<p>^Oops thanks for the correction! Haha, now I am wondering whether Leibowitz or Liebowitz is correct. :)</p>
<p>A Canticle for Leibowitz won the Hugo award in 1961. I liked it very much; my son liked it even more. I wonder if it might be more appealing to cradle Catholics? It’s an interesting view of futuristic Catholicism.</p>
<p>I’m wondering if Leibowitz might be one of those books that impresses you a lot as a teenager (in comparison to schlockier SF). I almost hate to reread it at this point.</p>
<p>On the subject of Sci-Fi, as well as how everything in this novel makes me think of something else, what are your thoughts on the scene where Meronym heals Catkin (via Zachry) with the turquoise stone? She struggles with this decision as if she were wrestling with the Prime Directive. You Trekkies know what I’m talking about: [Prime</a> Directive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive]Prime”>Prime Directive - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Another scene that I’ve been pondering is the one where Robert Frobisher kills the pheasant. Pheasants don’t come up anywhere else in the novel (in my recollection). Frobisher’s mercy killing of the injured bird seems a little out of character. I wouldn’t have expected him to take action and bloody his own hands to put the creature out of its misery. Could it be a foreshadowing of his own suicide?</p>
<p>I think the turquoise stone was really a tablet (a pill). It looked like a stone to Zachry because he had never seen anything like that.</p>
<p>Probably Meronym was not supposed to use “advanced” medicine because she was there as an observer and didn’t have much with her; perhaps she did not even have access to very much. If she had let it be know that she had special abilities to cure and heal, everyone would have been after her to do that, and it would have interfered with her mission.</p>
<p>I believe the incident with Frobisher and the pheasant illustrates how the deaths of the soldiers in the cemetery he had just visited affected him. </p>
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<p>The fact that the pheasant was hit by a car could also be sort of symbolic of the fact that WWI was a war that was initially fought in the perhaps more “sporting” (?) nineteenth century century manner (with cavalry charges, etc), but devolved into wholesale slaughter involving modern artillery and the new invention, tanks.</p>
<p>Ah, of course, that makes sense that the turquoise stone is actually a pill. I guess pharmaceuticals wouldn’t be too common after the apocalypse. :)</p>
<p>It’s not just Meronym’s mission that would be affected, but also her academic standing – “she mumbed to herself sumthin’ like If my pres’dent ever finded out, my hole faculty’d be disbandied” (p. 268).</p>
<p>As for war, that seems to be one area where Mitchell sees very little hope. Pacifists like the Moriori and the Valleysmen do not fare well in the Survival of the Fittest competition. Dhondt tells Frobisher, “Another war is always coming, Robert. They are never properly extinguished. What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence is the instrument of this dreadful will” (p. 444).</p>
<p>It seems to me that Mitchell is not so much saying that there is no hope for a world without war, but that – while human-on-human predation will always exist, and will always tend to gain the upper hand – the urge toward more civilized behavior is perennial as well, and will persist.</p>
<p>The first time I read the book, I could almost not stand the fact that most of Zachry’s people were wiped out, and that there were hints that the Prescients were slowly vanishing.</p>
<p>However, on second reading, I was heartened by the evidence that Zachry had survived to tell his tale. In addition, Meronym tells him that there are pockets of civilized people in existence throughout the world, and she suggests that it only stands to reason that a better type of individual is scattered throughout all groups…even the Kona. I like to think that Zachry’s lost brother might be one of the latter, though we never find out. If I were a moviemaker, I think I would give audiences a glimpse of the brother and hint that he would eventually have a pacifying influence upon the Kona!</p>
<p>I think the pheasant killing is showing us that there are worse things than death. I didn’t connect it to Frobisher’s suicide (I guess it represented physical rather than emotional suffering) but now I do. Good one, Mary!</p>
<p>Now here is a stretch–I was reading that Mitchell has a stuttering/stammering issue. I was thinking that maybe he was tweaking himself by the use of word repeats and mixups.</p>
<p>psychmom, I think you’re on to something. Here is an interesting article by David Mitchell about his stammer: [Let</a> me speak, by David Mitchell - British Stammering Association](<a href=“Welcome to Stamma | STAMMA”>Welcome to Stamma | STAMMA). The need to avoid certain words made him process language and think about the use and re-use of individual words far more than most people do. He writes, “Your stammer informs your relationship with language and enrichens it, if only because you need more structures and vocabulary at your command.”</p>
<p>I think the above stammering article just revealed another source of inspiration for David Mitchell. He writes in the article, “My sole strategy for damage limitation was a sort of alphabetical avoidance. You scan sentences ahead for stammer-words and navigate your sentence in such a way that you won’t need those words. Rather like Georges Perec writing ‘A Void’ without the letter ‘e’, except you have a lot less time to sit and think.”</p>
