Anthony Doerr sent me on a literary whirlwind in 2016 after I read his previous book, All The Light We Cannot See. Hungry for more of Doerr’s words, I went on a feverish search for books that turned my soul inside out as much as this one had, only to meet with a spate of mediocrity. For a long while, very little could match it (that it also fueled in me an intense urge to fly to Saint-Malo and Mont-Saint-Michel afterwards was further testament to Doerr’s evocative prose).

And then Cloud Cuckoo Land made its way into my bookshelf, a 600-page goldmine, 7 years later. The premise is riveting and the timing, perfect – it came to me after some excellent sci-fi reads. In CCL I had high, high hopes.

In all honesty, this is a fine book. One of a certain degree of literary prowess, perhaps even more astute than All The Light We Cannot See. It centers around an ancient Greek codex that is read, in excruciatingly slow bits and pieces, by people that span centuries – from fifteenth-century Byzantine empire to an intergenerational starship in an unspecified future. It is hard to slot this into a niche – not quite historical, not quite science fiction, not quite ecological fiction. What it tries to be, though, is everything. Perhaps that is where it falters the most.

When you are 400 pages into a 600-page book and find that you cannot connect to even a single storyline, you are faced with the harsh possibility of DNF-ing it. For Doerr’s sake, however, I soldiered on. There are gems in the prose that lingered on, and tiny common threads that I delighted in discovering across the centuries, but the overall narrative failed me. The connections took too long to surface, and when they did, I was underwhelmed. None of the narratives held much merit on their own – except perhaps for Constantinople – and each one meandered quite a bit before establishing itself into the overall arc.

Does my disappointment bear the weight of expectations from its predecessor? I don’t know. But for me, it was one of those books that, just when it teetered briefly on the brim of true greatness someplace midway, caught itself, floundered a little bit and toppled back into lukewarm waters by the end.