how'd you get it out of a post

80 pages left. A masterpiece.

80 pages left. A masterpiece.

I still don't really get the point.

Sure, the stories are beautiful and say a lot about the nature of human relationships, and I get that the whole bit is reincarnation and how two souls touch time and again over the course of many lifetimes, but what really is the point?

What, philisophically, was I supposed to take away from Cloud Atlas?

I don't like to call it the moral of the story, because a moral is too simple a concept. But really, what is the point of the book?

Do you mean you got it in the MAIL?

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.

Hamlet novelisation.

My copy had arrived a couple weeks ago, but I was been so excited to read the book that I finished the audiobook version a day before my hardcover copy arrived in the mail.

I really enjoyed it. Zahn and Luceno are the best writers Star Wars has right now.

my physics textbook

I get that the whole bit is reincarnation and how two souls touch time and again over the course of many lifetimes, but what really is the point?

Why does a novel need more of a philosophical point beyond creating a unique narrative about intertwining souls and struggles? From the author (wikipedia):

Literally all of the main characters, except one, are reincarnations of the same soul in different bodies throughout the novel identified by a birthmark...that's just a symbol really of the universality of human nature. The title itself "Cloud Atlas," the cloud refers to the ever changing manifestations of the Atlas, which is the fixed human nature which is always thus and ever shall be. So the book's theme is predacity, the way individuals prey on individuals, groups on groups, nations on nations, tribes on tribes. So I just take this theme and in a sense reincarnate that theme in another context...

What, philisophically, was I supposed to take away from Cloud Atlas?

The book focuses on how characters confront injustice. It displays overt acts of oppression beside subtle, even humorous acts. Timothy Cavendish and Sonmi-451 mirror each other, but Mitchell uses their vastly different stories to attack it from multiple angles. I can't tell you what you, personally, should take away from the story, but it made me consider more deeply whether I am complicit in oppression of others -- I am -- and to what extent I can tolerate it.

The Labor Movement in Japan - Sen Katayama
The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitô, 1911–16 - Jan Bardsley