on by Bill Chance

Where are you right now?
In my hut in my back garden in West Cork.

 Where do you write?
Here, at my desk; in my notebook, in an armchair; on planes.

How do you write?
By recording in words the scenes that are workshopped and staged in my imagination.

What keeps you writing?
My addiction to it.

Who do you write for?
Me, and the rest of the world. Nobody else.

—- David Mitchell, in Untitledbooks

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas

What is my favorite book? What is the best book I’ve read? —These are unanswerable questions. There are so many and my opinions at the very top shift over time like sands in the wind or shadows in my memory.

Still there is an upper stratum. This is occupied by fossilized memories of hours, days, sometime years spent poring over pages of labyrinthine structure, subtle metaphor, and deep, thick, and complex prose. This is the land of Pynchon, the landscape of Mason & Dixon, V, and, most of all Gravity’s Rainbow. That book took me twenty five years to read… and it was worth every second.

It is the land of Moby Dick, of Infinite Jest, of House of Leaves.

It is the land of Cloud Atlas.

If you catch me at the right time, I’ll tell you that Cloud Atlas is the best book I’ve read. Other times I’ll tell you it’s my favorite book. Rarely does a single entity spend time in both positions – as far as I’m concerned, that’s great praise.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a complex book and one with a unique structure – but it’s not hard to read. The structure is very carefully planned out, logical, and executed with panache – not like the shambling monstrous recursive story of Gravity’s Rainbow.

The book is a collection of six different story threads. The first half of the book the stories are half-told, in chronological order. It starts in the South Pacific, in 1850, in a sort of Melvilish, three-stooges version of a whaleless Moby Dick. The story then jumps to 1931 where a bankrupt musician tries to scam himself back into a state where he can feed himself and love again. Then it leaps to California in the 70’s with a thriller set at a nuclear plant.

At this point the stories move into the future, starting with a publisher trapped in a nursing home. We then switch to a dystopian future where the clones begin to rebel. Finally, we arrive in the unknown distant future where mankind has thrown off or lost its technological skin and is back to telling tales around the campfire.

Here, the book turns and goes back, working its way through the same stories again for their second half denouement, in reverse order, until we are left back in the 19th century South Pacific.

What is the connection between these diverse threads? You will have to read the book to find out.

Does this scare you? Will you avoid this tome in favor of the newest vampire mystery? Shame on you. Or not. Whatever. It is definitely the kind of thing you will like, though, if you like that kind of thing.

Waterspouts

Waterspouts

Why am I bringing up this odd and complicated book now? No matter how interesting?

I used to read a lot of movie reviews. I always tried to keep up on what was happening in the world of cinema. This was ruining my viewing enjoyment, however. I wanted to get back to that world of simple pleasure when I sat in front of the silver screen (or cathode ray tube [or light emitting diode (or liquid crystal semiconductor [ or tiny cloud of plasma-induced noble gas])]) unknowing about what was going to happen next. So I stopped reading movie reviews until after I had seen a film. I stopped following the pages outlining what was coming out next from what director.

Still, I stumble across bits of information now and then. That Interweb-thing is good for that, isn’t it?

This week I discovered that they are making a big-time, big-budget movie of Cloud Atlas.

It is one of the books that, when I was reading it, I thought, “This thing would be unfilmable.” Apparantly, someone disagrees with my assessment.

It seems it will have two directors – The guy that directed “Lola Rennt” will do the story threads that are set in the past and the Matrix director(s) will do the stuff in the future.

Big time actors too, Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent… It appears the actors will be playing more than one character spread across time (have to get your money’s worth out of Tom Hanks).

Well, I’m not sure how this will all play out – the book is unfilmable, really – but it will be interesting. I do hope it gets made. If it is good, it might be great. If it fails, it will be a glorious failure.

Storm

Storm

(whet your appetite) Short works online by David Mitchell