Status
Available
Call number
Series
Description
1799, Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor. Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk, has 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 of which will extend beyond Jacob's worst imaginings.
Similar in this library
Collection
Publication
Random House Trade Paperbacks (2011), Edition: Reprint, 512 pages
Pages
512
Genres
Physical description
512 p.; 5.49 inches
Awards
Booker Prize (Longlist — 2010)
Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 2012)
Audie Award (Finalist — 2011)
The Morning News Tournament of Books (Long List — 2011)
James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Shortlist — Fiction — 2010)
Macavity Award (Nominee — Historical Mystery — 2011)
Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Winner — 2011)
Independent Booksellers' Book Prize (Shortlist — 2011)
The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction (Shortlist — 2011)
Europese Literatuurprijs (Longlist — 2011)
Spear's Book Award (Shortlist — 2010)
Booklist Editor's Choice: Adult Books (Fiction — 2010)
The New York Times Notable Books of the Year (Fiction & Poetry — 2010)
Locus Recommended Reading (2010)
Notable Books List (Fiction — 2011)
Globe and Mail Top 100 Book (2010)
Media reviews
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/books/review/Eggers-t.html?ref=bookreviews
There are no easy answers or facile connections in “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.” In fact, it’s not an easy book, period. Its pacing can be challenging, and its idiosyncrasies are many. But it offers innumerable rewards for the patient reader and confirms Mitchell as one of the more
Show More
fascinating and fearlesswriters alive. Show Less
Another Booker Prize nomination is likely to greet this ambitious and fascinating fifth novel—a full-dress historical, and then some—from the prodigally gifted British author
For his many and enthusiastic admirers — critics, prize juries, readers — the fecundity of Mitchell’s imagination marks him as one of the most exciting literary writers of our age. Indeed, in 2007, he was the lone novelist on Time’ s annual list of the world’s 100 most influential people.
Show More
Through five novels, most impressively with his 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas, Mitchell has demonstrated flat-out ambition with respect to testing — sometimes past their breaking points — the conventions of storytelling structure, perspective, voice, language and range. The result, according to Mitchell’s rare detractors, is an oeuvre marked by imaginative wizardry and stylistic showmanship put on offer for their own sake. For most everyone else, however, Mitchell’s writing is notable because its wizardry and showmanship are in the service of compulsively readable stories and, at its best moments, are his means of revealing, in strange places and stranger still ways, nothing less than the universals of human experience. Show Less
Though direct in its storytelling, Jacob de Zoet marks a return to full amplitude. That means occasionally over-long scenes and one or two rambling monologues. But it also guarantees fiction of exceptional intelligence, richness and vitality.
With “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” David Mitchell has traded in the experimental, puzzlelike pyrotechnics of “Ghostwritten” and “Number9Dream” for a fairly straight-ahead story line and a historical setting.
He’s meticulously reconstructed the lost world of Edo-era Japan,
Show More
and in doing so he’s created his most conventional but most emotionally engaging novel yet: it’s as if an acrobatic but show-offy performance artist, adept at mimicry, ventriloquism and cerebral literary gymnastics, had decided to do an old-fashioned play and, in the process, proved his chops as an actor. Show Less
Now, however, with The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, he has moved on, jettisoned the cross-referencing, and severed the overt links to his previous books. It is interesting but unnecessary to know that the author has lived in Japan, is the father of half-Japanese children, and has set an
Show More
earlier novel – number9dream (2001) – in the country. Equally, the fact that this new novel centres on a love story between a European man and a Japanese woman represents no more than the most elementary draw from autobiography. Beyond that, it is a self-standing historical novel, written in chronological order in the present tense, which conjures up a profoundly researched and fully realised world. Show Less
If The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet shows a strong family likeness to these books, his fifth novel also spins fresh creatures from a prodigious creative DNA. From some angles it looks a more conventional novel of historical events (and pseudo-events) than its forerunners. Yet it invites us to
Show More
think and feel about a clash, or convergence, of civilisations in a fierce new light. The book leaves a reader, as Ghostwritten did, in a space beyond "belief or disbelief", citizen of several worlds but tyrant or serf in none, only convinced, as its voice of truth says, that it is "Better to strive to co-exist, than seek to disprove". Show Less
The opening chapter of this novel is not one you will forget in a hurry. It is Nagasaki, 1799, and the Magistrate’s concubine is in labour. She’s near-dead from the trauma and her baby, with one arm prolapsed, appears dead already. That Orito – the scholarly midwife with the beautiful, burnt
Show More
face – ends up miraculously saving both mother and child is the toppling domino that triggers the events of this story. It’s a graphic, pulsing start that boldly declares what a brilliant book this will be. Show Less
David Mitchells roman over een rechtschapen Hollandse klerk op de 19de-eeuwse handelspost Deshima raakt het hart en de hersens.
LCC
PR6063.I785 T47
ISBN
0812976363 / 9780812976366