Over time, he becomes an extreme environmental activist, drawn into a dark web group for which he must commit an act of violent protest to be initiated. And then one day, he finds the wing of an owl. What helps him survive are woods behind his home, where he encounters Trustyfriend, an owl he sits with who brings peace to the cacophony of his autistic world–until developers turn the woods into a high end development. Seymour is an autistic youth raised by a single mom in a double-wide she inherited, as she struggles in low wage jobs to make ends meet. He turns his translation into a play that he rehearses with the fifth graders and it is on the night of the rehearsal that he has his fateful encounter with Seymour. Consulting with Rex, he spends his retirement years translating an annotated version of the story, until enlisted one day by the librarian, Marian, to help her occupy a group of five fifth graders. Subsequently, through the local librarian, he learns of a digitized version of the only surviving manuscript of the story of Aethon. Zeno returned to Lakeport, Idaho, where he spent an uneventful life as a plow driver, punctuated by a visit to Rex and his gay lover in England. The older of the characters is Zeno, a gay Korean war surviving POW, who first heard Aethon’s story from Rex, an antiquities scholar from England and fellow prisoner. The second story is in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the 1930’s to the 2050’s. Eventually she flees the city, meeting up with Omeir, ostensibly an enemy, a hare-lipped young man, something of an outcast, whose gentle life had been spent tending oxen used to transport siege materials. While her and her accomplice sell various items, she keeps an old, somewhat mildewed book that is the tale of Aethon, which she reads to her dying sister, and preserves as a treasure, which in later years made it to the Vatican. Anna, an apprentice seamstress, to supplement her wages to get medical help for her sister, becomes a petty thief, climbing a tower with a lost library. The first story is occurs in 1452-53, in the attack on Constantinople. The story is actually based on a few extant fragments of The Wonders of Thule, the remainders of an 1800 year old manuscript by Antonius Diogenes, according to a note by Doerr. Successively, he is transformed into a donkey, a fish, and a crow before he finds the city and gains admission at the gates.
The story that ties these three together is of Aethon the shepherd who embarks on a quest to find a mythical city in the clouds where all his questions will be answered and longings met. I guess my response, having read the book, would be to say, “It’s complicated….”įor one thing, it is complicated as a story, really three stories occurring in three time periods of five people whose lives are tied together by another story. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize and I couldn’t wait to see how he would follow that tour de force. I thought Anthony Doerr’s All the Light You Cannot See one of the best novels I’ve read in the past twenty years. Summary: A story of five characters living in three time periods, whose lives are tied together by the story of Aethon the shepherd written by Antonius Diogenes. The author reassembles this work, which has only been preserved through papyrus fragments as well as later authors’ accounts, into a new edition that offers detailed philological and interpretive commentary on all of the surviving descriptions and fragments.Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr. The Wonders Beyond Thule by Antonius Diogenes uniquely combines a range of themes, including aspects of a love story, fantastic journeys, and Pythagorean philosophy. Bic Book Industry Communication::D Literature & literary studies::DS Literature: history & criticism::DSB Literary studies: general::DSBB Literary studies: classical, early & medievalīic Book Industry Communication::H Humanities::HB History::HBL History: earliest times to present day::HBLA Ancient history: to c 500 CE::HBLA1 Classical history / classical civilisationīic Book Industry Communication::H Humanities::HB History::HBL History: earliest times to present day::HBLC Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500::HBLC1 Medieval historyĪntonius Diogenes, Die unglaublichen Dinge jenseits von Thule
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