<p>^Wow, Mary, brilliant. I love it!</p>
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<p>This reminded me of an episode of the Twilight Zone where the aliens’ peace treaty ended up being a cookbook using humans (“To Serve Man”). I doubt David Mitcheel drew from the Twilight Zone, but who knows? He dazzles us with his range of references.</p>
<p>I tried to add this comment last night and CC did weird things, like randomly inserting it in the middle of page 4. I deleted it, tried again, and was told to wait. </p>
<p>For all that effort, the comment itself seems kinda puny: Luisa Rey lives in a suburb of Buenas Yerbas:Ewingville.</p>
<p>Kudos on finding all those gems, the words linking this very intricate collection of stories.
Please do keep finding them!</p>
<p>Can anyone help me with this?
Is there anything that happens in this book, where the “knowledge” of the “past” changes behavior, therefore effecting the “future” events? </p>
<p>I realize the “comet” birthmark links the individuals, suggesting reincarnation.</p>
<p>Is there a “Back to the Future” event where the future is “reset” ?</p>
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I don’t think there is, which is why I found the book a bit depressing.</p>
<p>I know Frobisher, Luisa Rey, and Sonmi have the comet-shaped birthmark. Did any of the others?</p>
<p>Hunt and SJCM - I don’t know about a “Back to the Future” event, but when I read the book I kept waiting for something (not sure what), but I don’t think that whatever I was waiting for ever happened. I thought the book was brilliant, but at the end I felt as if perhaps I had missed something. Did anyone else feel that?</p>
<p>ignatius - also the schooner The Prophetess is restored and docked in the Buenas Yerbas Marina. That was the ship Adam Ewing was on and Luisa feels a connection to it when she goes to the dock.</p>
<p>I’ve been musing over Hunt’s, SJCM’s and sylvan8798’s recent posts, and this is my thinking:</p>
<p>Yes, on one level, the book is depressing. It seems to reinforce the old saying that “Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.” Even though Luisa Rey triumphs over Swanneke, it’s clear from later chapters that no lesson was learned, that the earth was nearly annihilated by nuclear catastrophe. In the end, Sloosha’s Crossing depicts a community that is very much like the world that Adam describes in his Pacific Journal: warring tribes, minimal medical knowledge, superstition, and an environment where peace-loving people (Moriori/Valleysman) are destroyed by violent enemies (Maori/Kona). We have come full-circle. We have arrived nowhere. As one of the reviewers of Cloud Atlas observes, it’s no coincidence that the novel begins and ends with Autua, whose name is spelled the same forward and backward.</p>
<p>Yet within this cycle, there is an infinite amount of beauty: a slave striving for freedom, a savage showing more integrity than his “civilized” counterparts, a decision to take a risk in order to do the right thing, one person reaching out to save another’s life, men and women loving their families with incredible depth and constancy. We fall, but these attributes allow us to rise up again and again.</p>
<p>I think Timothy Cavendish sums this up when he talks about how literature presents the same stories over and over: “’…it’s been done a hundred times before!’–as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!” It is the same with human existence: so much repetition, but each individual’s struggle shines in its own way-- it’s not the What, it’s the How.</p>
<p>^I agree with Mary here. The first time I read “Cloud Atlas,” I felt more unsettled by it; the second time, I saw a lot more of the beauty and hopefulness in it.</p>
<p>From that scholarly paper I found:</p>
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</p>
<p><a href=“http://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/1685/02_whole.pdf?sequence=1[/url]”>http://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/1685/02_whole.pdf?sequence=1</a></p>
<p>Meronym also has the birthmark. (Cavendish says he has a birthmark, but not shaped like a comet.)</p>
<p>I don’t think the book’s message is depressing; it ends with Adam and his message is one of belief and choice and hope:</p>
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<p>And then he pledges himself to the abolitionist cause as his “one drop.”</p>
<p>I assume calling him Adam and referring the “The Fall” is the Sloosha section is not coincidental.</p>
<p>I think Cavendish’s birthmark was similar to the others. It would be just like him for his description of it to be flippant and contrary. :)</p>
<p>It would seem that a lot of the names are not accidents:</p>
<p>Wikipedia:
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<p>I knew I forgot someone. Interestingly enough, Adam Ewing (journal), Frobisher (letters), Luisa Rey, Cavendish (memoir), Sonmi (interview) “own” their narrations. In “Sloosha’s crossin’” Zachry narrates; we know Meronym only through Zachry’s eyes and what she chooses to share with Zachry re her past. (Hence the reason I forgot her birthmark; my mind filtered through the narrators when I tried to remember birthmarks.)</p>
<p>Hunt and Sylvan I share your views of the book, thinking I has missed something, that something “big” was going to happen. Mary13, nice explanation of the implied uplifting, hopeful, view of humankind. </p>
<p>Related to this “reincarnation” issue and the “comet birthmark”, did most of you think that the characters were extensions from the previous story?
I did not, and I know the movie is focusing on that theme, something I thought was just a “gimmicky” device by the author.</p>
<p>I did not either, SouthJerseyChessMom, and I have also read that the reincarnation theme is going to be a major focus of the movie (obviously, with the same actors reappearing in different parts of it). This worries me and disappoints me. We’ll have to see-- maybe it will be okay, or okay on its own. I just don’t want it to mess with my own love of this book.</p>
<p>Regarding names (and that meronym stuff is great, sylvan8798!)–I can’t believe this one is a coincidence, but I have no idea what it could possibly mean (if anything):</p>
<p>In the Adam Ewing story, Wagstaff marries the widow Mapple.</p>
<p>Art collector and curator Sam Wagstaff was the benefactor and partner of the artist Robert Mapplethorpe.</p>
<p>As for the movie, this New Yorker piece [The</a> Wachowskis? World beyond ?The Matrix?](<a href=“reading.ly - a really cool domain parked on Park.io”>reading.ly - a really cool domain parked on Park.io) says that expanding on the “idea of eternal recurrence” and having the actors “appear in multiple story linesplaying souls, not characters,” was how they solved the problem of making the novel work as a film.</p>
<p>I posted earlier and it ended up on page 4 (like ignatius). I deleted it and then I wasn’t able to post again. A friend suggested updating my iPad. So, I’m trying again. I hope it works. I originally tried to post this after ignatius’ #95 post.</p>
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I love this, Mary!</p>
<p>buenavista - I agree, Adam’s message at the end of the book is encouraging and not depressing. It is depressing that we have seen the future from Adam’s time and it’s not looking too great. In every era of history in the book there are individuals who are hopeful. Perhaps Mitchell’s positive message from the book is that human’s can survive and, even amid bedlam, there is always hope.</p>
<p>Yay! It worked.</p>
<p>I hadn’t looked at the movie trailer for Cloud Atlas until I finished the book on Monday. It looks like the actors play more than one role, but not just the person with the comet birthmark. That seems strange to me. Won’t it be weird for Tom Hanks to play Cavendish, who has a birthmark, and also play Isaac Sachs alongside Halle Berry as Luisa Rey, when Luisa is that sections bearer of the comet birthmark. Are we to believe everyone is reincarnated with the same group of people over and over again?</p>