And I gather the spark for this novel came from what you learned about the limited life span - let me put it that way - of ancient texts.ĭOERR: Yeah, my previous book, "All The Light We Cannot See," is set primarily in this town called Saint Malo in Brittany, France. But to say you're living in Cloud Cuckoo Land says you're kind of living in an unrealistic paradise. And especially in the English language, over the past two or three hundred years, it's come to mean a kind of a fanciful domain, a utopia. It's about a man who strives and hopes to be turned into a bird so he can fly to this paradise in the sky called Cloud Cuckoo Land. What ties these stories together of Anna, Zeno, Omeir, Konstance and Seymour?ĭOERR: Yeah, the novel has five protagonists living at different times, and they all, at various points in their lives, fall in love with this story, a fable called Cloud Cuckoo Land, a fable I invented, although the writer who I attribute it to did write books - named Antonius Diogenes. SIMON: Well, they're important to us and to a lot of people. It's so great that you cover books every weekend.
And thanks so much for covering books in general. Anthony Doerr joins us from Boise, Idaho - his novel, "Cloud Cuckoo Land." Thanks so much for joining us.ĭOERR: Oh, thanks so much for having me, Scott. Before she turns 14, every person she knows will be either enslaved or dead. Anna has never tasted sweet cream, never eaten an orange, and never set foot outside the city walls. Between them, they own four copper coins, three ivory buttons, a patched wool blanket and an icon of Saint Koralia that may or may not have belonged to their mother. Anna and her older sister Maria sleep in a one-window cell barely large enough for a horsehair pallet. Let's not delay in asking him to read a section.ĪNTHONY DOERR: (Reading) On the fourth hill of the city we call Constantinople but which the inhabitants at the time simply called the city, across the street from the convent of Saint Teo Fanno (ph) the Empress, in the once-great embroidery house of Nicholas Kalaphates, lives an orphan named Anna. Anthony Doerr, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 with his last novel "All The Light We Cannot See," has a new novel that ties together stories from medieval Constantinople, a contemporary small-town library held at gunpoint by a teenage environmentalist, and a spaceship in the next century.
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