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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel |  | Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
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Rating:  105 reviews
Sales Rank: 185
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 496
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.4
ISBN: 1400065453
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9781400065455
ASIN: 1400065453
Publication Date: June 29, 2010
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2010: David Mitchell reinvents himself with each book, and it's thrilling to watch. His novels like Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas spill over with narrators and language, collecting storylines connected more in spirit than in fact. In The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, he harnesses that plenitude into a more traditional form, a historical novel set in Japan at the turn into the 19th century, when the island nation was almost entirely cut off from the West except for a tiny, quarantined Dutch outpost. Jacob is a pious but not unappealing prig from Zeeland, whose self-driven duty to blurt the truth in a corrupt and deceitful trading culture, along with his headlong love for a local midwife, provides the early engine for the story, which is confined at first to the Dutch enclave but crosses before long to the mainland. Every page is overfull with language, events, and characters, exuberantly saturated in the details of the time and the place but told from a knowing and undeniably modern perspective. It's a story that seems to contain a thousand worlds in one. --Tom Nissley
Product Description
In 2007, Time magazine named him one of the most influential novelists in the world. He has twice been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. The New York Times Book Review called him simply “a genius.” Now David Mitchell lends fresh credence to The Guardian’s claim that “each of his books seems entirely different from that which preceded it.” The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a stunning departure for this brilliant, restless, and wildly ambitious author, a giant leap forward by even his own high standards. A bold and epic novel of a rarely visited point in history, it is a work as exquisitely rendered as it is irresistibly readable.
The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland.
But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?”
A magnificent mix of luminous writing, prodigious research, and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the most impressive achievement of its eminent author.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 105
 This novel succeeds on so many levels - A+ April 28, 2010
sb-lynn (Santa Barbara, California United States)
246 out of 258 found this review helpful
Brief summary and review, no spoilers.
The story begins in the year 1799, and most of the action takes place on the man-made island of Dejima in Nagasaki, Japan. This is the farthest outpost of the Dutch East Indies Company and foreigners are kept restricted to the island. It's the only contact point between Japan and the West.
This epic tale starts out dramatically with a young midwife helping a Japananese magistrate's concubine with a difficult birth. The midwife is named Orito Aibagawa, and she has a disfiguring scar on one side of her face. With the support of her father she begins to study medicine under the tutelage of the brilliant Doctor Marinus.
After this dramatic opening, we are introduced to Jacob de Zoet, a young Dutch clerk who has just arrived in Dejima. Jacob is hoping to work for 5 years and make enough money to go home and marry his fiancee. He stands out not simply because he is so virtuous and decent, but also because of the color of his hair - bright red. Jacob will learn that his fellow merchants, supervisors and Japanese translators are not always to be trusted, and that things are not always as they appear.
Other important characters in this novel include Ogawa Uzaemon, an honorable young translator who faces a difficult moral dilemma. We meet high-ranking Japanese officials including Magistrate Shiroyama and the malevalent Lord Abbot Enomoto. In fact there is a huge cast of characters, many with their own fascinating backstories. And did I mention a thieving monkey named William Pitt?
This book is wonderful on so many levels. It succeeds as a rousing old-fashioned adventure tale with nail-biting scenes taking place on both land and at sea. It's also an amazing historical where we really are transported back in time and place and learn about Japanese custom and their relationship with the West. And it works as a romance novel, where we find ourselves rooting for both the safety of our protagonists and for their finding happiness and love.
But this is a David Mitchell novel, so we really don't know if that is going to happen, and there is palpable sense of anxiety and dread as we read further and further on in this magnificent story.
Like this author's previous novel, Cloud Atlas, it took me a while to get hooked. In fact, it took me quite a while. There are a lot of names to remember and it can get tough trying to keep everyone all sorted out. But by the second section (the book is divided into 5 parts), I could not put it down. In fact I am writing this review at 3am because I was simply unable to stop reading.
This book really is breathtaking and exceptional, and laugh out loud funny at times to boot. David Mitchell is one of my very favorite authors and I think he's so gifted and he has knocked my socks off, once again. If you find yourself struggling a bit through the first section of the book, don't give up. As with most novels by this author, this book is an ambitious undertaking and requires some work from the reader. But I promise you this turns into an absolute page-turner and at the end you will be rewarded by that wonderful reader's high that can only be experienced by reading the finest kind of novel.
