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Letter to the editor

Novel offers a new way to look at clouds

A wounded spirit finds healing in the sky's endless interactions.

By Jennifer DeCamp, Times Staff Writer
Published November 18, 2007

The Theory of Clouds
By Stephane Audeguy
Harcourt, 266 pages, $24

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Akira Kumo, Hiroshima survivor turned renowned Parisian couturier, has a singular obsession as he enters the twilight of his life: clouds.

In French author Stephane Audeguy's first novel, The Theory of Clouds, Akira doesn't just see wispy billows. Instead, he sees cumulus, stratus, cirrus, nimbus, identifying them by the classifications given to nature's changing mystery by scientist Luke Howard in the 1800s.

Akira also has amassed the largest collection of cloud literature in the world and hires Virginie LaTour, a sexually liberated librarian, to help catalog it.

As the pair inventory Akira's books, the mentor talks avidly about the oft-overlooked phenomena. "There was, however, one question to which he had no answer, and it involved his obsession with clouds . . . he couldn't help feeling that an answer lay in wait for him somewhere, crouched like a beast hidden in the dark jungle of memory."

While Akira introduces his new muse to Howard the real-life Quaker chemist considered by some the father of meteorology and Richard Abercrombie (Audeguy's fictional cloud enthusiast whose definitive atlas, The Abercrombie Protocol, would be the piece de resistance of Akira's collection), he finds their discussions triggering painful memories he has repressed for half a century.

Quiet, beautiful prose (translated by Timothy Bent) enhances Audeguy's multilayered story.

The Theory of Clouds is not a thrilling page-turner, but a compelling, poetic love letter to the sky's diaphanous, ever-changing wisps.

But more important, Audeguy uses clouds as a guise to explore one of humanity's most basic needs: to form connections, either sensual or intellectual, with another. And like clouds, these relationships change with the passage of time - moving from tumultuous love to staid indifference as quickly as the speed of an explosive summer storm's passing.

Jennifer DeCamp can be reached at (727) 893-8881 or jdecamp@sptimes.com.

[Last modified November 15, 2007, 16:19:44]