10 minute read
Anthony Doerr
Photo courtesy Anthony Doerr
BY APRIL NEALE
Writing Beyond the Pulitzer
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 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.
Tony with his boys in Idaho.
PHOTO COURTESY ANTHONY DOERR
“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.
As he explains, “The first seed was reading a lot about walls. Saint-Malo, in Brittany, France, in which about 60% of All the Light We Cannot See is set, has this old medieval wall around it. Although it was destroyed significantly during World War II, American tourists like me can’t quite tell that they rebuilt it so carefully in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. It was part of Hitler’s vast megalomaniacal attempt to build the Atlantic Wall, a series of fortifications, with millions of tons of poured concrete, trying to build a series of defenses all along the Atlantic to stop an invasion from the United States and Britain. Every text that mentioned the history of defensive walls would bring up the walls of Constantinople, which I knew nothing about, but I just wanted to learn a little bit more about them. Even before I finished All The Light We Cannot See, I printed out a 15th-century drawing of the walls of Constantinople. Many sieges over 1,000 years came up against them, and they failed. I wanted to learn more about them. I didn’t realize that I’d have such a long project until I learned about how books were protected inside those walls, preserving the classics. About 75% of the ancient Greek texts that we have today only exist because of those walls of Constantinople, and then the libraries, masters, and monks were copying them every hundred years by hand, all of these old books. That’s when I started saying, ‘Okay, I’ve got something here.’”
The characters of Cloud Cuckoo Land come to life so exactingly that it’s difficult to imagine that the author is not a shapeshifter. Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives with her sister inside Constantinople, embroidering the robes of priests. She is not destined for this work, and through guile and bartering, she learns to read, finding the story of Aethon. Outside of Anna’s protected city is Omeir, born with a cleft palate and demeaned as being afflicted with a demonic curse. He is lovingly raised by his relatives in a safer, remote area until his conscription to the Sultan’s armies to attack Constantinople. The boy is accompanied by his two loyal companions, his beloved oxen twin brothers, Tree and Moonlight. Omeir and Anna have a shared destiny as the Byzantine and Roman empires fall around them.
When pressed about his most challenging character, Doerr says, “They’re all challenging at different points. Omeir was probably the most challenging because there’s just so little research material for me. There were many more chronicles of the [Constantinople’s] Siege of 1453 from the Greek side. It was just challenging to figure out what he might wear on his feet or what he would eat. What kind of mobility would he be allowed with a cleft palate in the 1400s because it’s so hard to research. So often, I would have to trust my imagination and common sense with his actions.”
Disability is a theme with two of the male characters. Seymour has a sensory disorder and cannot process external stimulation in a usual way. Omeir’s cleft palate is left open, a source of danger and bullying. Zeno’s sexual orientation, in a time when no one dared speak of it, weighs heavily in the story as well. “To be a gay man in the 1950s,” says Doerr, “all these complicated things you have to do to survive. I certainly would feel for him as well.” Zeno’s story connects with Seymour over time in a library in rural Idaho. Of the local angle, Doerr shares that Lakeport was created with a mix of familiar areas. “It’s certainly most influenced by McCall. There’s a little Donnelly in there, maybe a little Riggins,” he adds.
Courtesy Harper Collins
When asked if Cloud Cuckoo Land has an environmental subtext, Doerr explains that living in Idaho has made him even more attuned to the fragility of the Western lands. He says, “Some of that’s even intentional, a lot of that’s just subconscious and where my attention has been directed the past seven years. The growth in Idaho is wonderful, but it’s challenging also when you see that a mountain bike trail now has houses on it. We’re all just getting used to that, especially during the pandemic. Like when you get to a trailhead, and there are 40 cars parked where normally three would have been. I don’t have any more right to that trail than anybody else. I’m just trying to get used to the change. How do we all share all these resources that we all value so much when the West is growing so fast? Especially for Seymour’s arc, I read a lot of scientific predictions for the climate. When I started the book in 2015, they predicted that maybe someday there will be million-acre mega-fires in the West by 2030 or 2040. By the time I was finishing Cloud Cuckoo Land, they’re happening almost every summer. I think it’s almost irresponsible if you don’t address it right now.”
Idaho’s changes of late also surface in the story of Seymour and Zeno’s paths. As Doerr says, “[My wife] Shauna grew up in Boise, most of our friends are lifelong Idahoans, and those are the things people talk about, the changes in the woods, the changes in the rivers, the way salmon used to come up to the mountain lakes or the temperature of the rivers this summer. Water, of course, is an issue on a lot of people’s minds. Also, just being outside more than maybe some of my friends who live in cities. Absolutely. Idaho has influenced that.”
ANTHONY DOERR
PHOTO BY ULF ANDERSON
Life has changed enormously for Doerr, whose work has earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize. These accolades and worldwide notice allow him to breathe as a writer and dream even bigger as he explores the connectivity of history and the impact of our short time here on Earth. “In some ways, it’s like a double-edged sword because there’s more pressure [to write]. You feel like more people are waiting for what you’re going to make, and that’s a little scary, but then the other side of the coin is that there’s this immense freedom, and your publisher will be willing to publish what you make next. So I thought, well, why not try to make it as challenging and ambitious and weird as I can? Because there was a certain freedom that came with [the awards]. That ratification and the joy of the Pulitzer Prize, which came into our family for about 48 hours. But then you go back to your life. I’m still just picking up the socks and emptying the dishwasher and dealing with the kids. You don’t think about it every day after a little while, and you still have to solve all your work problems, but I’ve always felt so grateful to get to do it. And maybe, living where we live [in Boise] is a little easier Often, you’re just making friends and talking to them about your kids. You take the kids to the foothills on the weekend or something. So in many ways, the prize fell away, and you were just faced with your life. And I’m just so lucky to get to write for a living. So I try to remember that, even on the days when you feel like you’ve written yourself into a dead end and you can’t see your way out, and you say, ‘Oh, I can’t solve this.’ There are plenty of mini creative hangovers almost every day.”
More than any other novel Doerr has written, Cloud Cuckoo Land also explores the fears of erasure, our best stories, and our lives’ meanings. His line, “erasure is always stalking us,” is written inside the book, and when asked about its importance, Doerr shares that the personal connection between that penned line stems from his own life experience.
He says, “Immediately what comes to mind is my grandma. When I was in high school. My older brothers had gone off to college. My mom said, ‘We’re moving Grandma in with us.’ She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. I’d never heard of it before. But over the next two years, we watched dementia steal everything that was Grandma–her ability to care for herself or ability to know who we were–her entire self gets erased, in a sense. I couldn’t articulate that at the time. Now in my forties, I’m learning that I’ve kind of always been obsessed with the fragility of memory and this idea that erasure is always stalking us, maybe because I watched this happen. You realize it’s always coming for all of us. So in the novel, I’m asking questions all the time about preservation and erasure and maybe the one important thing we can do each day is to try to de-center ourselves and think, ‘What am I doing for the next generations? Can I get outside of my own head?’ Because I think that might help us accept the fact that we’re going to be removed from the world.”
