Book of Clouds

Book of Clouds

by Chloe Aridjis (Author)

Synopsis

Adrift in Berlin and with no desire to return home to Mexico, Tatiana cultivates solitude while trying to distance herself from the city's past. Yet the phantoms of Berlin - seeping in through the floorboards of her apartment, lingering in the abandoned subterranea - are more alive to her than the people she passes on her daily walks. When she takes a job transcribing notes for the reclusive historian Doktor Weiss, her life in Berlin becomes more complex. Through Weiss, she meets Jonas, a meteorologist who, as a child in the GDR, took solace in the sky's constant shape-shifting, an antidote to his unyielding and grim reality. As their three paths intersect and merge, the contours of all their worlds begin to change. Unfolding with the strange, charged logic of a dream, "Book of Clouds" is a haunting, beautifully drawn portrait of a city forever in flux, and of the myths we cling to in order to give shape to our lives. From a crowded U-Bahn where Hitler appears dressed as an old woman, to an underground Gestapo bowling alley whose walls bear score marks of games long settled, Chloe Aridjis guides us through Berlin with wit and compassion, showing why cities, like people, cannot outrun their pasts.

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Quantity

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Published: 09 Jul 2009

ISBN 10: 0701184256
ISBN 13: 9780701184254
Book Overview: Book of Clouds is a haunting, curious and exquisitely-written debut novel about a young woman adrift in Berlin, where a string of fateful encounters leads to romance, violence and revelation.

Media Reviews
A stirring and lyrical first novel by a young writer of immense talent. Paul Auster Chloe Aridjis writes with a fine-tuned sensitivity and a captivating charm. Her universe is offbeat, rich and disturbing in equal measure - but always utterly compelling Tom McCarthy In her first novel, Chloe Aridjis succeeds where many have failed, blending past and present, real and imagined, in a believable realism. Lawrence Ferlinghetti Chloe Aridjis's gifts for narrative, description, and detail signal the arrival of a promising new writer Francine Prose Exquisitely written, Book of Clouds is a perfect Berlin story for our unsettled times, and a remarkable debut Francisco Goldman
Author Bio
Chloe Aridjis was born in New York, and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico City. She studied for a BA at Harvard, and gained her DPhil in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic from Oxford University. She then spent five years in Berlin and now lives in London.