<p>Re your actor link, Ignatius, the idea of Tom Hanks as Goose and Hoggins fascinates me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the man play a villain.</p>
<p>NJTheaterMom, I’d be interested in your summary of the book’s theme and messages. You’ve read the book twice, read lots of research, and if you’d like to share I’m most interested.</p>
<p>I’ve read in one of the links that Tom Hanks will evolve from evil to good. This idea made the studio happy.</p>
<p>I’ve been thinking about buenavista’s idea that “the themes remain the same but the venues change and the characters morph into others while still retaining parts of their earlier incarnations.” We’ve talked about words that reappear, thus linking the stories together, but I’ve noticed that certain scenarios reappear as well. </p>
<p>For example, in Sloosha’s Crossing, Zachry sees his enemy sleeping on the bed, and although he remembers his “augurin”–Enemy’s sleeping, let his throat not be slit–he cannot resist taking revenge:</p>
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<p>Eerily, in the second half of Letters from Zedelghem, Robert Frobisher finds himself staring at the sleeping Ayrs, whose “fragile skull was only inches away, but he didn’t wake”:</p>
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A blue vein throbbed over Ayrs’s Adam’s apple, and I fought off an unaccountably strong urge to open it up with my penknife. Most uncanny. Not quite d</p>
<p>Excellent observation and find, Mary13.
And, wasn’t it soon after Zachry’s murder, that Meronym discusses the idea of “delayed gratification, of surpressing one’s animalistic, ID Nature”, of self control.
This, of course, applies to nation/ states, too, and a big message of the book, suggesting Meronym’s society was more civilized.</p>
<p>^ Very true, SJCM! So the scenes not only link the stories together through their similarities, they also express one of the novel’s overarching themes. Maybe you or others can explain the meaning behind this other repeated action: tossing living beings to their death. So gruesome! Since there are three (and maybe more) incidents, I feel like there must be some significance.</p>
<p>The critic in Timothy Cavendish’s story:</p>
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<p>The Zizzi Hikaru doll from Sonmi’s story:</p>
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<p>The first mate Boerhaave from Adam’s story:</p>
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<p>Good heavens. That’s so weird. </p>
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<p>Gee, thank you, SJCM. You flatter me; I’m not sure I understand the book better than anyone else. I’ll think about it and see if I can summarize my observations in a later post.</p>
<p>Mary, my only comment on your observation about people being tossed to their deaths, is that there is a heck of a lot of falling and/or jumping in the book, one way or another, in general: Ewing falling into the crater, Frobisher jumping out the window, Luisa’s car falling from the bridge, Sachs’ and Grimaldi’s plane falling from the sky…the list goes on and on. </p>
<p>And then there is of course mankind’s “Fall”…and the fact that the book itself can be described as “genre-jumping, century-hopping”…</p>
<p>Perhaps Mitchell is suggesting, in a way, that it is something of a miracle when we can keep our feet on the ground during our fleeting existence(s)?</p>
<p>Thanks NJTheatreMom, that makes sense. Your idea sent me back to do a flip through the novel and I see phrases such as falling asleep, falling in love, falling prey to, hair falling out, teeth falling out, falling to bits, falling silent, falling flat. No wonder it is so difficult to “ascend”! We spend most of our lives falling.</p>
<p>And those comet birthmarks…“falling stars”… :)</p>
<p>I have another question. Since so much in these stories is connected, I’m trying to figure out where Hilary V. Hush comes into play. Timothy Cavendish says that Hilary V. Hush is the author of Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery. He mentions her a couple of times, and even has a funny erotic fantasy about her. Later, to his surprise, he discovers that she is a man—it’s Hilary Vincent Hush: “And what a lard-bucket! I’m no Chippendale myself, but Hilary has the girth to fill not two but three airline economy seats” (p. 387).</p>
<p>Can anyone think of anywhere else Hilary Hush might have “morphed” in the novel, or why David Mitchell would have this particular person be the author of Luisa’s story?</p>
<p>(By the way, I think Mitchell makes another clever little dig at himself here. Timothy writes of Half-Lives: “It would be a better book if Hilary V. Hush weren’t so artsily-fartsily Clever. She had written it in neat little chapteroids, doubtless with one eye on the Hollywood screenplay.”)</p>
<p>^I don’t know, but I was wondering about the reference to Alain-Fournier (p156).
