Anthony Doerr has made a name for himself and won the Pulitzer Prize as a master literary world-builder.
Doerr has a vast imagination, but he’s also a scholar of well, everything.
It wasn’t until gunpowder showed up in Europe that anyone was able to.
Anthony Doerr; ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’.Credit: Courtesy Anthony Doerr; Simon and Schuster
It all took on a supernatural power, and I knew I wanted to tell that story.
“I was really inspired by the book culture of the Constantinople era.
Inside the town there were some of the first lending libraries of human culture.
Constantinople in 1493.Courtesy Anthony Doerr
“A book in itself is an amazing technology.
It allowed a record of things that outlasts all of us.
I wanted a character who loved stories that much.”
An architect’s design for a French library during the Enlightenment.Courtesy Anthony Doerr
Here, it’s gunpowder.
It disrupted warfare, and the Ottomans used it to bring down defensive walls.
Suddenly you have early Renaissance scholars reading Plato and Socrates, creating the flowering of art and literature.”
‘Falter’ by Bill McKibben.Henry Holt
During the Enlightenment, they were trying to bring wisdom to all people.
What I’m trying to ask in the book is: Have we actually done that?"
Owls
“I play a lot with owls in the book.
Here in Idaho, we’re lucky enough to have these great horned owls come to our tree sometimes.
They’ll screech and scare the crap out of you, man.
I also use it to represent his lost father, maybe even a godlike figure.
I decided to cram the imagery everywhere.”
It took me years just to get to this outline of the structure of the book.
It’s not quite science fiction, but it took a lot of work to create the world.
Cloud Cuckoo Landis out now through Scribner.
