I have no way of knowing if Mitchell has always balked at this trend, or if the science-fictionalized idea of reincarnation just happened to suit his own personal set of obsessions, but I do think he has struck out in an interesting new direction. The less sympathetic the character, according to this formula, the greater the degree of difficulty, and the greater the artistic success should you feel something for that character. So much of contemporary literature is predicated on the idea that empathy is the paramount experience-that if you can make a reader feel along with your characters, you have succeeded. This is less a matter of casual tourism than it is a moral reckoning. He bound Cloud Atlas’ s disparate characters together via reincarnation (a fact at which he only hints, via birthmarks, but which becomes more and more explicit in his later novels ), and although it does feel a bit too tidy and a bit too cute, that’s not to say that the underlying idea is not a good one. Because Mitchell didn’t just intend for his book to serve as a trump card in a literary parlor game he also sought to make a moral point. But it wasn’t the only challenge-or even the most important one. So that was the challenge the trio of directors faced: distilling a millennium-spanning, plot-packed, hyper-verbal, genre-fluid, 600-page novel into a film of just under three hours. It is not one novel (or not just one novel) but six expertly braided miniature novels, all of which can certainly be imagined at feature length, but none of which seem readily abridgeable into the twenty-five or so minutes that the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer actually had at their disposal.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas stands out from those in that the difficulty lies not so much in the work’s content-the novel is awash in dialogue, plots, and characters-but in its length. Tristram Shandy is one example, Naked Lunch is another, and Life of Pi certainly also qualifies. Jump aboard.Ī lot of novels have been called “unfilmable” that wound up being perfectly filmable indeed, under the right stewardship. With that in mind, The Back Pages is a crate-digging, B movie–watching, moldy book–reading column with the intention of offering a hand from the departing ship of the common vernacular. Sometimes it’s underexposure and sometimes it’s overexposure, but for whatever reason, things fall through the cracks. Pepper’s or The Godfather -but it is incomplete. It’s generally not wrong -no one’s saying there’s any argument to be made against Sgt.

Cloud atlas book