The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
For fans of David Mitchell (the two-time Booker finalist and author of Cloud Atlas and Number9Dream), this week wasn’t about Eclipse–it was about the U.S. release of Mitchell’s long awaited fifth novel, The Thousand Autums of Jacob de Zoet. Unlike Mitchell’s first three novels, with postmodern tricks and genre shifts galore, Thousand Autums is a historical novel that moves chronologically within the setting of shogun-era Japan. It follows protagonist Jacob de Zoet, a Dutchman, as he relocates to a small island in Japan for five years to make a living and return home to marry his sweetheart. But of course, circumstances on the island interrupt his well laid plan. Jacob falls in love with another woman–a Japanese midwife named Orito–and ends up on a suspense-filled quest to save her (it wouldn’t be Mitchell without a little genre bending). So far, critics are calling the work Mitchell’s most emotionally engaging novel, but they find some of the adventures and details unnecessary. Still, Mitchell fans won’t be disappointed.
“[Mitchell has] meticulously reconstructed the lost world of Edo-era Japan, and in doing so he’s created his most conventional but most emotionally engaging novel yet” – Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“In [Mitchell's] earlier books, the disconnect of stories across time and space were fascinatingly and proddingly jarring. Here, they’re frequently just jarring.” – Eric Banks, Los Angeles Times
“There’s a great deal of very interesting history in the novel, regarding European mercantilism and Japan at the dawn of the nineteenth century, but it is resolutely unallegorical, and speaks only of itself.” – Paul La Farge, Barnes & Noble Review
“[Mitchell] often risks high-level pastiche but writes with such invigorating edge and dash that scarcely a sentence stands idle.” – Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
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