In May of 2014, Anthony Doerr’s WWII novel All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner) was published. His fifth book, the novel was a breakout success that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and catapulted Doerr into what can only be described as literary stardom.
His ongoing popularity is evidenced by his sold-out talk at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, where he will be in conversation with Bryan Curtis on Saturday, May 18, to discuss his 2021 novel Cloud Cuckoo Land (Scribner).
Doerr, who spoke to Pasatiempo from his home in Boise, Idaho, says he’s excited to participate in this year’s festival and to return to Santa Fe, which he just visited recently for a workshop at the Santa Fe Institute.
“I’m not smart enough to keep up with some of those scientists up there, but it was a totally fascinating experience,” he says.
In Idaho, Doerr lives far away from the centers of literary culture, and while he doesn’t express any desire to move to NYC or Los Angeles, he says he’s looking forward to the festival as an opportunity to get to interact with other authors such as David Grann and Jesmyn Ward.
“It’s always a gift to get to be around a bunch of other people doing the same weird job that I’m doing,” he says.
Cloud Cuckoo Land is Doerr’s first novel since the release of All the Light We Cannot See, the success of which Doerr says he’s still processing a decade later.
“It all depends on how you define success, but in capitalist terms, that book was so much more successful than my other previous books and it did change our lives in a million ways, particularly in just how busy I got,” he says.
Previously Doerr responded to every letter and email he received from readers, which quickly became impossible. Managing the flood of requests on his time for the first couple years afterward was challenging, but he says he’s managed to find his way back to a more balanced routine.
“It’s an incredible gift if any of your work finds readers while you’re still alive to appreciate it,” he says.
Doerr says he’s content with the fact that All the Light We Cannot See is likely the book he’ll always be known for, but he hasn’t shown any inclination to rest on his laurels. At more than 600 pages long and with a time frame spanning eight centuries, Cloud Cuckoo Land is at least as ambitious as Doerr’s previous novel, if not more.
The book focuses on the impact of a fictional book, also called Cloud Cuckoo Land, written by a Greek author in the second century on five characters: Anna and Omeir, who live in the 15th century Byzantine and Ottoman empires; librarian Zeno and troubled ecoterrorist Seymour, whose paths cross in Idaho; and Konstance, a teenage girl in the 22nd century living on the spaceship Argos, which is taking a centuries-long trip to a new planet in the wake of Earth’s ecological devastation due to climate change.
Each of the characters use Cloud Cuckoo Land to make sense of themselves and the world around them in different ways, and it’s ultimately what ties them together. Doerr’s story jumps back and forth between the five characters at different stages in their lives, with some of the most breathtaking parts of the book held back until the very last pages. Despite its doorstop-worthy length, the novel has the propulsion of Konstance’s starship, and readers are unlikely to find themselves counting the pages.
The book was submitted to Doerr’s agent in February of 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was making incursions into the U.S. One of the storylines of Cloud Cuckoo Land involves a deadly disease, a parallel Doerr says was “quite uncanny” at the time.
The enforced isolation of the early days of the pandemic helped re-
inforce to Doerr some of the key themes of the novel, which center around the power of storytelling to transcend space and time.
“Reading really helped me kind of escape my own anxieties in the beginning of the pandemic,” he says.
Doerr adds that the lengthy time frame of the novel was necessary for him to show “the power of a story ricocheting down through the centuries” in ways that the original authors will never know about.
“That’s what teachers do, and what so many librarians do — you plant the seeds that will sprout after you’re gone, and you’ll never personally get to see the results of that,” he says. “But there’s something so beautiful about humans that we want to do that.”
The novel is dedicated to librarians, and Doerr says it’s been particularly unsettling to witness the wave of book bans at public and school libraries across the nation, which in many cases have been spurred by small groups of activists.
While Doerr isn’t aware of any attempts to ban his books — much of the recent efforts have centered around books by and about LGBTQ people or people of color, according to data collected by PEN America — he says he’s appalled on behalf of those under siege.
“The idea that we would attack these underpaid guardians and our librarians who protect these places is crazy to me,” he says. “I’ve tried my best in my tiny ways here in Idaho to stand up for libraries, and I hope this quiet majority of people who have had their lives improved by them continue to support them as this loud minority continues to assault them.”
Doerr draws a parallel between stewards of human culture and stewards of our planet. Along with the power of storytelling, another main theme of Cloud Cuckoo Land is the importance of safeguarding the earth, something that’s just as crucial in the real world as in the world of Doerr’s novel.
The effects of climate change are, in a way, leveling in how they bring people across the world together, Doerr notes.
“The clouds over New Mexico, the temperatures in the Atlantic, affect weather patterns over Central Europe,” Doerr says. “And all of these things are linked in invisible ways.”
While the power of literature to create real-world change is sharply limited, Doerr says he hopes there is value in addressing such a crucial issue as climate change in fiction.
“We need symbiosis. We need cooperation,” he says. “And I do think literature helps our minds grasp those complexities. It’s kind of like a twin arm approach: you have to arm yourself with science, but you also have to arm yourself with art.”