Luisa Rey

Luisa Rey is a fictional character in David Mitchell's books. j She first appearedin Ghostwritten as an minor character, an elderly writer calling on a radio show. Her role is drastically increased in Cloud Atlas, where she is the main character of the Half-Lives section, where she appears as a young and courageous reporter in 1970s San Francisco.

Biography
In the advanced proof copy of the Bone Clocks, Luisa Rey appeared as the editor-in-chief of Spyglass Magazine, for which the narrator Ed Brubeck is working, which would mean that her exploits as an reporter led her to enventually be in charge of the magazine and turn it into a more serious press organ.

However, in the definitive edition of the Bone Clocks, her name is replaced by another character, Olive Sun. The editing can however still be visible by the fact that after one of her message, instead of signing by her initials O.S, she writes L.R. Involuntary mistake or is Olive Sun a pseudonym ?

In Utopia Avenue (advanced proof edition), Luisa Rey appears as the lover of Elf Holloway, a member of the band Utopia Avenue. In conversation with Holloway, she refers to her work on Spyglass Magazine, suggesting that her role on the magazine referred to above is correct, despite the change of name in the definitive edition of The Bone Clocks.

Movie Adaptation
Luisa Rey is played by Halle Berry in the Wachowski siblings 2012’s adaptation of Cloud Atlas, making the character somehow slightly older than her 26 years-old incarnation in the book. Her character's personnality is pretty much the same as in the book, though her relationship with her mother is not explored.

According to the movie version, though she bears the same birthmark as Robert Frobisher and all the other main narrators, it is implied that her soul is the reincarnation of an arboriginal woman in the Chatham islands, Jocasta Von Crommelyck, and will subsequently reincarnate into an Indian woman at a book party, a male version of Madam Ovid in Neo Seoul and Meronym the Prescient, according to Halle Berry's different roles. The movie also implies that she is destined to be the soulmate of the characters played by Tom Hanks, especially his incarnations as Isaac Sachs, Dermot Hoggins and Zachry.

The movie directly that her teenage neighbour Javier, a crime novel enthusiast, ends up being the writer of Half-Lives : the First Luisa Rey Mystery.

Trivia
- Her name is based on The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a novel which investigate on the nature of fate by investigation the lives and reasons that led the different people to stand on a bridge. The investigation of the monk may have inspired the journalist profession of Luisa Rey.

-Luisa Rey's adventures greatly echoe those of real life Karen Silkwood, an American chemical technician and activist known for raising concerns about corporate practices related to health and safety of workers in a nuclear facility. She died in a mysterious car accident in 1974 as she was about to give to a journalist a report on the hazardous safety malfunction of the nuclear plant where she was working.

- Luisa Rey's section is the first time David Mitchell writes in the third person for a whole chapter.

- Timothy Cavendish discovers the manuscript of Half-Lives : the First Luisa Rey Mystery written by the unknown Hilary V.Ush, which made some reader speculate if the over-the-top advendtures of Luisa Rey were fictional ( which would render Adam Ewing and Robert Frobisher's sections also fictional, creating some continuity conflict ) or somehow romanticized.