| The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel |  | Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Random House
List Price: $26.00
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Seller: treebeardbooks
Rating:  102 reviews
Sales Rank: 134
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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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.
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
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 102
 Floating world September 6, 2010
Colorado Springs reader (Colorado Springs)
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.
 Mr. Mitchell, you let another fan down, (sigh). September 5, 2010
Richard Gilbar (WA United States)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
At first I was merely irritated but I slowly grew irate. After reading the Cloud Atlas I expected something great. What those 4 and 5 stars are for, I haven't got a clue. If I hadn't felt so dinked around I might have given 2.
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.
satisfying novel September 5, 2010
Donald L. Fink
A superb creation of 17th century Japan and the cultural clash between European and Japanese cultures at the early stages of their interaction. Not as complex or innovative as Cloud Atlas but a good read all the way.
 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.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 102
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