From Publishers Weekly
A specialized, sensual history centers this novel from French historian Audeguy, winner of the Académie Française's Prix Maurice Genevoix. Virginie, an aimless young librarian, is hired by Hiroshima survivor and Paris couturier Akira Kumo, who seems much younger than he is, to categorize his obsessive library of cloud and meteorological-related material. While Virginie works, Kumo tells stories of other cloud gazers in history, including the fictional John Constable–like painter Carmichael, who spent a year painting clouds, to the consternation of his father, and the photographer Abercrombie, who left behind the much speculated upon cloud book that bears his name. As Kumo's past begins to come into focus, Virginie is drawn into his life. Audeguy's prose, lyrical in translation, mostly manages to contain sudden shifts of time and explorations of cloud lore. Beautifully written and imaginatively structured, Audeguy's book is as diaphanous as its subject.
(Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Cloud watching is as dreamy as pastimes get, and French debut novelist Audeguy casts a spell as mesmerizing as that of a grand armada of cumulus. But clouds can also spell catastrophe. Things begin serenely enough in Paris as librarian Virginie goes to work for Akira Kumo, a famous couturier who has amassed an unusual collection of early meteorological works. Seemingly burdened with unshared sorrows, Akira regales Virginie with unexpectedly dramatic tales of meteorological discovery, in which Audeguy masterfully matches the true-life stories of such pioneers as Luke Howard, the British scientist who named cloud forms and inspired Goethe and Shelley, with imaginary cloud-lovers, such as the increasingly eccentric explorer Richard Abercrombie. But as Akira sends Virginie off in pursuit of what is reputed to be the definitive cloud atlas, the story he really needs to tell is that of his boyhood in Hiroshima. Slyly fabulist in the manner of Paul Auster, and expressing great feeling for life and scorn for arrogance, Audeguy's witty, erotic, and expansive novel subtly contrasts humankind's love for nature and pursuit of scientific knowledge with our thoughtless pillaging of the living world and tragic habit of war. Seaman, Donna