Alain-Fournier was a pseudonym of French author Henri Alban-Fournier. His only novel was about a boy searching for a girl he had met at a mysterious party.</p>
<p>Another connection between the stories which is easy to miss the fist time around: When Cavendish wakes up in Aurora House and yells at the nurse, she says
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<p>^I think, when it comes to Hilary Hush, Mitchell is sort of playing with us. “Ha ha, you thought Luisa was ‘real’…but no, she’s a character in a book supposedly written by a woman…but no, ‘actually’ that book is a (fictional) work written by a man – a big fat man.” </p>
<p>Maybe he’s trying to get us to think about all the layers. We know that the entirety of “Cloud Atlas” is fiction anyhow, so why should we be unnerved when it’s revealed that Luisa is somehow “less real” than other characters? </p>
<p>One piece of commentary that I found mentions that Hilary V Hush is a “Nabokovian” name, but I don’t possess the erudition to understand exactly what that means.</p>
<p>Copied below is something that addresses the Hilary Hush issue in the context of metafictional self-consciousness (a concept that I must admit I only dimly understand):</p>
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The jacket copy of “Cloud Atlas” mentions Nabokov and Umberto Eco, and calls Mitchell a “postmodern visionary.” This is true enough, but one is struck by the gestural nature of Mitchell’s postmodernism. You could remove all the literary self-consciousness without smothering the novel’s ontology, or coarsening its intricacy. It is not exactly that Mitchell’s heart isn’t in his authorial games; to put it positively, the persuasive vitality of his stories is strong enough to frighten off their own alienation. The novellas have a life of their own, and will not be easily burgled—which is to say that they function like all successful fictions. The revelation that, say, Adam Ewing’s journal might have been fabricated by his son, or that Luisa Rey’s journalistic crusade in California might just be a thriller written by someone with the nom de plume of Hilary V. Hush, actually strengthens the autonomous reality of these fictions. This is the opposite of the weak postmodernism of a writer like Paul Auster, whose moments of metafictional self-consciousness—“Look, it’s all made up!”—are weightless, because the fictions themselves have failed to achieve substance: a diet going on a diet. In this respect, Mitchell is more like Nabokov (or Jos</p>
<p>Interesting quote, NJTM. I don’t know what I believe, but that’s part of the fun of the novel. There isn’t a clear cut answer. The answer is determined by the reader and what they choose to believe is “real” or “not real”.</p>
<p>In contrast to the “falling” mentioned earlier, there was also a lot of ascending going on in the novel, which I believe was brought up earlier in our discussion. The big one is Sonmi ascending from her fabricated life. She ascended intellectually, but also ascended from the underground location of Papa Song’s, going up in the elevator to the ground level to her new life. In Sloosha’s Crossing, Meronym and Zachry ascended the mountain. There was also a Dr. Upwards in Cavendish’s section and a Father Upwards was mentioned in Adam’s section.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>Adam Ewing “resolved to scale a high hill to the north of Ocean Bay, known as Conical Tor, whose lofty elevation promises the best aspect of Chatham Isle’s ‘backcountry.’” Ewing descends quickly and painfully (physically).</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.musc.edu/cando/kidsat/chatham/image4b.jpeg[/url]”>http://www.musc.edu/cando/kidsat/chatham/image4b.jpeg</a></p>
![http://www.musc.edu/cando/kidsat/chatham/image4b.jpeg[/url]](http://www.musc.edu/cando/kidsat/chatham/image4b.jpeg%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
<p>Frobisher climbs the many steps to the clock tower first with Eva and later to wait for Eva. Frobisher’s descent can best be described as emotional/psychological.</p>
<p>[Bruges</a> Clock Tower](<a href=“http://www.stolworthy.me.uk/photo19.htm]Bruges”>Bruges Clock Tower)</p>
<p>^Sylvan, I was intrigued by your mention of the Alain-Fournier reference, which I’ll admit I had just skimmed past, both times I read the book. </p>
<p>Apparently Alain-Founier’s book “Le Grand Meulnes” is considered one of the great works of French literature…something that all French young people read. I’d wager that the British know more about the book than Americans do; they are generally better informed about all things French.</p>
<p>I get the impression that the book is lushly romantic, in a very evocative and haunting way. Maybe Mitchell has Cavendish substitute Alain-Fournier for Saint Bernadette because, to a British guy of Cavendish’s type, “Le Grands Meulnes” would represent a type of magic that religion once supplied but modern secular culture has ceased to make so available??</p>
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<p>[Le</a> Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier | John Baker’s Blog](<a href=“http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/le-grand-meaulnes-by-alain-fournier/]Le”>http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/le-grand-meaulnes-by-alain-fournier/)</p>
<p>Drat, I got myself interested in reading “Le Grand Meulnes” (see post 157 above), but discovered through Amazon’s “look inside” feature that the translation by Robin Buss is too dreadful to be borne (I know enough French to be able to tell, but not quite enough to be able to read the book in French very easily).</p>
<p>A clearly much better translation, by R.B. Russell, seems to be available only on Kindle (I don’t see anyone selling the actual book of the Russell translation online)…and I don’t have a Kindle. Grrr. Well, I’m just going to have to find that Russell translation somehow, somewhere.</p>
<p>Anyone read Sarah Dillons - Critical Essays :David Mitchell.
Mitchellness style- cult followers</p>
<p>Also way cool Ignatius with picture appearing in post - maybe just with iPhone?</p>
<p>And, Mary13, I too, wondered about Hilary V Hush. Glad you asked!</p>