<p>I didn’t have any idea who Georges Perec was, so I looked him up. He was a French novelist and, per Wikipedia, “Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental word play, lists and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.”</p>
<p>Also, “Perec is noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel *La disparition<a href=“1969”>/i</a> is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter ‘e’.”</p>
<p>This made me think of Sonmi’s story—where the vocabulary has evolved (or devolved) to the point where the “e”s are missing in front of certain words (xultation, xpression, xtra, xplained, xtraction, xamine, and so on).</p>
<p>Georges Perec’s tour de force was La Vie mode d’emploi: “an immensely complex and rich work; a tapestry of interwoven stories and ideas as well as literary and historical allusions, based on the lives of the inhabitants of a fictitious Parisian apartment block. It was written according to a complex plan of writing constraints, and is primarily constructed from several elements, each adding a layer of complexity.” [Georges</a> Perec - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Perec]Georges”>Georges Perec - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Sounds like a structure that might have influenced the “layering” of Cloud Atlas.</p>
<p>David Mitchell himself is a “comet” person; he has transcended his predators (the bullies from childhood) by embracing his deficit and enriching us with his writing.</p>
<p>Very interesting info Mary and nj theater mom. Psychmom- it did occur to me that Mitchell may have been stigmatized as child- hence his preoccupation with predators and prey.</p>
<p>I think that Mitchell’s having lived in Japan…in Hiroshima, yet…and having a Japanese wife may have influenced him as much as any childhood experiences.</p>
<p>In a way, he reminds me of Jonathan Littell, another writer with bi-cultural influences who has done a lot of thinking about the topic of man’s inhumanity to man. </p>
<p>Littell is about the same age as Mitchell. He grew up in the US and France and is fluent in both languages. After a number of years working for humanitarian organizations in conflict zones like Chechnya, Littell decided that he wanted to write a novel that examined the question of how an individual could possibly end up participating in a genocide.</p>
<p>He decided to study a historical conflict rather than a current one, and spent five years researching the actions of the Nazis during World War II. The result was an amazing 992 page novel called “Les Bienveillantes” (“The Kindly Ones”), published in 2006. The novel won major French literary awards but is not too well known in the United States.</p>
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<p>For those of you following the Read-along-guide </p>
<p>new posting Luisa Rey (second half)
[Cloud</a> Atlas Readalong Part 9: Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery (second half) | editorialeyes](<a href=“EditorialEyes Publishing Services”>Cloud Atlas Readalong Part 9: Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery (second half) – EditorialEyes Publishing Services)</p>
<p>Black Swan Green is about bullying and is very different from CA, but brilliant as well.</p>
<p>^ jaylynn, do you prefer one over the other?</p>
<p>SJCM - Thanks for the link. I just went over and read the latest entry on the read along. My head really starts spinning when I try to figure out if all the different “stories” are real or not. When I first read the The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish stories, I thought maybe Cavendish was a confused elderly person retelling a story using some real facts and some imagined facts.</p>
<p>After reading today’s blog, I really want to believe that Cavendish’s story is “not real”. Cavendish publishes sensational books and The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is a sensational story. Cavendish only mentions his birthmark in passing, so we don’t really know if it’s the same as the other birthmarks. I feel like Cavendish mentions the birthmark to tie himself to Luisa’s story and Mitchell mentions it just to confuse us. Plus, I think I read somewhere (on the read along?) that there was an overlap in time where Luisa and Cavendish were both alive. That just doesn’t fit in with with the separation of characters in the other stories.</p>
<p>Okay, that is what I was thinking and then I realized something that makes Cavendish’s story tie in with the other stories and also makes it as "real’ as the other stories. It’s the ongoing “sextet” theme. If we dismiss Cavendish’s story, there will not be 6 intertwining stories.</p>
<p>Yes, my head is still spinning.</p>
<p>^^I know today’s entry wasn’t about the Cavendish story, but that is where it sent my thoughts.</p>
<p>There is also a review of the movie on the read along site. The blogger saw the movie at an advance screening in Canada.</p>
<p>BUBC - I’m quite confused about the validity of those stories. Perhaps others can shed some light on this issue.</p>
<p>^Interesting film review, BUandBC82. It says that the theme of consumerism and all-powerful corporations is absent from the the Sonmi story (!!), and it implies that Frobisher doesn’t steal from Ayers…hmmm…</p>