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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel |  | Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $10.00
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Seller: Cobb Media LLC.
Rating:  reviews
Sales Rank: 204
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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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| Customer Reviews:
 A promising beginning leads to dissapointment September 8, 2010
Zooey
The first third of this novel is an enticing, engaging read. The characters are compelling, the writing style seems effortless, and soon enough the plot grows legs. I settled in for the duration, expecting to swept along as the author delved into the themes and atmosphere he had established - only to find myself, by the midway point, tapping my fingers as I read in exasperation.
Throughout the middle of the book, I felt drawn in and engaged only to feel somehow brought up short at the end of the storyline. The 'Ogawa Adventure' sucks the reader in and pushes them along the narrative, only to bring them to an abrupt stop, after which one feels as though the adventure was, in essence, completely meaningless. It was difficult to fight the growing resentment I felt towards the author as I continually got emotionally invested in plotline after plotline that eventually passed to no true consequence, leaving the fundamental issues and mysteries of the novel's beginning untouched.
I feel as though I'm in the minority with this last part, but truly I felt let down by the climax of the Orito plotline and following denouement. By presenting the conclusion so matter-of-factly and with such brevity, the reader is robbed of the catharsis he's been anticipating since the outset. Even the protagonist seems to have a hard time getting worked up about it.
My humble suggestion is this - wait till this one is on the used paperback rack for $3.50. I think it's more the hype of the author than the quality of the work that's garnering the 4-star reviews and publicity.
not Mitchell's best September 8, 2010
zashibis
I'm left with mixed feelings. I devoured it eagerly, mostly enjoyed it as I was reading it, but was ultimately left with a sour taste in my mouth, as with a cream puff that, although very pretty to look at, had passed its pull-date.
The novel is structured around two real events: the collapse of the Dutch East India company in 1800, and the "Nagasaki Harbor Incident" of 1808, in which the HMS Phaeton, an English frigate, intruded into the harbor with the intention of plundering the Dutch ships they expected to find there. Mitchell has both events happen the same year, and lightly disguises the HMS Phaeton as the HMS Phoebus, but in general hews reasonably close to the events that transpired, providing a realistic framework for the novel.
And what does this "realistic framework" contain? In a typically Mitchell-esque fashion, it frames a deliberately unrealistic Gothic melodrama about evil Japanese monks who keep deformed women as brood mares, and a brave but inexperienced samurai who attempts to rescue the woman he loves from them. Readers of Cloud Atlas: A Novel and Ghostwritten won't be surprised by this abrupt shift of genre from realism to romanticism (and back again, through several iterations) but what served Cloud Atlas so well here feels contrived, muddled -- too realistic for "magical realism" -- there is a very careful attention to period detail throughout -- but too fantastical and haphazard for "historical fiction."
Beyond this, there were a number of plot and character elements of the novel that were distracting. Many of the minor characters have been given elaborate back-stories, which tend to be revealed in ways that awkwardly interrupt the flow of the narrative. For instance, Van Cleef chooses a post-coital morning stretch on the roof of a brothel to tell the novel's hero, Jacob de Zoet, his entire life story. In a similar vein both Jacob and the novel's heroine, Aibagawa Orito, are noble, brave and self-sacrificing well beyond the point of implausibility. (I found the climactic scene between Jacob and Penhaligon unintentionally ridiculous.) Mitchell eschews the most obvious kinds of sentimentality -- the ending of the novel resonates powerfully in its emotional honesty -- but indulges in smaller instances throughout that jar. Would a samurai really feel any remorse about the loss of a life? Would an uptight, religious Dutch clerk really fall head over heels in love with a scarred women he'd hardly spoken to?
Too, for the first time, Mitchell's stylistic quirks began to get on my nerves. As always, I found a great deal to admire in his style -- he brings 18th-century Nagasaki very vividly to life -- but certain Mitchellisms began to seem too predictable, mannered: his use of nouns as verbs; his choppy back-and-forthing between interior monologue and public utterance (as during the sermon on the frigate); his non-sequiturs for poetic effect (e.g. "This Nagasaki," notes Wren, "is an anchorage the equal of Port Mahon.." In clear water, a shoal of silver fish changes direction. "...a few modern placements would make it impregnable"). What seemed effortless panache in Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green: A Novel here comes across as effortful.
Enough griping. As I said at the outset, I enjoyed the novel despite its flaws, but I hope next time out Mitchell delivers a more consistent effort.
 Floating world September 6, 2010
Colorado Springs reader (Colorado Springs)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This breathtaking novel is set primarily on Dejima, an artificial island created by the Japanese off the coast of Nagasaki as an isolation zone for foreigners who through desperation or misadventure are seeking their fortunes far from home. Jacob de Zoet has traveled to Japan as an employee of the Dutch East India Company, hoping to progress successfully enough along the road of fame and fortune to marry his sweetheart back in Holland. There is an inherent poignance in the contrast between what we the readers know and what Jacob knows; we know that the Dutch influence in Asia is beginning to wane, that what seems like endless possibility is in reality a way of life that is fast disappearing. And of course teeming vigorous Nagasaki itself lies under the shadow of a dark future, doomed to sufferings that its inhabitants in 1800 would have found literally inconceivable.
But the characters in Thousand Autumns are nevertheless suffering from the transitory nature of existence, and in a more blatant fashion than most of us reading the book; slaves seized and separated from their families, probably forever. Men impounded into the Dutch East India Company through all manner of mishap, and stranded under strange skies. Kidnapped women forced into a life of loss whose real nature they fundamentally misunderstand. Many times in the course of the book someone looks at the face of a beloved, knowing it will be the last glimpse. Or sees a face through a telescope that heartbreaking resembles the face of a dead loved one. Or refuses to look through a telescope to catch one last glimpse of a much-loved face.
Of course, a world of words is even more ephemeral than the world we live in, and I felt this novel was like a universe inscribed on a bubble, shimmering in the sun, blinding in its richness, with fishwives and embroidered silks and rainy streets and moon grey cats, and then - pop - it all disappeared, and we're left with a vast and featureless sea.
Beautiful and stately.
The Thousand Autums of Jacob De Zoet September 5, 2010
Ronald J Primm (Norfolk, VA, US)
My first reading of David Mitchell. Great book. Looking forward to reading the rest of his novels.
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