"Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell

I became interested in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell after seeing the preview of the movie starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and others. While reading the book, I got to see the movie, and while both were good, they however were quite different. But let me come back to that.

Mitchell describes what the Cloud Atlas is the book as a "sextet for overlapping soloists . . . each in its own language of key, scale and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finish, and by then it'll be too late."

What results is a set of six novellas one nested inside another that extend from the 19th Century to somewhere in the future. Each story is linked to the story that occurs before it in time. Each story has its own distinct language and style. And each story is linked together by having one its characters have in a birthmark in the shape of a comet that represents the universal theme of all six stories. Here is where the book differs from the movie.

In the movie, the uniting theme is union of a love between two souls. That theme is better expressed, though, in Laura Esquivel's La Ley del Amor [The Law of Love], a great book that's also cleverly presented. This book’s uniting theme, however, centers around the idea that there are two types in this world: those that exploit and those that are exploited be it by bullies, murderers, cultural institutions, corporate greed, genetic engineering or whatever. The comet birthmark represents the resistance to being exploited unjustly, or as Dylan Thomas wrote:

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.