Separately, inside the besieged city, the orphaned seamstress Anna has developed herself a side hustle as a cat burglar to raise money for her sick sister, Maria. As events at the library threaten to spin out of control, the scene shifts and we find ourselves 500 years earlier, in 15th-century Thrace, meeting a harelipped character named Omeir, whose oxen have been requisitioned for the siege of Constantinople. It’s to Doerr’s credit that he quickly manages to humanize Seymour, a lonely young misfit who has become a radical misanthrope after developers encroached on the wilderness he loves.
The rehearsal is jarringly interrupted by the intrusion of Seymour Stuhlman, who’s armed and carrying an explosive device. As the book opens, Zeno is in his 80s and directing a play he’s written for a cast of children at the local library. In present-day Idaho, we meet Zeno Ninis. The novel follows five characters in three different historical epochs, who at first seem like the protagonists of separate books.
In fact, there’s a vast notional library of vanished books that includes Aristotle’s treatise on comedy, Shakespeare’s “Cardenio,” Melville’s “The Isle of the Cross,” several books of the Bible, Byron’s memoirs, the second volume of Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” and “Inventio Fortunata,” a 14th-century travel book about the Arctic. You know how many we have left? Thirty-two.” A bibliophile in Anthony Doerr’s new novel, “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” reminds us how many of the works of the Greek tragedians have been lost: “We know that at least one thousand of them were written and performed in Greek theaters in the fifth century B.C. Fire, mildew, carelessness, water, censorship, indifference and a need for cheap paper have annihilated many undoubted masterpieces. Manuscripts are only slightly more robust than the humans who write them. Especially it is possible to explain the fact that in German the phrase is still 'cloud seven'.“Manuscripts don’t burn,” says the fiendish Woland in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita.” This stirring claim is often taken to mean that great art never perishes, but it’s certainly not literally true. In my opinion after reading the mentioned article, the origin which relates to the literature and music seems to fit most. Summing up, there is no perfect answer for this question. 1980s: 'cloud nine' has become predominant due to popular music which were using the phrase 'cloud nine'.1960s: Dictionary of American Slang, which was the first printed definition of the term 'cloud seven' - completely happy, perfectly satisfied in a euphoric state.".Clouds in literature: often refererred a state of happiness.'Cloud nine' is one of the stages of the progress in Buddhism.1950s: classification of US weather bureau: 'cloud nine' denotes the fluffy cumulonimbus type that are considered so attractive.There is a very interesting article which lists several possible explanations: It seems that there's still no common explanation for seven versus nine.
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