Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Anna tries to follow Maria’s needle [...] but directly in front of their table a little brown stonechat alights on the sill, shakes water off its back, sings wheet-chak-chak-chak, and in an eye-blink Anna has daydreamed herself into the bird. She flutters off the sill, dodges raindrops, and rises south over the neighborhood, over the ruins of the basilica of Saint Polyeuktus. [...] Anna flies higher still, until the city is a fretwork of rooftops and gardens far below, until she’s in the clouds.”

This quote employs the bird motif through Anna’s projection into a bird, by which she imagines freedom from the embroidery house. The projection illustrates Anna’s desire to seek a life beyond what she has always known and references crow-Aethon from the latter half of the Cloud Cuckoo Land folios. This enriches the bird motif by connecting it across the storylines of this book. The imagery of this quote mixes the description of Constantinople with the sensations felt by a bird, grounding the daydream in reality.

“Omeir sits against the wall [...] and he bites back tears. Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the precious one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.”

Omeir is referring to being enlisted in the war, which further grounds the historic aspects of this book by subtly illustrating how boys were taken from their homes to fight in wars they did not understand. Omeir articulates a key problem that all the main characters overcome as they come of age: Change comes at unexpected times and violates expectations. The use of second-person narration is distinct here and is used to address the reader directly with the pronoun “you.”

“The thistles nod their purple crowns and tiny insects sail everywhere. The thousands of pines stacked against the back of the property, rising toward a ridge, seem to breathe as they sway. [...] It’s amazing out here. Big. Alive. Ongoing.”

Seymour is experiencing the depth of the forest behind his home, and this rich description uses metaphor to convey the untouched beauty of the scene.