Father knows best
Martin's whole arc (and ultimate failure) was prefigured in the opening chapter. He lays out a sensible business model for his cigar tree in the shop window and it works out nicely. But Martin is disappointed by it. His father cautions against extravagance but his warning falls on deaf ears and…

Editor or co-author?
Michael Pietsch's name should appear on the cover below DFW's. And it should be spelled correctly in the article above, too.

Last night I had to confess to my wife that although I watched this with her last season I have no idea who half the characters are or how they're connected to each other. I also confessed that I mostly watch because I can't look at Lauren Graham without hearing her yell, "Fuck me Santa!" Not that there's anything…

Well-played mr apollo.

I wondered who'd be brave enough to mention Ulysses in this context. Should've known it would be MikeStrange.

I guess I'd have to argue that while it doesn't work intellectually, for me at least, it made for a playful poke in the eye.

Guess it's just piling on now but I'm with Crunchy and Scrawler. I think the 'fictional' aspect of Luisa Rey's story is a deliberate blurring of the lines by Mitchell to force us to confront the fact that the whole thing is fiction, after all. Strikes me like an Escher staircase - it all makes sense piecewise until…

Repeating structural elements
As I was reading I was looking for parallels or repeating elements that ran through each section (beyond the obvious birthmark, etc.). For example: every story involves an island in some way, though it kinda falls down for Frobisher's section (Chateau Zedelghem? England?). One encounters…

Hopefully it's not too blindingly obvious to point out that "Half-Lives", in addition to the atomic energy connotation, could be applied to the overall structure of the novel in the sense of all but one of the stories being broken into halves…

Thanks for the suggestions - I'm definitely going to check out Ghostwritten (and probably Number9Dream) as soon as I can find the time.

Right. While the structure was perfectly symmetrical overall there is a big difference between the sometimes jarring interruptions from section to section in part 1 versus the smooth segues in part 2. That naturally led to the enjoyable feeling of careening downhill in the second half: good fun!

I'm with MikeStrange on the overall assessment. I enjoyed reading this book quite a lot and may well try something else of Mitchell's. But Cloud Atlas seems to have had its genesis in some rather lofty literary ideas that were never quite realized; it falls far short of being a masterpiece.

The narrator is Kirby Heyborne - the accent came across with a tinge of almost Irish/Scottish but it definitely had elements of the local pidgin one hears among people raised in HI. He seemed to take some liberties, e.g. where the text had 'Yay' he would say "Yeah", but that was one of the things that rang most true…

Apostrophes weren't an issue in the audiobook version. Having spent a number of years living in Hawaii I thought the narrator for the Sloosha's section did a pretty good job with the dialect.

I thought it was clever too. But the extrapolation falls apart somewhat upon further reflection. Kleenex and Xerox became generic terms because they utterly dominated the market when the products were introduced; using "ford" for "automobile" doesn't really work out as well by comparison.

I recently finished 2666. While I don't regret spending the time on it I can't say it's among my favorites. It did stick with me, though. Now that I think about it, there is some parallel with Cloud Atlas in that it also consists of several tenuously connected sections.

OK, I joined. I'm usually finishing the book the night before the discussion begins here so I don't know about the 'jump start' aspect. But I'm already 100+ pages into Cloud Atlas (and loving it) so one never knows…

Yup - I'm in a couple of real-life book clubs but this one is consistently the most rewarding. I'm well into 'Cloud Atlas' already (audio version) and loving it. See you next month!

Agree that the rotoscoping was a good fit for this material. I found the scramble suit in particular to be quite well imagined. Unfortunately that's probably the only aspect that improved on the book for me, as so often is the case with adaptations. The loss of the Arctor's interior monologue was a significant loss,…

Thanks FJ! That's very illuminating.