The Theory of Clouds - Softcover

Stephane Audeguy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156034816 ISBN 13: 9780156034814

Publisher: Harcourt Publishers,U.S., 2008

Synopsis

Akira Kumo, miraculous survivor of Hiroshima, reinvented himself as someone twenty years younger. Now an eccentric couturier and collector of all literature having to do with clouds and meteorology, he hires Virginie, a young librarian, to catalogue his library. While she works, he tells her stories of those who have devoted their lives to clouds: the Quaker Luke Howard, contemporary of Napoleon and Goethe, who first classified clouds; the painter Carmichael (based on John Constable), who spent a year painting clouds; and the mysterious Abercrombie, a photographer who catalogued clouds around the world. Virginie's trip to London in search of the suppressed Abercrombie protocol becomes a quest no less wondrous and strange than Kumo's own.

About this title

Review:

PRAISE FOR"THE THEORY OF CLOUDS" "This is an extraordinary bit of fiction, incorporating layer upon layer of history mixed with that Proustian pathos. This is Swann in love--with clouds, with mystery, with the secrets hidden in the physical world and psychological world. An exquisite, eccentric read."--"The Baltimore Sun""" "Conceptual, dreamy, smart, and funny."--"Slate"""

From the Back Cover:

"An amorphous story, alternately static and turbulent, a subtle mixture of history and fiction, tragedy and comedy?. Sit back, stare up at this book: The weather's fascinating." -- Washington Post Book World

Akira Kumo miraculously survived Hiroshima's mushroom cloud. Now an eccentric couturier living in Paris, he he hires Virginie Latour to catalog his collection of literature on clouds and meteorology. As they work, he tells her the stories of those who have devoted their lives to clouds, including the late-nineteenth-century amateur meteorologist Richard Abercrombie, a photographer who may have created the only definitive catalog of clouds?but only one copy exists, and it has never been seen. Kumo dispatches Virginie to London to track down the fabled Abercrombie Protocol, a quest both surprising and wondrous, where love, like clouds, forms and transforms lives.

"[W]ise and oddly tender?Audeguy reminds me of the late, great W.G. Sebald." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune

"An all-encompassing and startlingly erotic meditation on all the shapes to be found in nature. Beautiful, sensuous, cerebral, this novel is the work of a major talent." -- Seattle Times STÉPHANE AUDEGUY lives in Paris, where he teaches the history of cinema and arts.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt Publishers,U.S.
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0156034816
• ISBN 13: 9780156034814
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272