Cloud Atlas

Okay, I have not seen the movie, but I did read the book.  Sometimes when you read a book, you submerge into the story -- most times, actually.  But occasionally you can't get away from reading the book as a writer, looking at the way the book was constructed rather than the story it tells.

So goes Cloud Atlas.  Six stories, five of them surrounding the sixth in a series of shells.  You get part of the oldest story first - probably in the early 1800s - on a ship somewhere on the route from Australia to Hawaii.  The story drops off in midsentence, and then we get a new story, early 1900s in Belgium.  Then another in the 1970s or so.  So it goes until the sixth story, which is far in the future in Hawaii again, and is told in full.  Finally we get the second half of story five, story four, story three, etc. 

If only they were better stories.

There are two connecting threads between the stories.  One is that one character is the same soul reincarnated in a different body and life.  The other is that each character reads about/sees a movie about/hears a story about the person in the story before his or hers.

And what does the title mean?  It took me a while to get it, but I think the point is that life is like clouds, and if you try to look at the atlas, it will be different every time you see it.

Okay.