Theory of Clouds - Tapa blanda

PRAISE FOR"THE THEORY OF CLOUDS" "This is an extraordinary bit of fiction, incorporating layer upon layer of history mixed with that Proustian pathos. This is Swann in love--with clouds, with mystery, with the secrets hidden in the physical world and psychological world. An exquisite, eccentric read."--"The Baltimore Sun""" "Conceptual, dreamy, smart, and funny."--"Slate"""

Akira Kumo, miraculous survivor of Hiroshima, reinvented himself as someone twenty years younger. Now an eccentric couturier and collector of all literature having to do with clouds and meteorology, he hires Virginie, a young librarian, to catalogue his library. While she works, he tells her stories of those who have devoted their lives to clouds: the Quaker Luke Howard, contemporary of Napoleon and Goethe, who first classified clouds; the painter Carmichael (based on John Constable), who spent a year painting clouds; and the mysterious Abercrombie, a photographer who catalogued clouds around the world. Virginie's trip to London in search of the suppressed Abercrombie protocol becomes a quest no less wondrous and strange than Kumo's own.