C’est une histoire de culs, or it is a new way to make meteorology sexy. This first novel from Audeguy takes you on several historical journey’s all related one way or another with the way science has perceived clouds. The entire story is held together by the library of a Paris based Japanese fashion designer called Akira Kumo (reminds me a lot of Kenzo) and his librarian Virginie. Of course, Kumo was a boy living in Hiroshima during WWII, and one of the few survivors of that other man-made cloud. Kumo is the narrator and tells many meteorological stories, such as Luke Howard’s discovery in the early 1800’s, as the creator of all the names we use to this day for all the clouds in the sky.
The novel also has a number of other meteo-trivia, such as the refusal of Napoleon to listen to his Chevalier warning him of the snow clouds over Moscow, just before making thousands of his own French soldiers perish in “La Marche en Avant” through the Russian winter, or the role of (a fictional?) Richard Abercrombie, a meteorologist of the 19th Century who unintentionally assisted the science for military commanders to send gas clouds killing thousands of soldiers in WWI Europe, and his travels around the world to lose himself in the perfect cloud of the mind through the prostitutes of South East Asia. These anecdotes do hold together. However, the story of Kumo’s librarian, Virginie, was a bit weak; and more explorations of Kumo’s motivations in collecting thousands of works on clouds would make the reader care a bit more about his untimely end.