Cloud Cuckoo Land

The most salient theme in Cloud Cuckoo Land is that it is essential to preserve books and stories—and with them, the information they hold. Ensuring the survival of books and the knowledge they contain is an essential task in maintaining a connection across generations. Time and powerful entities are the natural enemies of books that eventually cause erasure of past ideas. As Licinius says to Anna during their reading lessons: A book contains the “soul” or essence of its author, who writes the book to preserve their thoughts, but “when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death” (52).

Doerr’s book discusses many types of destruction as representations for erasure. Omeir and Anna, caught in the siege of Constantinople, illustrate the ways that war leads to the destruction of knowledge. As the Italian buyers explain to Anna, who does not yet understand the ramifications of the destruction of her city, “Permanence is only an illusion” (172). This theme is echoed in Trustyfriend’s forest because even though the forest sustained life for a long time, it is still destroyed. Rex offers another perspective regarding what happens when knowledge is snuffed out too early when he is discussing his Compendium of Lost Books: When only a fragment of a work survives, “it’s like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become” (403). Destruction and erasure are often incomplete, and the fragments created in this process, like the Cloud Cuckoo Land folios, can maintain enough of a connection to revive the story.

One of Doerr’s primary concerns with losing books is intentional erasure, especially that which serves the interests of a powerful entity. Both the Ottoman siege on Constantinople and the deforestation in Lakeport illustrate the notion that often things are destroyed to create space for something new. As Omeir considers deserting the war effort, he understands that sacrificing the lives of men and animals in war is “a way for a small thing to destroy a much larger thing” (377). When read as a metaphor for intentional destruction of books, the “small thing” is a powerful entity that seeks to destroy the “larger thing,” or the infinite knowledge of books. Ilium, the tech corporation in the book that loosely represents real companies, is an example of an entity intentionally destroying information to serve its own goals. This represents the danger of allowing groups to control perceptions of reality—a danger which culminates in Konstance’s plotline: The Argos, its false mission, and the Atlas cleansed of undesirable images all illustrate the ways that Ilium aims to regulate perception of reality.

Finally, the theme of preserving books is represented through Aethon’s story and the folios that persist into the future. The folios pass precariously through each timeline, evading erasure thanks to direct intervention. Doerr emphasizes that “time [is] the most violent war engine” because its passage is inevitable and will claim books despite intervention. This relates to the lesson that Zeno and the five children mutually teach each other. The value of preserving old books—in their case, through translation—is that it maintains an open link between the past and present so that the past can inform the future. The Cloud Cuckoo Land folios solidify this argument because each character reads Aethon’s story and grows from it, taking ancient information and applying it to their own individual futures.