I was a little disappointed in this sprawling 625 page novel that encompasses three narrators and several hundred years. In fact, the jumping back and forth from narrator to narrator and consequent time shifts gave the work such a fragmentary feel, that it took me nearly three hundred pages to settle in and to figure what the three narrators have in common—one, a young girl during the sack of Constantinople in 1204, one from the 1920’s, and one from a few dozen or so years in the future, a young girl trapped inside a space ship that is barreling its way toward the planet, Beta Oph2. The book flips back and forth from character to character and from century to century in a fragmentary fashion that makes it difficult for the reader to piece together such an enigmatic puzzle. A slow start, the novel progresses and the story lines coalesce as they revolve around a fragmentary play written by the fictional playwright Diogenes, born circa 413 B.C.. The sections begin to inform each other and most importantly, the reader is at last drawn into the plights and lives of the disparate characters. Part science fiction, part historical novel, it is a wildly ambitious book that has as its glue this unfinished and fragmentary play.

Initially, I was in a hurry to get to the next chapter and the one after that, but by book’s end I was enthralled by the characters’ lives and the contexts in which they lived (and died.) At the heart, is the unfinished Greek Play Cloud Cuckoo Land, an ancient Greek play whose remnants have survived time, and touch all of the characters’ lives—Zeno in his overseeing of the script as he directs a version as a children’s play in the 21st Century, Omeir and Anna, who survive the sacking of Constantinople and carry the play with them as their most precious object, and Konstance, bound for Beta Oph2 on the spaceship Argos. The manuscript brings such disparate narratives together. The tapestry that Doehrr weaves is monumental—smart, profound, informative and humane—though I did feel that I needed Wikipedia by my side. Another book similar in its diverging points of view is Hanya Yanigihara, another inter-generational novel that takes place in the past, present, and future, whose fulcrum is a single house in Brooklyn. That wonderful book is narrated in three large sections, however, and so our reading is not interrupted by the next future or past fragment. Cloud Cuckoo Land demands to be read carefully—and then perhaps read again to put all the pieces together—in much the same way that Diogenes’ play only comes to us in pieces—so much of it having been lost, to wear and tear and time.