[MD] cloud atlas.

Thu Sep 14 03:54:21 PDT 2017

Hi, Dan, all...

Given the content of your last sentence,yes,i did some further reading to
the
end of the book , and it is thrue that a cluster of alter ego's appears and
vanishes again only to reappear in other chapters/essays,and story's
elsewhere.They really merge into previous characters.
The same pattern indeed that we can find in "Zen,..."and "Lila", where it
is not always very clear when Phaedrus,the narrator Pirsig and the
caracters are talking.Phaedrus is a master of disguise, as is Pirsig when
hiding in the alter ego.
There is a page somewhere in the book , where  Mitchell uses the term New
England, but does not seem to project innuendo of any sort.
This guy is very sharp in his details,when he retakes the "letters from
Zedelgem", near the end of the book, he makes sure the first letter takes
of where the last of the early chapters left it, even to the
date.10/10/1931; is
about two weeks after the last was left behind.
Also it was very nice to find that when he left the diary of Ewing (first
exposure) , and used an unfinished sentence as lead-out, he uses the same
sentence as lead-in in for
the retake of the dairy of Ewing near the end.Just before he does, he talks
about Frobishers molecules , lingering around in his mind.Briljant!, superb!

Personally , i like the Cavendish caracter most,but that is a personal
feeling i guess.Very rational Brit writing like he is a freemason of
semantics.
This book contains more story's that a writer can think of.History itself
delivers them.  That also apply's for 'inferno' of Dan Brown,that i
recommended,history and the geograpical setting that is chosen delivers a
part of the mystic content.I left it aside for now, need to read some other
things first. During my reading of the surroundings in Brugge,(bruges) and
Zedelgem(modern spelling), i visited the brugse reien virtually and
travelled
some of the streets via google earth,for the part about the "minnewater" he
mentions.Coming around that event , i found several entry's in wiki talking
about the castle of the Della Faille's on the border of the "Minnewater".
This was not related to Mitchell's book , but de Della Faille's were the big
landlords in my home town of Assenede,during medieval times, and i just had
to grab the story i found.Its a book on itself.But has nothing to do with
the Cloud Atlas.

Brugge, (Bruges) is only 40 minutes driving from here btw.Most beautiful
town in Belgium, very clean and very historical.Very medieval.I know all
places in the book.Even the hotels are real.And the musea.
When artists are visiting  Brugge they tend to become creative.
One can travel most of the canals here by boat, not expensive, its even
possible around Gent and in the city core of Gent proper itself in the
medieval channels.That is only 20 min's from my location here.

Medieval centum Gent

http://www.debootjesvangent.be/nl/stadsrondvaarten/het-middeleeuwse-centrum-40-min

7 euro/person

medieval centrum Brugge (Bruges)

http://www.boottochten-brugge.be/

8 euro/person

also Gent to Bruges is possible.

Have some fun.Adrie

2017-09-13 5:48 GMT+02:00 Dan Glover <daneglover at gmail.com>:

> Hi Adrie,
>
> Glad you are enjoying Cloud Atlas. Yes I agree how David Mitchell does
> a stellar job with his characters and their settings. Oh. The Kona
> episode is written from the future tense and disregard this if you
> haven't made it through the entire book yet as it may contain
> spoilers:
>
> the dialect is I think meant to reflect a breakdown in social
> standards (and morality as well, thus the rather filthy and limp
> portrayal) in some unspecified but certainly not too distant point in
> time and it is set on the islands of what we today call Hawaii. This
> is I think a rather ingenious portrayal of social patterns devolving
> rather than evolving, the result of what we might term negative
> Quality.
>
> The point of view character starts as a young boy I believe of around
> 7 years old who unwittingly leads the Kona back to his camp where the
> barbarians slaughter his father and older brother while he hides in
> the forest. Later, the boy now grown meets with a newcomer to the
> island who might or might not be a relative and who might or might not
> be the reincarnated persona of earlier characters in the story. Note
> the comet-shaped birthmark.
>
> You might notice how David Mitchell uses reincarnation as a touchstone
> not only in Cloud Atlas but in all his stories. The same characters
> continually appear and reappear throughout his novels. You might even
> make the case how the boy is not only a descendant of one of the
> earlier characters in the book, the one who mistakenly believes he's
> been afflicted with a deadly parasite, but quite probably the
> reincarnated persona. The doctor who treats him (or rather mistreats)
> is relateable to a character from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de
> Zoet and The Bone Clocks and is a traveler of an altogether different
> sort.
>
> The intermingling nature of the stories leads the reader up the hill
> and then back down again which I think is much like Robert Pirsig's
> two novels, ZMM leading us up and Lila taking us back down. Thus the
> mention of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in Cloud Atlas is
> I think no accident or whim of the author but instead what we might
> term a touchstone, a point on a map guiding us to a more expansive
> point of view.
>
> On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 4:33 PM, Adrie Kintziger <parser666 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I did some more reading today, Dan, and i have to say,the story's are
> > stunning.This writer is really far pitching.What took my attention most
> and
> > give me the feeling that i was walking around in alice's wonderland, is
> > that he went around the geographical timetable's to situate his caracters
> > in their locations.
> > When JR Ewing speaks , he uses the 1850  spelling of the Dutch /Flemish
> > language,when the letters of Zedelghem are spoken about, the author uses
> > the 1931 language spelling, as the story situates itself in..... etc,
> > brilliant!, he actually used words that i had to look up in the
> dictionary,
> > and i'm from around here.A particulair word,"verwaten", does nor even
> exist
> > anymore!;this is a very rare quality in a writer.
> > He actually writes some phrases in Western Flemish,like he is from around
> > there, dialect as they come. Superb.
> >
> > But i'm struggling with one of the story's.
> > He embeds a story about the Kona within the two orison articles(not
> written
> > as a chapter). It looks like an essay.But it is written in a sort of
> > Dutch and absolutely not Flemish dialect, that is so filthy and limp, and
> > idiotic that one can only find it around the big asocial city's like say
> > Rotterdam and Amsterdam.Extremely annoying.I do not understand why this
> is
> > written this way.
> > Struggle....
> >
> > Adrie
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
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>
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