Book Review: The Theory of Clouds - Stephane Audeguy

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. On day one it is The Theory of Clouds by Stephane Audeguy, a book I consider the most fortunate discovery of my life.

Read: December 2007

The Theory of Clouds in one tweet-sized chunk:

The Theory of Clouds is a journey across skies and into lives, quietly building a tapestry of interlocking narratives on life, obsession and memory

Since the dawn of time writers have been drawn to the sea, to its solitude and its silent power. From Homer and William Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, and John Banville, the sea has existed as both a living presence, and metaphorical idea on which novels, poems and plays have floated…and occasionally sunk. Yet despite their equally transient nature, moodiness, and deceptive depth, clouds have been largely overlooked in the annuls of literature. Suddenly, having read The Theory of Clouds this strikes me as a remarkable oversight.

“All children become sad in the late afternoon, for they begin to comprehend the passage of time. The light starts to change. Soon they will have to head home, and to behave, and to pretend.”

From this sumptuous first paragraph, The Theory of Clouds takes you on a journey across the skies and into lives, quietly, gradually, sparsely building a tapestry of interlocking narratives, stories of life, and obsession, and clouds. Stephane Audeguy’s debut novel, already the recipient of the Grand Prize of the French Academy, reveals a rare and delightfully fresh new literary talent.

Legendary couturier Akira Kumo has built his whole life for himself: never questioning the holes in his memory: the absence of a childhood, or family. Now retired, he has devoted himself to amassing the world’s largest collection of books on clouds and meteorology. Requiring someone to catalogue this vast library, he hires Virginie Latour and begins to teach her about the history of clouds, and those who have watched them.

So begins this most gently beautiful of books. As Kumo takes Virginie on a historical tour of clouds, we meet prominent men whose lives have been attracted to those deceptively heavy clouds which float so lightly across the skies.

We meet Luke Howard a devout Quaker who, in 1821 gave clouds the names by which they have been known ever since, Cirrus, Cummulus, Stratus, and Nimbus. Then there is Lewis Fry Richardson, a devout pacifist and mathematician who devised the means of modern weather forecasting years before the technology existed make it a reality.

But though some lives are made by their relationship with clouds, others lose themselves in their deceptive depths.

“Men are destroyed, and destroy each other, over basic things – money or hatred. On the other hand a really complicated riddle never pushed anyone to violence; either you found the answer or gave up looking. Clouds were riddles too, but dangerously simple ones. If you zoomed in on one part of a cloud and took a photograph, then enlarged the image, you would find that a cloud’s edges seemed like another cloud, and those edges yet another, and so on. Every part of a cloud, in other words, reiterates the whole. Therefore each cloud might be called infinite, because its very surface is composed of other clouds, and those clouds of still other clouds, and so forth. Some learn to lean over the abyss of these brainteasers; others lose their balance and tumble into its eternal blackness.”

It is this infinity, this capricious refusal to be defined, that can send people mad. For example, Carmichael, the English painter, whose obsession with painting the true nature of clouds drives him mad. But it is the story of Richard Abercrombie, noted cloud watcher and all round English gentlemen, which holds the key, not only to Kumo’s collection, but to his past, and Virginie’s future.

So when The Abercrombie Protocol becomes available, Kumo dispatches Virginie to London to see if she can lay her hands on the fabled document. Her journey takes her into the heart of the very history Kumo has been teaching her, its locale and its characters, and soon she returns with fresh stories, stories which run to the heart of that most difficult of relationships, between clouds, and the people who watch them.

The Theory of Clouds is about the interconnectedness of nature and humanity. Without a single line of dialogue Audegey builds a novel which is both illuminating and beautiful, understated and yet intensely profound. The narratives verge from the fictional to the literal, each story merging together, reflecting its predecessors in some way or other, be it geographically, emotionally, intellectually or in the events of life and death. And slowly but surely the lives of Kumo and Virginie merge with their forebears, being written into this future history of clouds.

There are touches of Kazuo Ishiguro here, in the Japanese history and the sparse prose, the ability to let events and stories speak for themselves. Subtly, ever so quietly, this novel will creep up upon you until you find yourself thoroughly engrossed, hungry to read at all hours of the day. There are hints of W.G. Sebald too, in the search for memory and historical truth.

“Only the ocean may be more fascinating to watch than clouds, and equally dangerous, for nothing is more useless and more deceptive and generally more stupefying that watching something that is ever changing and ever self-renewing. Yearning to describe or understand, or even control it can cost you everything. What Virginie first perceived as a long and sweetly amorous procession of clouds now contained an element of despair, unrequited love, and dreary solitude.”

Reading this simple tale of clouds is so much more and less than that. It is like watching the clouds pass overhead, like looking at life itself, head on for once. Infinity, infinitely recurring, always changing, never definable. And the clouds are both literal in the history and science behind them, and a metaphor for the transience of thought, of life, and of expectations.

I finished The Theory of Clouds on a Friday afternoon and started re-reading it immediately. I had never done that before and it was as good the second time as it was the first. I can offer no greater recommendation than that.

