THE THEORY OF CLOUDS - Hardcover

Stephane Audeguy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151014280 ISBN 13: 9780151014286

Publisher: Harcourt Trade, 2007

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:

[A] luminous first novel.--The Bloomsbury Review FRENCH PRAISE FOR THE THEORY OF CLOUDS "A cyclonic fiction illuminated by flashes of genius." --Elle "An impressive first novel . . . Belongs up there with the works of Jonathan Coe, Julian Barnes or Kazuo Ishiguro." --Les Inrockuptibles "A Proustian first novel, climatic, ambitious, and splendid." --Politis

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 Trade
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0151014280
• ISBN 13: 9780151014286
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256