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Title details for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell - Available

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

by David Mitchell
Jonathan Aris
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
2 of 2 copies available
By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud AtlasLonglisted for the Man Booker Prize
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 Zoetis 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, fanshaped 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    June 9, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781456114299
      • File size: 544725 KB
      • Duration: 18:54:50

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This utterly original and wildly satisfying new novel gets such a dazzling performance here that you are torn between wanting to know how it ends and hoping it never does. On the cusp of the nineteenth century, Jacob de Zoet--hoping to earn enough to marry his sweetheart in Zeeland--arrives on the island off Nagasaki where the shogun sequesters the trading partners of a closed and essentially medieval Japan. In the ensuing symphony of clashing cultures, Jonathan Aris plays all the instruments--from the comic/despicable Dutch and English adventurers to the smoothly confusing Japanese voices. His timbre and range are truly remarkable, his pacing irresistible. Paula Wilcox is equally good in the smaller women's world of the fascinating midwife, Orito Aibagawa. An embarrassment of riches. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from April 12, 2010
      Mitchell’s rightly been hailed as a virtuoso genius for his genre-bending, fiercely intelligent novels Ghostwritten
      and Cloud Atlas
      . Now he takes something of a busman’s holiday with this majestic historical romance set in turn-of-the-19th-century Japan, where young, naïve Jacob de Zoet arrives on the small manmade island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor as part of a contingent of Dutch East Indies officials charged with cleaning up the trading station’s entrenched culture of corruption. Though engaged to be married in the Netherlands, he quickly falls in hopeless love with Orito Aibagawa, a Dutch-trained Japanese midwife and promising student of Marinus, the station’s resident physician. Their “courtship” is strained, as foreigners are prohibited from setting foot on the Japanese mainland, and the only relationships permitted between Japanese women and foreign men on Dejima are of the paid variety. Jacob has larger trouble, though; when he refuses to sign off on a bogus shipping manifest, his stint on Dejima is extended and he’s demoted, stuck in the service of a vengeful fellow clerk. Meanwhile, Orito’s father dies deeply in debt, and her stepmother sells her into service at a mountaintop shrine where her midwife skills are in high demand, she soon learns, because of the extraordinarily sinister rituals going on in the secretive shrine. This is where the slow-to-start plot kicks in, and Mitchell pours on the heat with a rescue attempt by Orito’s first love, Uzaemon, who happens to be Jacob’s translator and confidant. Mitchell’s ventriloquism is as sharp as ever; he conjures men of Eastern and Western science as convincingly as he does the unscrubbed sailor rabble. Though there are more than a few spots of embarrassingly bad writing (“How scandalized Nagasaki shall be,
      thinks Uzaemon, if the truth is ever known
      ”), Mitchell’s talent still shines through, particularly in the novel’s riveting final act, a pressure-cooker of tension, character work, and gorgeous set pieces. It’s certainly no Cloud Atlas
      , but it is a dense and satisfying historical with literary brawn and stylistic panache.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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