10 out of 10

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Read: September 2007

Ah, that most capricious of customers: the classic. The very idea can conjure up the image of dark alleyways, men in top hats and overcoats, enticingly dusty smells and dark oil painting covers. There are some which you pick up and can’t believe you never read them before. The Great Gatsby, Frankenstein and Catch-22 are three classics I received in such rapturous delight. For these wonderful books, the word classic barely does them justice. They are so much more than just a word, they are whole, complete works of fiction to which I will always be drawn.

And then there are the others, the ones you read and know you are reading a classic which thousands of people have loved, and you can tell its crammed with really great ideas, but for you it doesn’t quite do it. Sadly for me, Crime and Punishment found its way into the latter of these two categories. It tells the story of Rodion Romanych, a young student with a Napoleon complex who has fallen on hard times but dreams of a glorious future, both for himself and his fellow mankind. Feeling wronged by misfortune his thoughts begin to turn towards the good he could do were he in possession of the requisite finances. He writes essays on morality and justice, arguing that it is just for a man of genius to transgress moral law if it will ultimately benefit humanity. He posits that the test of this genius is the ability to transgress moral laws and not feel guilty, to be wholly focused on the grander scale. To this end he begins to plot the perfect crime, the murder and robbery of a horrible old pawnbroker, universally hated by all. So begins Crime and Punishment, a book of great scope and plot and a powerful study of a psychology in turmoil. It is an investigation into the grand ideas so prevalent across nineteenth century society: the social implications of rampant capitalism, the crossover between morality and legality, and the growth of psychology as a means of explaining mans actions.

Crime and Punishment unfolds slowly as the author lays out his message through the intermeshing of the various characters. Dostoyevsky has been described as an author for whom an idea is always rooted in human skin, that no idea is removed from its very intimate human bondage. That is never more prevalent than here, where much of the story is told in miniature tales, single chapter stories in which supporting characters appear to share their story, then leave almost as quickly as they arrived. This method of telling the story is incredibly seductive, it draws you into a world you feel is almost boundless and encourages you to involve yourself within it.

All the while I was aware I was reading a really great novel. But I was bored. The whole premise of Crime and Punishment has been done better elsewhere. Take Albert Camus’ The Outsider, or Kafka’s The Trial if you are interested in the psychology of crime and the nature of punishment. There are some startlingly good characters here, each with a really fascinating story to tell and the chapters in which they espouse their tales are brilliant examples of secondary characterisation. But then there are long, long passages in Raskolnikov’s life in which we trudge around like his shadow in the sludgy snow and wait for something of interest to take place. All the while growing cold and tired. A third could be cut from it just like that. There are no superfluous plot lines but there are many flabby periods when I just wanted to get back into something interesting.

Although Raskolnikov develops into a rounded and really powerful character and his mentality is intriguing at times, there is something about his ‘woe is me’ attitude which really gets on my nerves. Like the snivelling little creatures that populate many of Gogol’s short stories and Dostoyevsky’s own Notes from Underground I found the most powerful impression he engendered was not sympathy but disgust. Pathetic disgust for a man who expects the world to unfurl before him without any effort. And even though this impression was diluted as the novel progressed to the point where he had become partially interesting his is still a story of unmentionable blandness. Perhaps this is the point, but it doesn’t make for great reading.

Another problem, as with many works of Russian literature, lies in the translation. Even with an award winning translation such as this one, much of the lyricism is lost so we are left with the story and ideas Dostoyevsky intended, but without the expressive and poetic prose in which it was originally written. And although I noticed a slight difference between this translation and another by Sidney Monas, it was not enough to change the essential chunkiness of any Russian translation. It is in the language that I believe a real classic is borne and I believe this language would have kept me enthralled through the long journeys in Raskolnikov’s mind, but shorn of much poetry I found it a struggle to finish.

I suspect I may re-read Crime and Punishment in the future and wonder how I could ever have written such drivel about a great work. For when that day comes, I shall just say sorry.


6.5 out of 10

The Outsider - Albert Camus

Read: November 2006

Ah, there is no punishment like the social pressure to conform. No condemnation greater than that reserved for outsiders who fail to live up to our social norms of expected behaviour.

Following the death of his mother, Meursault appals everyone by showing no trace of sadness. He refuses to feign mourning and instead plans a day trip to the beach. But when he commits a random act of uncharacteristic violence, a baffled society jumps on the chance to punish him and the machinery of the law cranks into gear.

At his trial Meursault refuses to repent, shows no remorse or guilt, even when it could save his life. Soon it becomes clear that it is not the crime he has committed that Meursault is being punished for, but his very refusal to play the game, his very status as an outsider. His greatest crime is not murder, nor refusal to repent, but feeling nothing at the death of his mother, a crime no-one can understand or ever forgive.

Camus brilliantly elucidates the nature of moral and mob justice. This is a novel which resonates long after you have finished it. One of the classic twentieth century novels, up there with Kafka’s The Trial and Calvino’s If on a Winters Night a Traveller. Read it now.


8 out of 10