She - her feet have never touched the soil of Earth.ĭOERR: That's right. SIMON: And this is a human being who has come to be in space. And then you have to kind of wait until the end of the book to understand the long journey that that story took from ancient times all the way to land in Konstance's lap. So you know, the very opening of the book, her father's telling her a story. They live on this little community inside of an interstellar spaceship. Her father is a gardener in this spaceship. And she loves stories, and she loves plants. SIMON: I want to ask you about both my favorite character and a character it was harder to get warm about. And the glory of a job like yours or a job like mine is you get to chase these different curiosities all the time and spend your day learning. And I just want to learn as much as I can. And I think we're here for such a short amount of time - if you're so lucky, seven or eight decades. I think it puts you on edge and makes you a little more alert, and you don't take anything for granted. I like to kind of write into what I don't know. SIMON: You have said that you - in this age of people being encouraged to write about what they know and from their own perspectives, you wrote you want to write about what you don't know.ĭOERR: Yeah, that's right. And so I'm just so interested in why certain things last and what we can do as people to be stewards of - both of human culture and, of course, of the natural world, too. And, you know, when you're young, you think all the ancient texts that we have were all the ancient texts that were ever written. And yet in high school, at least in my high school, we kind of got to the end of the fall of the Roman Empire and Western civilization that we just leapt to the Renaissance and skipped over a thousand years.Īnd so I just started reading about the walls of Constantinople and how, among all the different kinds of wealth they preserved, was also books and book culture. They were kind of the preeminent defensive technology in the whole world. And every text I would read about the history of defensive walls would mention the walls of Constantinople, which I knew basically nothing about. And it's got medieval walls, about 2 kilometers of medieval walls around it. And I gather the spark for this novel came from what you learned about the limited life span - let me put it that way - of ancient texts.ĭOERR: Yeah, my previous book, "All The Light We Cannot See," is set primarily in this town called Saint Malo in Brittany, France. But to say you're living in Cloud Cuckoo Land says you're kind of living in an unrealistic paradise. And especially in the English language, over the past two or three hundred years, it's come to mean a kind of a fanciful domain, a utopia. It's about a man who strives and hopes to be turned into a bird so he can fly to this paradise in the sky called Cloud Cuckoo Land. What ties these stories together of Anna, Zeno, Omeir, Konstance and Seymour?ĭOERR: Yeah, the novel has five protagonists living at different times, and they all, at various points in their lives, fall in love with this story, a fable called Cloud Cuckoo Land, a fable I invented, although the writer who I attribute it to did write books - named Antonius Diogenes. SIMON: Well, they're important to us and to a lot of people. It's so great that you cover books every weekend. And thanks so much for covering books in general. Anthony Doerr joins us from Boise, Idaho - his novel, "Cloud Cuckoo Land." Thanks so much for joining us.ĭOERR: Oh, thanks so much for having me, Scott. Before she turns 14, every person she knows will be either enslaved or dead. Anna has never tasted sweet cream, never eaten an orange, and never set foot outside the city walls. Between them, they own four copper coins, three ivory buttons, a patched wool blanket and an icon of Saint Koralia that may or may not have belonged to their mother. Anna and her older sister Maria sleep in a one-window cell barely large enough for a horsehair pallet. Let's not delay in asking him to read a section.ĪNTHONY DOERR: (Reading) On the fourth hill of the city we call Constantinople but which the inhabitants at the time simply called the city, across the street from the convent of Saint Teo Fanno (ph) the Empress, in the once-great embroidery house of Nicholas Kalaphates, lives an orphan named Anna. Anthony Doerr, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 with his last novel "All The Light We Cannot See," has a new novel that ties together stories from medieval Constantinople, a contemporary small-town library held at gunpoint by a teenage environmentalist, and a spaceship in the next century.
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