The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Narrarated by: Paula Wilcox, Jonathan Aris
© 2010 David Mitchell
A Booker finalist and Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize winner, David Mitchell was called “prodigiously daring and imaginative” by Time and “a genius” by the New York Times Book Review. In 1799, the artificial island of Dejima lies in Nagasaki Harbor as Japan’s outpost for the Dutch East Indies Company. There, Jacob de Zoet has come to make a fortune large enough to return to Holland and marry the woman he loves.
A romantic novel that swells with specificity and strangeness
Postmodern, British novelist David Mitchell is known for his ability to inhabit and explain detailed worlds of vastly different time and place. Long listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, his latest, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is more formally traditional than past works, such as Ghostwritten, number9dream, and Cloud Atlas, which were spun from interconnected but self-contained narratives, voiced by multiple narrators. Here, we get a historical novel set in a remote and isolated Japan of the 19th century, a world that's exquisitely detached from the present day.
Based on Hendrik Doeff, a real scribe shipped to Nagaskai by the Dutch East India Company in the early 1800s, our young protagonist, Jacob, is commissioned to expose the fraudulence and corruption that permeates the local trade market. Already engaged to be married when he is sent to abroad, Jacob falls in love with a Japanese midwife. The affair soon proves both culturally taboo and personally fraught. This romance, told alongside Jacob’s bureaucratic trials, reveals, once again, Mitchell’s uncanny talent for commanding historically accurate perspectives, as well as his narrative facility for telling tales of simultaneous complexity and suspense. Swelling with specificity and strangeness, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is transportive in a way especially seductive when listened to aloud.