Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Doerr is coming to San Diego

Anthony Doerr is the author of six books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner "All the Light We Cannot See," which is being adapted for Netflix to be released later this year. His latest book, "Cloud Cuckoo Land" is both historical and speculative fiction, spanning centuries in time and multiple protagonists and continents. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2021.

"Cloud Cuckoo Land" is a sprawling and layered book that draws on five points of view anchored in five distinct worlds — from the 1450s when Constantinople braced and underwent its siege and fall, to a small town in Idaho in the 1940s and in 2020; from a war prison in Vietnam, to a spaceship pod destined to colonize a second planet at a vague point in the future.

At its heart, it's a love letter to books and the drive to preserve stories and culture. Anchored by a single, lost text — a fictional account Doerr wrote in what he imagines is the style of the real ancient Greek novelist Antonius Diogenes — that tells the absurd story of a character turned into a donkey and then a bird. The story drifts across each of the protagonists' realms as they attempt to understand, translate or grab ahold of it, from Anna in Constantinople to Zeno in Idaho, then to Konstance on The Argos ship.

In "All the Light We Cannot See," young Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig's storylines swirl chaotically alongside, but apart from, each other for over a decade as World War II takes hold on western Europe. Similarly to the power of texts, "All the Light …" explores the power of radio.

Through all of his work, Doerr carries remarkably crafted detail, both historical and imaginative landscapes and the metaphorically-loaded obsessions and interests of his characters as they dwell in the fringes of those worlds.

Doerr's other books include the novel "About Grace;" the short story collections, "The Shell Collector" and "Memory Wall;" and his memoir "Four Seasons in Rome." Doerr will speak as part of the Writer's Symposium by the Sea at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023 at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Your 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "All the Light We Cannot See," is being adapted for a four-part Netflix series. What can you tell us about that project? And how involved are you?

Doerr: It's exciting. It'll come out later this year. I don't have a date for anybody yet. Four episodes — the book was about 500 pages and they've got it into four one-hour episodes. I think episode four might be a little longer than an hour.

I got to go to Budapest with my son. Bringing my son was the best gift ever. We got to see them making this thing, you know. To see all these people employed because of something I made up in my basement was incredibly humbling. Of course, you think as a novelist you have to imagine every single corner of — say — somebody's attic in 1939, but then when you see it come to life, you know, somebody's put details just in case the camera just grazes past it. Mark Ruffalo's in it and Hugh Laurie, and we found this amazing young actor to play Marie who is blind. There's a young version of Marie who's eight and then an older version, her name is Aria (Mia Loberti) and she plays teenage Marie. To see them with a blindness consultant working through the set was really moving. I'm really hopeful. I hope it's a great show, and I hope people learn a lot about the power of radio during the second World War and and are also entertained.

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In the time since "All the Light We Cannot See," you've written another book, "Cloud Cuckoo Land," which came out in 2021. How was writing "Cloud Cuckoo Land" different from "All the Light We Cannot See?"

Doerr: Oh gosh, in many ways, as you probably can guess Julia as a writer yourself. "All the Light We Cannot See" follows two characters, a German boy and a French girl, and although there are deviations primarily the structure moves back and forth between the two, A, B, A, B, back and forth kind of like a tennis match.

This new book, "Cloud Cuckoo Land," has five protagonists. It's more like a star shape than a line back and forth between two points, and there are a lot of plates to keep spinning. I set the book in the past and the present and the future. It was this huge architectural challenge for me to build, and I was also paranoid and anxious the whole time that my reader might get confused as I'm moving from the 15th century to the 21st century, even into the future, but it was a ton of fun as well.

You know, I got to learn a lot about the history of manuscripts and as much as I'm researching 15th century Constantinople, where about a third of the book is set, I'm also researching the future and learning about the promises and the dangers of artificial intelligence, the threats of climate chaos. There was always something really interesting to work on and maybe similar to your job. I just felt like every day I was learning something, I was chasing my curiosities and that's just an immense privilege of this profession.

You mentioned this star shape when you're writing a character. How do you draw the web around that person to whom they're connected or what decisions they will make that will then impact another storyline generations later or even things like what their obsessions and interests are? Can you talk about that outlining process?

