I've been reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and finding plenty to enjoy, not least his command of narrative voice. There's an astonishing range of voice and point-of-view in the six narratives involved and a wonderful sense of linguistic exuberance. And it's easy to be get involved in the stories themselves, though the central piece, Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After lost me in places.
However, I must confess to having doubts about the structuring of the text. The reader is given five incomplete stories before the central Sloosha's narrative is given complete, with the stories moving forward in time from the mid-nineteenth century of The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing to the post-apocalyptic future of the narrative sitting at the centre. But now I am a fair way through the second half of the book with four stories complete in the telling I'm not at all sure what links them together.
I'm hoping for something revelatory about the text as a whole as I work through the final eighty pages, but I'm doubtful.
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