The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I didn’t know what to expect from David Mitchell’s “Thousand Autumns” except that it would be different than the others I’d read (“Cloud Atlas” and “The Bone Clocks” this year), but that it would contain some familiar faces from the other books.
So reading this one became a little bit of a Where’s Waldo game of spotting characters which would show up in later (or earlier) works. Thankfully, he gets Marinus, the main recurring character, on stage quickly, though, because I got sucked into the story after orienting myself around some of the other characters assembling in the Dutch East India Company’s little island outpost in Japan.
I love the way the novel pivots from Jacob’s arrival to his interest in the burned, odd figure of Miss Aiba-gawa in Marinus’s collection of medical students, to her removal to the mysterious mountain monastery, an attempted rescue by her former lover Uzaemon, and the abandonment of the Dutch outpost and its caretaker residents, and then their eventual uprising, when the English arrive on the scene, and Jacob’s dismantling of the monastery and ‘rescue’ of Aiba-gawa by somewhat diplomatic means. More than the heady leaps and bounds of a Cloud Atlas or Bone Clocks these pivots are like the tacking of a majestic ship. And within the sections Mitchell steers his beautiful, masterful prose. He has a small tic, in this book, of breaking up dialogue with narrative description, mid-sentence, so that the language has an odd, halting rhythm of someone in a foreign land, submersed in foreign culture, trying to reconcile their own language with that of their hosts. At a certain stage of the book he used the trick so much that it became a little distracting, but, like I said, it made me think of someone stuck out in a foreign outpost in which he was learning the native language from his translators.
I haven’t felt quite the sense of loss I had when I had to give this book back to the library. What a great read.