A History of Isolation May 6, 2010
Roger Brunyate (Baltimore, MD)
63 out of 71 found this review helpful
This is quite simply the best historical novel I have read in years, Tolstoyan in its scope and moral perception, yet finely focused on a very particular place and time. The place: Dejima, a Dutch trading post on a man-made island in Nagasaki harbor that was for two centuries Japan's only window on the outside world. The time: a single year, 1799-1800, although here Mitchell takes the liberties of a novelist, compressing the events of a decade, including the decline of the Dutch East India Company and Napoleon's annexation of Holland, into a mere twelve months. He plays smaller tricks with time throughout the novel, actually, alternating between the Japanese calendar and the Gregorian one, then jumping forwards and backwards between chapters. The effect is to heighten the picture of two hermetic worlds removed from the normal course of history. One is Japan itself (the Thousand Autumns of the title), a strictly hierarchical feudal society, deliberately maintaining its isolation and culture. The other is the equally hierarchical society on Dejima itself, comprised of Dutch merchant officers, a polyglot collection of hands, and a few slaves, whose only contact with the outside world is the annual arrival of a ship from Java. To these, Mitchell adds two more hermetic worlds: an isolated mountain monastery in the second part of the book, and an English warship in the third. Without spoilers, I cannot reveal how these connect, but Mitchell's writing will carry you eagerly from one event to the next.
The author has the rare ability to work on three narrative scales simultaneously: small, medium, and large. He immerses the reader in local details -- particulars of language, culture, medical practice, philosophy and prejudice, commercial procedures, gambling, debauchery, and the capsule back-stories of the lesser characters. He will set up nail-biting situations that last a chapter or so, but introduce some twist that suddenly turns everything around at the end. And he arranges the book in three large parts, each of which ends with a transformative moral decision.
There is a large cast of of characters, whose plethora of exotic names can be confusing at first. But these crucial moments are associated with three or four who stand out for their human interest and moral dimension. Part I focuses on Jacob de Zoet (probably based on the real life Hendrik Doeff, who wrote a book about his experiences). He comes to Dejima as a lowly clerk, but he is smarter than the others, more genuinely interested in Japanese language and culture, and an incorruptible man in a nest of swindlers. Although by no means omnipresent, he serves as the commercial, political, and moral touchstone of the entire novel. Part II centers around two Japanese characters. One is the interpreter Ogawa Uzaemon, Jacob's principal link to the Japanese world; his formal reticence conceals secrets of his own. The other is Orito Aibagawa, a young midwife who already knows more than most doctors. Despite a disfiguring burn on one cheek, she has a beauty that is hard to resist. But her importance to the book is less as a figure of romance than as the center of a moral challenge that tests her (and indirectly Ogawa) to the utmost. Part III introduces the fourth touchstone character, the British naval captain John Penhaligon, whose decisions will prove pivotal as the book approaches its climax.
Those who know David Mitchell from CLOUD ATLAS will be aware of his stylistic virtuosity and his fondness for channeling popular genres ranging from the nineteenth-century adventure story to dystopian futurism. There are traces of many different styles here also, but amazingly they all fit into his account of a single place and time. There are no postmodern tricks; this is Mitchell's most straightforward novel to date. He does have a fondness for writing in short one-paragraph sentences of less than a line long, which makes some of the book look like blank verse, though it reads more like the rapid exchanges of a screenplay. Against this, he can produce set-pieces such as the opening of chapter 39, beginning thus: "Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike-topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas, and dung-ripe stables..." And going on for a page and a half to end "...a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observed the blurred reflection of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. 'This world,' he thinks, 'contains one masterpiece, and that is itself'." And David Mitchell, in HIS masterpiece, gives us an entire world.
Vivid Re-creation of Bygone Era April 27, 2010
K. L. Cotugno (San Francisco, CA USA)
20 out of 25 found this review helpful
David Mitchell's first book in over four years is a revelation, not because he utilizes his trademark leaps of imagination as in Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas, but because he produces a monumental departure, a satisfying historical novel of depth and adventure. Once you pick one of his books up, it is hard to do anything else, you are hooked.
In Nagasaki, in 1799, Jacob de Zoet is a newly arrived clerk of the Dutch East India Company centralized on Dijeema, a man-made island built on piers in the harbor. Through Jacob's eyes, we witness the end of an era, the beginning of another. This world jumps to life through Mitchell's poetic imagery, meticulous research, extraordinary craft as a storyteller. Jacob disappears from the pages in Part II, which unfolds with the drama and force of a Kurosawa samurai epic, featuring a heroine of remarkable fortitude, resourcefulness and character. To tell more of the plot would spoil the surprises, suspense and development. I'll only add that it is beautifully written, thoroughly engrossing, and proof that David Mitchell is capable of anything.
"This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself." May 7, 2010
switterbug (Austin, Texas United States)
14 out of 18 found this review helpful
This is a modern, woolly mastodon of a book, a book with tusks and chewing teeth, a throwback to the most towering storytelling in literary history. But it is also a Seraph, a three-paired-winged novel that is full of zeal and respect, humility and ethereal beauty, an airborne creature that gave me five days in heaven. And, it is a sea serpent, because it lifted itself up like a column and it grabbed and swallowed me. Whole.