Doerr: With beginning writers of whatever age, I try to dispel the notion that, at least for me, characters come to you fully formed. You know it's not like lightning strikes and you're just sitting there listening to opera music typing out, you know, your inspiration. For me, they're just clunky creations that are this slow accretion of days and days of thinking and work. I have these five young people in this novel and they don't come to me first; all I know is that this book, this old book, what might be the very last copy of an old book called "Cloud Cuckoo Land," is important to each of them and that each of them is an outsider in his or her own culture and time and it's only through time, you know, you sleep and you wake up — that's the beauty of reading a book. ... You're kind of moving through this labyrinth, this garden in the dark and you don't always know where you're going.

As Americans were kind of taught to worship efficiency and that can be challenging sometimes for me. I have to remember this is not a straightforward A to B process. I'm often just trying things and then you sleep and read it over in the morning and think, "God that's not quite what I hoped," but hopefully by taking that false start or that dead end or that wrong turn, you learn something and from that little bit of failure, you can come back and say "Okay, maybe she'll say this in the situation," and that's when you kind of start to get to know your characters just like getting to know real people over time.

"Cloud Cuckoo Land" is such an ode to books, and to libraries — I also recognized this in "All the Light We Cannot see" — what are you saying about the preservation of stories and of knowledge?

Doerr: "Cloud Cuckoo Land" is a book inside of a book, and a lot of my earlier books — you're right, even in "All the Light We Cannot See" — I'm playing around with intertextuality. And in that novel Marie — this blind girl — is reading a braille copy of "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea." And I play with a few elements of that novel inside my own novel. And in "Cloud Cuckoo Land," I really blow up that idea of intertextuality. I invent 24 fragments of this lost book. There were novels, believe it or not, written in the ancient Greek world. We know of five full copies and we know the titles of about 20 lost books, and so, I invented a lost book written by a novelist name Antonius Diogenes. All of his writing is lost, but he sounds like he was a really playful writer. He played with genre in interesting ways, played with metafiction — was kind of like a Nabokov or a Jorge Luis Borges of the ancient world apparently, and I wanted to see if I could invent something that he might have written.

I put 24 pieces of that book, not the entire thing, but just a little sense of it as folios into my book and have the characters read it ... I wanted to explore different ideas of stewardship as I get into my middle age and think about you know, what kind of world do we want to pass down to my kids, and as my kids get older, I see this great de-centering that happens when you're in middle age and you realize 'oh, maybe I'm not the center of the world.' I think stewardship in a bunch of different ways has become important to me and libraries and the way they steward culture is a huge element of the way I think and the way I'm grateful for all the privileges I've had in my life. And of course in terms of the natural world, what kind of biodiversity, what kind of temperatures on this planet do we want to hand down to our kids. So I hope as the reader turns pages, she's not only entertained in "Cloud Cuckoo Land, but she's also asking herself questions about stewardship, you know, what is it that lasts and what outlasts us, and isn't there something — instead of kind of frightening about it, it's kind of beautifully humbling? I think there's a great sweet humility and it helps me kind of accept my aging to think I'm just one link in this really long chain of human culture. And what is it that we want to — what stories do we want to make sure that our kids are able to tell their kids.

In "Cloud Cuckoo Land," there are so many worlds and in each there's this specificity of detail and intent — there's the walled city of Constantinople, the Argos, the libraries. What inspired each of these realms?

Doerr: I kind of envision the structure of the book in the most simple way as kind of spheres within spheres within sphere.

If you want to start in the past — the siege of Constantinople, these city walls stand around the city, they stand for over a thousand years. They withstand 23 sieges successfully before the city is finally breached. And the libraries inside the city help — because of these walls — help to preserve the cultural heritage of the ancient world — Greek and Roman texts that were decaying in North Africa and across Europe, you know, really started to enter the era of intellectual worlds and then the European intellectual world and kind of form the seeds of the Renaissance because of those copies preserved and copied over by hand inside the libraries of Constantinople. So, I envision that in the most basic way as a circle with this character — her name is Anna — trapped in the middle of this circle. And then I started to build each of the characters, in their way, trapped with this book in their lap inside the center of a circle.

So I have in the present day, I have a rural library in the state where I live here in Idaho. I try to play with these ideas of grand libraries and really humble libraries and this is just one that's a leaky library with three employees and they can't always get the heat to work. But these kids are rehearsing a version of this really old story "Cloud Cuckoo Land" with this elderly guy, a translator, and there's a siege on that library. It'll be quite familiar to all of your listeners, of course, a modern-day shooter incident. And then in the future, I have this girl trapped in a vault for reasons I probably shouldn't spoil, but she's got the book on her lap too.

