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NTHONY DOERR: Writing Beyond the Pulitzer
BY APRIL NEALE
Idaho has a history of attracting literary giants, but Anthony Doerr, finalist for the 2021 National Book Award and Guggenheim Fellow, is the only Pulitzer Prize-winning author who calls Idaho home. The Gem State also serves as one of many locations in his expansive new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, in a nod to the Greek story by Aristophanes titled The Birds. “Cuckoo” is a time-defying journey that celebrates the indelible power of story and its importance to humanity, as well as serving as a literary canary in a coal mine about the faltering planet we appear to be inheriting thanks to careless stewardship. The caveats are more than subtle in this novel that centers on five characters—Zeno, Konstance, Seymour, Anna, and Omeir—who share a tenuous attachment to the same ancient story told by Aethon, preserved and adapted over millennia. The novel artfully reveals how our actions and stories connect the dreamers and outliers of their time in the most unusual ways throughout human existence. Doerr won the Pulitzer Prize for his previous novel, All the Light We Cannot See, a highwire work of literary fiction soon to be a four-part limited series on Netflix, with Shawn Levy and Steven Knight as showrunners. Doerr notes that writing, unlike making movies, offers him the luxury of creating stunning visuals unconstrained by budgets or cameras. ”I never have to think about money when I write a scene at night with old cars in the background. If I want to have a character like Marie-Laure, aged from 8 to 80, no problem. I don’t have to worry about all the things they do.” Sentence upon sentence, Doerr’s books prove that words can conjure a dream as brightly on a page as on any screen. Cloud
ANYHONY DOERR / PHOTO BY ULF ANDERSON
Cuckoo Land is even dedicated to librarians. Organically, it makes sense that Doerr’s involvement in the film series is strikingly humble. “I’m helping them in terms of giving them notes, or I can help them with research. I’ve shared photographs with them that I used to write the book. But beyond that, I’m hoping maybe I can get my boys there for a day or two when they’re filming and otherwise be a cheerleader. I’m hoping they make something really beautiful,” he shares. The new book asks a reader’s imagination to travel from the dystopian future of a dying Planet Earth to the 15th-century, ancient walled city of Constantinople, to a small, lakeside town in present-day
Idaho. The story weaves these unlikely places, times, and people together with the magical thread of one ancient, soaring tale about Aethon, who hopes to become a bird to fly into the clouds and discover a utopian paradise in the sky. “Surrender your disbelief all ye who enter these pages,” sings Doerr’s writing, page by page. And throughout the magical narrative, the five characters and the reader set forth on journeys that ultimately offer hope, humor, and inspiration through the profound power of story. This nascent idea began with Doerr’s fascination with a wall and how the structure preserved ancient Greek and Latin texts handed down throughout time.
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