Pardon me while I gush; I bow to the spirit and heartbeat of David Mitchell, a force of nature who wrote this unforgettable, epic tale of adventure and colossal love. It is really...all about life and love. At turns knotty, briny, ribald, sensuous, fearsome, biting, daring, cerebral, grandiose, infinitesimal, and what did I leave out? It's panoptic, and exquisitely poetic. The first page-and-a-half of chapter XXXIX rivals Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. It will make you laugh, it will make you weep, it will make your soul utter its secrets.
The novel starts with a birth, ends with a death, like bookends to all it contains. It contains two calendars, the Gregorian and the lunar. Time is an expanding and contracting entity in this story. In the strictest and most Western sense, it is linear. But when you are addressing a more Eastern orientation, as well as gestation and birth, the lunar calendar is more fitting. Mitchell makes them work, hand in hand, in alternating chapters.
The eponymous Jacob de Zoet, the Dutch Zeelander and clerk, is the strong and very moral center of this novel. Copper-haired and green-eyed, robust but reserved, he is a devout, sensitive, patient, tolerant, artistic, and keenly intelligent young man. He is sometimes troubled, and often prescient. He is posted indefinitely on the fan-shaped, artificial island of Dejima in the bay of Nagasaki with the Dutch East India Company's warehouses and stock and motley crew, and the year is 1799.
At first sight, Jacob falls in love with Orito Aiwabaga, midwife and student to the scholarly Dr. Marinus. A burn scar on the left side of her face is no impediment to her beauty in the eyes of Jacob; his principled nature is his obstruction. I inhabited his quiet torment and pleaded with the pages to bring them together. I fell a little in love with Jacob myself--he transcended the fictional; I felt his hands.
Drawing on historical facts but twisting it into a magnificent, almost mythical tale, Mitchell casts a spell with words and images. His juxtapositions are painterly; the narrative is colorful with stylistic and linguistic leaps that keep you on your toes. This is a demanding novel. Mitchell stays one step ahead of the reader (but not arrogantly so), and he does it with brio. It is as if he is aware of what he needs to do to take you to the fathomless waters of his prose. He starts off with these tongue-slicing, lip-curling crazy names that may frustrate you initially, but it makes you slow...down...and pay attention to the minute details as well as the grand canvas.
I have rarely read a book (in third person point of view) that makes me feel so intimate with the author's artistic strokes. It was as if he made a contract to take our senses, gradually tune us to his rhythms, and descend further and deeper. With not one stitch of self-consciousness, he envelopes you. And there are lovely sketches in the book that add dimension to the narrative.(I wish I knew who the artist was--is it Mitchell? His wife?)
There are three major shifts in the book. The first part sets up the tension and gives you the flow and rhythm and landscape of the novel, and introduces the Dutch and Japanese equipoise of politics that teeter-totters in this faraway place. The hierarchy of administrators, leaders, shoguns, samurais, medical practitioners, merchants, interpreters, servants, and slaves encompasses the serious to the sensational, and is often comically ingenious. This is also where I was most a tenant of Jacob.
The middle section focuses more on Orito, and has a feminine spirit to it, as well as cautiously moving into a thriller mode. And just when you think you got ahead of the author, he wrests that predictability away and keeps his promise to elevate his purpose.
The third section is the most challenging to read. It begins baldly but ambiguously, with a nautical saltiness that throws you off, and a gouty Captain with a morality of uncertain definition. You know where you are, but not why you are there and how it relates to the story and themes. The language is frequently idiomatic and the circumstances initially unclear. But, Mitchell doesn't let you down. Everything gradually connects without artificial means. And the Captain's closing thoughts stole my breath away.
This is as close to perfect as a novel can be. (You know there will be a movie--it is beautifully cinematic without being conventional.) You will close the pages, exalted. Jacob de Zoet and Orito Aibagawa will be eternally seared in your consciousness, and this story forever in your heart. A++
Astounding. Best book I read so far this year. July 1, 2010
Melanchthon (USA)
10 out of 13 found this review helpful
I really don't give five stars all that often, but this book really knocked me out. In a series of vignettes, the author describes events in the Dutch trading colony at Nagasaki as the eighteenth century flips over to the nineteenth and the Dutch trading empire is disintegrating, giving way to English primacy on the seas. We see the events of the novel from the perspective of its protagonist, Jacob de Zoet, his love interest, Aibagawa Orito, and a mutual friend of theirs, Ogawa Uzaemon, but occasionally from the perspective of other participants in its actions. It's a story of love that can't be fulfilled, idealisms that are shattered, and a world that is changing for everyone involved. The best parts are lyrical reflections on the nature of love, perception and knowledge. This is going to stay with me for a long time and I will probably give it as a gift. It's also a fantastically researched historical novel; my one quibble is that the puns the author makes in English with his Dutch characters don't usually work in actual Dutch. But I loved it.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 105
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