I tried to start with that as my starting point. In the purest way each of these characters just trapped, and this book in their lap, this silly old tale offers them a way to kind of transcend their circumstances, to slip the trap of their predicaments, and that's really what books have been for me in so many ways. They've helped me slip outside the walls of my own skull and into the lives of other people. They're both an escape and this tunnel into another world and you know in many ways the whole novel is an homage to that act: what reading can do for us — it can help us multiply our experiences of the world.

Your characters deal with some of the things that dominate our present day headlines: disease, radicalization, war, technology, even A.I. and machines — like one called Sybil. How do you thread such conflicts and their impacts across this massive span of generations and centuries?

Doerr: Yeah, I tried to cram like all of my preoccupations into this novel. At some point, the characters are even playfully calling this other book "this book of everything." And in many ways this novel was my book of everything. I was trying to explore the fragility of memory ... And I think I also was feeling this mortality thing ticking as my kids get older — they are twin boys and they were 10 to 18 during the eight years that I wrote this book — and you know watching this enormous amount of change that the world's going through as they become teenagers and then the pandemic hits. Strangely, I was reading about the possibility of viruses leaving wild populations of animals and entering human cities long before the coronavirus pandemic began. So there's even a pandemic in this novel.

And of course the cheapening of the natural world. So what does it mean for this great quilt of interconnected life on this planet that was stripping out so many creatures? And what does it mean to have this kind of false dichotomy between the human and the natural worlds? And each of the characters, I think, kind of feels that. And I hope the reader feels the richness of the characters' interactions with animals in the 15th century and how they're much more fraught and endangered in the present day. And of course in the future, the only experiences that this character Konstance can have with wild creatures is they're all virtual. They're all built by this A.I. called Sybil.

I also think that "Cloud Cuckoo Land" is this story, this celebration of rebellions — many of them small and some of them pretty significant. Can you talk about the way you write some of your characters — you refer to them as outsiders, but I like to think of them as as rebels or underdogs?

Doerr: I think every artist in some way is a rebel in her own right. Even the way I think about, say, cliché or existing stories. When I first read a sentence I'm often grasping for the words in combinations that are familiar to me and it's only in revision I think I need to rebel against those habits a little bit. I can't just say the 'sun glinted on the water', because it's been said so many times that it won't feel quite clear to the reader. Every cliché in a way is sort of a lie, because they've been repeated off so many times that they've lost their impact. There's always these tiny acts of rebellion, I think, as you're writing because you're trying to think, 'How can I make this new? How can I kind of invert the precedents that have been set before me', and I think that's true in character creation too? I'm most interested in these characters who are able to recognize that what's going on around them, what other people take for granted, they think 'Let me pay attention to that, maybe make it a little less familiar, and see if I agree.'

Certainly Anna and Omir are quite different in their time in the 15th century. And then it takes Zeno, this older guy in the present a long time, I think, to recognize his place as a rebel. But he is quite a rebel even though he's just helping these kids make this little silly play. It's really a wonderful, radical act that he's doing and of course he, in the end of the book, he's helping keep them alive during the siege on the library.

So you'll be speaking at the Writer's Symposium on Tuesday. There will be some writers and lots of readers in attendance. You've talked quite a bit about books — there's so much text in this novel. I'm wondering if you can recall back to a time when you heard a writer that you admire speak and what you took away from that?

Doerr: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. What a nice question. Yeah, I'll be at the Writer's Symposium with the wonderful interviewer Dean Nelson's amazing lineup, with William Finnegan and Maria Hinojosa. Gosh, I think here's one because he just died last year, Barry Lopez — a wonderful writer from the Northwest where I live, but of course a man of the world, very much who moved around so much and saw so many things and you know spent time in the Arctic and the Antarctic and just a terrific essayist. He came to Boise where I live and spoke at the Egyptian Theater which holds maybe seven or 800 people and he created this essay, of course, just for this event probably took him a month to write, or longer. And he had this sparkle, you know, not gonna get his age right but he was in his 60s when he spoke, and just this — the people who practice awe who are able to find wonder in the world on a regular basis always inspire me.

And just seeing him talk reminded me what motivated me to want to do this in the first place. To not kind of sleepwalk through my life, to be able to practice observation and translating this huge big clattering gleaming pulsing thing that is the world in the language. Seeing Barry speak in person — sometimes, when you meet your heroes they kind of disappoint you because they're human and they have bad breath or whatever — but he was just even better than I had dreamed. And he put so much labor and kindness in generosity into that talk that it really reminded me: every day while you're here, while you can, try to bear witness to the grandeur of this special place before we're gone.