Anthony Doerr dreams big with ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’

How do you follow up a Pulitzer Prizewinning work of fiction? If you’re novelist Anthony Doerr (”All the Light We Cannot See”) you write a story that consists of five separate stories, spans millennia, and all ties together with a fictional manuscript attributed to the ancient Greek novelist Antonius Diogenes called “Cloud Cuckoo Land.”

Sound a little, well, cuckoo? It sort of is, but it’s also admirable in its ambition. Doerr’s ability to juggle all the stories and interlock them over the course of 600+ pages is quite a literary feat. It helps that the characters in the sub-stories are so likable, even when, like a teenager named Seymour in modernday Idaho, they’re under the thrall of an eco-terrorist group.

What really binds them all, and one of the themes Doerr explores, is the timeless nature and necessity of storytelling.

If it all sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. But it’s the kind of thing only a novel can do. And it’s a trip well worth taking with the inimitable Doerr.