THE “NO STRINGS ATTACHED BOOK CLUB”
SPONSORED BY THE SOCIAL COMMITTEE OF THE PTOS

“CLOUD ATLAS”

David Mitchell

“Mitchell's virtuosic novel presents six narratives that evoke an array of genres, from Melvillean high-seas drama to California noir and dystopian fantasy. There is a naïve clerk on a nineteenth-century Polynesian voyage; an aspiring composer who insinuates himself into the home of a syphilitic genius; a journalist investigating a nuclear plant; a publisher with a dangerous best-seller on his hands; and a cloned human being created for slave labor. These five stories are bisected and arranged around a sixth, the oral history of a post-apocalyptic island, which forms the heart of the novel. Only after this do the second halves of the stories fall into place, pulling the novel's themes into focus: the ease with which one group enslaves another, and the constant rewriting of the past by those who control the present. Against such forces, Mitchell's characters reveal a quiet tenacity. When the clerk is told that his life amounts to "no more than one drop in a limitless ocean," he asks, "Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

January 14, 2014 (Tuesday)
4:30 PM-5:30 PM
REMSEN CONFERENCE ROOM 4D44

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT
LYNN BRISTOL: LYNN.BRISTOL@USPTO.GOV