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Today, "The City of Clouds and Birds" by Anthony Doerr, published on September 14, 2022 by Éditions Albin Michel.
Emily Café Powell, contributor to the 20 Minutes
Books reading group
and blogger, recommends
The City of Clouds and Birds
by Anthony Doerr, published on September 14, 2022 by Éditions Albin Michel.
His favorite quote:
“Each sign corresponds to a sound, associating sounds amounts to forming words, and by associating words we end up building universes.
»
Why this book?
Because it's an unclassifiable novel,
thought of as an ode to fiction, to the power of literature.
The author writes magnificent pages on the magic of stories that transcend centuries and countries and unite people who have, at first sight, nothing in common.
The universality of literature.
It's incredibly beautiful.
Because the author also delivers a
deeply melancholic reflection on the fragility of literature, stories depending on their physical medium, which can be so easily destroyed or lost.
Alongside the characters, the reader reflects on all these long-lost stories from Antiquity… and on all those, perhaps, that we have yet to rediscover.
Because Anthony Doerr also talks to us about ecology,
terrorism, socio-economic precariousness, war, loneliness, mourning, thwarted loves, loss... And each time, he does it with accuracy and modesty .
Because thanks to its short and incisive chapters and
its effective style, the novel is read with great ease, despite the profound erudition of the text and its astonishing density.
The essentials in 2 minutes
The plot.
An ancient fable crosses the centuries and unites the characters: the author thus embroiders a universal fiction on the power of creation and imagination.
Characters.
Anna and Omeir are two teenagers from the 15th century: one lives in Constantinople, the other comes to conquer it.
Zeno is a young American of the 20th century.
Konstance lives in a spaceship en route to a new planet.
Seymour is an autistic little boy… What do they have in common?
Places.
Anthony Doerr excels in exhuming from oblivion the Constantinople of yesteryear, on the verge of falling.
It also transports us to the America of yesteryear, to Korea, and on a spaceship...
The time.
By handling historical fiction with as much brilliance as science fiction, the author shows us the full range of his talent.
The Constantinople of 1453 is more alive than ever, like America in the 1950s or the future...
The author.
Anthony Doerr is known for his Pulizter Prize, won in 2015 for
All the Light We Cannot See
.
This book was read with
deep melancholy.
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