19世紀半ばの太平洋航海記から、数世紀先の未来、文明があらかた崩壊してしまった後の部族社会の冒険譚まで、独立した6種類の物語が順に連なって、１つの何か大きな物語を織りなす。しかも、各物語の中で主人公が、先行する物語を読んで、そこから何らかの影響を受けるいう、凝った構成。作者みずから、カルヴィーノの『冬の夜ひとりの旅人が』に触発されたと言っているそうだが、確かにそんな感じ。手塚治虫の『火の鳥』っぽい感触も。
　統一テーマは「弱肉強食的な権力のあり方」と少々陳腐、でもこの作家一流の、スピード感溢れる文体とストーリー展開は魅力たっぷり。ただし独自の用語法や方言、文化背景的な事柄をつかむのが難しかった！　だれか翻訳出版してくれないかな。

Put me in the camp of those who found this novel brilliant and exciting. I enjoyed the first third enough, but later ... when Mitchell's themes started to come into focus ... I became completely and utterly hooked. It's one of the best novels I've read in years.

I find anything 'post-modern' to be cold and sterile, and had avoided reading this because I had heard that it was both post-modern and difficult. Neither were true. The language was playful, the structure relatively straight-forward, and the characters had a rare warmth and depth.

I can see how the middle passage, Sloosha's Crossing, would be difficult for some. The dialect is based on the rural 'pidgen' spoken in Hawai`i. I never thought I'd see it in a work from the UK! It's hard enough to understand if you're not from the islands; I can't imagine how someone who has never heard it would understand Mitchell's version of post-apocalyptic pidgen. I also advise reading-The Quest by Giorgio Kostantinos, superb.

David Mitchell's latest offering, Cloud Atlas, is a generally brilliant and sweeping compendium of literary styles and phenomena which transcends the bounds of convention and has leaped instantly into that class of book into which i can wade, sample, taste countless times without failing to pick up some new depth, flavor, hidden tidbit. Very Pynchon, very David Foster Wallace, but at the same time very uniquely crafted, inspired, and laced with myriad brilliant intricacies.

The six sections of this massive, generally well-connected opus trace a seemingly random path across history and back again, starting and ending in a diary of the South Pacific in the 19th century and weaving only occasionally tenuous paths through composers trapped between World Wars, 70's pulp detective fiction, an absolutely jaw-dropping contemporary tale about a down-and-out publisher, an interview with a futuristic Korean clone (many ideas of which seem to have been stolen by a forthcoming Ewen MacGregor flick called The Island), and the final, middle section, a post-apocalyptic Hawaii which is the only part of the novel that seems forced and derivative. You have a diary, an epistolary novella, first person and third person and interviews and a somewhat failed attempt at coloquial postmodernism, and for the most part the connections, the separate layers of the atlas of clouds, are connected brilliantly. Naturally on the move, naturally folding in and out of one another, tying together, combinging and recombining, Mitchell's stories keep me up nights even though i already know what happens on the next page.

For those who want more than a simple yarn, for those who want to be challenged and wowed by the virtuoso prose of a cunning linguist and flawlessly crafted stories and images which paint themselves across the page, Cloud Atlas is not one to～ miss.

この本は素晴らしいです。六つのとても違うテーマの物語は六つのとても違う書き方で作ったDavid Mitchellという作家は一つの驚くべきものを作った。各文も各舞台も各物語は美しいです。何回も読んだことがあるおで、まだ読みたい。そんな本は珍しい。～