The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Random House
Category: eBooks
This item is no longer available
Rating:  98 reviews
Sales Rank: 106
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Edition: 1
Pages: 528
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
ASIN: B0036S4CZM
Publication Date: June 23, 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.
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 98
 great writing but story comes up short September 4, 2010
Boston Reader (Boston, MA USA)
The start of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet grabbed me as few novels have. It's an intense scene of a midwife assisting in a hard birth in Japan in 1799, and came so alive on the page. The first hundred pages of this book did a great job of creating a sense of place and the people inhabiting this Dutch outpost in Japan. The details were beautifully described. I felt transported to this exotic place and time. The problem came when the main plot began to unfold. Actually, it was not clear who the main characters were and what the main plot was. The story bounced here and there, and with so many characters, it was unclear whom I should pay special attention to. The story of the secret "monastery" seemed a bit contrived, and took away from the realism of the novel. In short, the plot did not engage me as much as the writing did. While not a page-turner to me, I still enjoyed it. It had enough good stuff that I'm tempted to reread it. I expect that I'd like it even more the second time. The ending was very well done.
 as brilliant and startlingly poetic as ever September 2, 2010
Abeer Y. Hoque (New York City)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I heart David Mitchell. I want to have his babies. But since this is not possible (he lives in Ireland with his wife and children), I content myself with his words. 'The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet' is his fifth novel, about a Dutch clerk, a burned midwife, a Japanese translator, an English captain - their lives intersecting in a port of Nagasaki, Japan in the early 1800's, and the writing is more startlingly poetic than ever.
Mr. Mitchell's skill with dialect, so commanding in 'Cloud Atlas' is evident here as well. The cardshark Ari Grote's speech is hilarious, witty, and colourful, and the other sailors, slaves, and henchmen, hailing from Ireland, Batavia, England, Ceylon, and of course Japan, have each their own particular language and style.
The book switches between different perspectives, each one opening a world behind the character, filling out enormous spaces I often didn't even realise were there, rounding out even detestable characters, and showing the author's enormous abilities involving psychology and dialogue.
The plot gets off to a slow start, but by the second third of the book, I was hooked (and not just because the POV switched to that of a hot Japanese girl surgeon with a burn mark on her face).
I wish I had noted some of my favourite lines, which were often one line poems inserted throughout the book. But any one page will yield gorgeousness. Here are three random selections:
'The notes are spidery and starlit and spun from glass. The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.
'Melt what I am into you, she begs the darkness.'
'The fine black silk is crisp as snow and heavy as air.'
I highly recommend this book.
A n thousand autumn read but a good tale August 30, 2010
Patricia Graham (Baton Rouge, Louisiana USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I like this book a lot but it just was long to read. I began to feel I was Jacob trapped in Dejima. That said, the writer is good, the story was fine and it was a good read. I have ordered other books by this writer who is new to me. And Japan!! I haven't read much about it but will. What fascinated me most was the description of the East India Company and the interaction with Japanese.
Some Genius Story Telling August 28, 2010
Brett Benner (Los Angeles, CA USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
David Mitchell is the kind of writer that has his fans rabid for his next book. He is truly a gifted wordsmith who thinks with big ideas, and executes them brilliantly. This time, he tackles a historical novel, which for the most part is pretty linear in it's story telling, but intricate within the construct. The book is dense. Densely plotted, demanding, and full of a massive cast of characters, who float in and out, and more punctuate the world he's created rather than flesh it out.This was my only beef with the novel. I felt characters could have been dropped without detriment to the narration, to streamline the cacophony of names I was trying to keep straight.Where the novel works best is at it's most human moments, in particular, the final ten pages of the book, where after the grand set pieces of the plot have been played, he artfully brings it down to the most lovely, simple exchanges of life, love, and regret. It's not necessarily a book I'd recommend to everyone, frankly just because of the attention it demands, but if you appreciate supple, gorgeous writing, and have patience to go the distance, you'll find it a rewarding, moving, reading experience.
A master storyteller August 27, 2010
Simone Oltolina (Morbio Inferiore, TI Switzerland)
David Mitchell has to be one of my favourite writers. Not only his works of fiction are invariably great, he also manages to reinvent himself completely with every subsequent novel.
After dabbling in the surreal and the coming-of-age story, Mitchell now pens a proper historical novel, set in Japan during the Edo period, when the country had almost no contact with the outer world, save for a Dutch trading post where most of the action takes place.
I won't give you details concerning the plot as I expect the Amazon blurb can accomplish that much better than myself. Suffice it to say that the novel is exquisitely written, thoroughly researched and deeply engaging. There are two main story arcs, intertwining towards the end of the narrative, and both make this terrific book into a flat-out page-turner.
I sincerely hope Mitchell will win what he so clearly deserves, i.e., this year's Man Booker Prize, after having been short-listed twice in the past.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 98
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