Cloud Atlas - We are All Connected (The Book and The Movie)

At the start of this year I've been searching for a new book to read, as reading has been one of my favorite ways to spend my "me" time. I had to look up some book reviews for it though because I'm looking for something new, something to take my imagination for a spin. Just like in movies, I easily lose interest when the plot or the theme gets predictable. Or maybe it's just that I want my hard-earned money to buy something that can really teach me something new.

And Cloud Atlas gave me more than I asked for. It's not just a novel, it's six (6) different stories spanning six (6) different eras. The characters are linked together by a single birthmark shaped like a comet, and a universal rule that knows no space and time.

Favorite book of 2013 :)

It was a helluvanexperience. Personally, I found it breathtaking and exhausting at the same time. Each character lived in a different era, therefore for each "chapter", one had to be accustomed to the setting, the characters, the culture, and most especially the prose. The vocabulary of the 1800's are of course, different from the 1970's, and from 2013, and Mitchell invented his own slang for the future. Mitchell, takes a delicious spin at every turn and I loved it.

The stories are entitled as follows:

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. The Orison of Sonmi-451

6. Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After

First off you find yourself a shipping vessel, where the the problems are about land and gold and mine, you are in the company of barbaric men who whip and sodomize for fun, and witness the bloom of friendship between a lawyer and a slave.  Just when it gets better, Mitchell forwards to the 1930's, where a struggling musician seeks to be an amanuensis to one of the musical greats of his time.  "Now Frobischer, the clarinet is the concubine, the violas are yew trees in the cemetery, the clavichord is the moon... So let the east wind blow that A minor chord, sixteenth bar onwards" - Vyvan Ars to Frobischer

Then the scene switches to an old feisty (and adorable) publisher trapped in the home for the aged, then it gets all Sci-Fi and futuristic with the pre-execution testimony Sonmi-451 (my favorite), and somehow takes a central turn with Zachary, the Prescients and Old Georgie himself.

Each story had its own unexpected twists and dimensions, they can almost stand on their own, and David Mitchell managed to connect all of these with incredible mastery and up to now I am still amazed with how he did it.

I realize that reading is very much like surfing, and instead of waves, you ride with the prose until it takes you to a delightful high. It was exhausting having to switch mind frames for each story but it was just as exhilarating.

"A half finished book, is after all, a half-finished love affair" - Robert Frobischer to Rufus Sixsmith

Adventure aside, what Cloud Atlas manages to instill to the reader, is that some problems don't change, just as beautiful hearts and love does not. And that we are all, interconnected. I know we've heard these before, but somehow, the book makes you feel how the actions that you do create a ripple through eternity, and through the hearts of other people. And this is a story taught again and again in the course of the book. No matter the era, no matter the place.

 Somehow, we manage to make boundaries in the world we live in, boundaries that we work so hard to maintain, and then someone comes along to change it, we change the world, and then we make up our boundaries all over again. I think it's because we need social order  to live sanely in a place of extreme diversity. But eventually the boundaries get too oppressive, probably because people are dynamic and at some point the walls can't contain us anymore. Then revolution begins, and then change, and then walls, it's a cycle.

"We cross and recross old tracks like figure skaters"- Timothy Cavendish

Now this brings me to the Movie. Knowing how painfully long the book was, I was intrigued at how they managed to actually bring this to the big screen.

The movie is three hours long, and even at this long, so many parts of the stories had to be cut and some storylines had to be changed. While this is quite of a disappointment, it is very much understandable. I'd have to say that the movie was able to make me understand the novel more, in a wholistic perspective. The book took me months and months to finish so I tended to forget some of the parts, and these were all brought back in the movie.

"Fear, belief, love - phenomena that determine the courses of our lives. These forces begin long before we are born and continue after we perish" - Isaac Sachs

If the book was able to dwell a lot in each era first before moving to the next storyline, the movie tended to jump from one era to another, and I can just imagine how it may have confused the people who weren't familiar with the book. On the other hand, this style was able to emphasize the parallelisms of each story. How again, we just change eras, technologies, and social frameworks, but the cycle of living is really very similar. And that well, there is beauty in truly following your heart. That your heart really finds no borders.

"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". - Sonmi 451 and Meronym

Aaaaand the cast. We have Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Hugh Grant, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent among many others, big names, yes? While watching the movie I was partly thinking that these are too many big names with quite a few exposures for each plot. Somewhere along the middle I realized that each actor was present in the different stories, playing a different character. I had fun trying to find out where Hugo was, where Halle Berry was, and the same with the other characters. This was the movie's way to play out the "interconnectedness" of each scene. How some people who fall in love are still able to find each other in another lifetime, and how your actions in the present is a result of the past and will affect the future.

The movie is ambitious, heartfelt, stellar, and epic. I just cannot get over how awesome it is.

In the credits my jaw dropped as they showed all the characters played by the lead actors, and man that was amazing make up and prosthetics! I just fell in love with Tom Hanks because at first I wondered why he had too few roles, only to realize that he was actually there the whole time and I just didn't recognize him! Crazy actor he's REALLY REALLY GOOD. He goes from vulnerable as Zachary, brute Dermot, to sleazy Henry Goose. And so were Hugh Grant and the rest of them! I have now been watching the movie over and over again just to see them in action. :)

Cloud Atlas would have to be my single favorite for 2013, and a significant one at that. It's the first time that I loved a movie, the same way I loved the book. It has managed to teach me, that boundaries, are indeed, just "conventions waiting to be broken". And what a world of possibilities there would be if we all would open our eyes.

There are points in your life when you encounter something as tender as it is mind blowing.  Cloud Atlas, I'm sure is one for the books. \m/

"Well firey dying. Mm. Just as well. My yarning's done." - Zachary