French Session - April 2008
The Book:
The Theory of Clouds, by Stéphane Audeguy was chosen to be the first book to represent French litterature at the European Book Club.
When Akira Kumo was eight years old, his sister was vaporized in a mushroom cloud over his home town of Hiroshima. Akira miraculously survives, but is marked for life by an obsession with clouds. When the novel opens, he is at the end of an illustrious career as a fashion designer in Europe. He has amassed the world's largest collection of books on clouds, from the works of the Quaker Luke Howard who gave them the names cumulus and stratus, to the early Nineteenth Century British painter Carmichael, who went mad trying to perfectly capture their ever-changing forms on canvas. Into the stacks of this formidable collection walks a young librarian, hired to organize it. As the days go by, Akira tells Virginie Latour the story of clouds and of those who contemplated them. In time, she is sent off to London on a quest for one last book: it's the one Kumo has been waiting for decades to acquire, Richard Abercrombie's Protocol. Upon Virginie's return from London it is her turn to tell him the story of her misadventures trying to wrestle the Protocol from Abercrombie's heirs, and once she has her hands on it, the surprising nature of its contents. Sprinkled throughout the increasingly intense story of this unlikely and unforgettable pair, are wonderful tidbits on the history of meteorology, the earliest attempts to predict the weather, and even the beginnings of computer science.
Stéphane Audeguy takes us through two centuries and in and out of the lives of the earliest meteorologists, artists, and other mad or contemplative observers of clouds, in a billowing novel about the blustery nature of legacy and love, and the (mis)evolutions of science.
STEPHANE AUDEGUY lives in Paris, where he teaches the history of cinema and arts. The Theory of Clouds is his first novel.