{"id":4053,"date":"2010-06-28T00:01:20","date_gmt":"2010-06-28T04:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=4053"},"modified":"2016-06-10T22:23:40","modified_gmt":"2016-06-11T02:23:40","slug":"david-mitchell-the-thousand-autumns-of-jacob-de-zoet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2010\/06\/28\/david-mitchell-the-thousand-autumns-of-jacob-de-zoet\/","title":{"rendered":"David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet<\/strong><\/em><\/span>\r\nby David Mitchell (2010)<\/span>\r\nRandom House (2010)<\/span>\r\n479 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
I\u00a0have loved David Mitchell.\u00a0He wowed me with Cloud Atlas <\/em>(I was not one who thought it was mere gimmickry).\u00a0And even though many thought\u00a0it to be a lesser work, a kind of\u00a0break from\u00a0ambitious writing,\u00a0I also loved Black Swan Green<\/em>, his\u00a0wonderfully structured and\u00a0wonderfully described narrative of a small English town in the early 1980s told by a stuttering young boy. Nevertheless, when I saw that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet<\/em> was on the table, I was a bit nervous it would\u00a0lessen my esteem for Mitchell. I’m sure this is due to the many glowing reviews it had received already, heightening my expectations to the point where I felt there was no way Mitchell could meet them. Well, if you’ve yet to read this book, this review might deflate some of your expectations, which I hope will be a service. For me, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet<\/em> is a step backwards.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
A\u00a0step backwards from those earlier works doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. For one thing, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet<\/em> took me to a place that I didn’t know existed, a small man-made island named Dejima, which sat in\u00a0Nagasaki harbor during Japan’s period of\u00a0Sakoku. I didn’t know what Sakoku was either.\u00a0From 1633 – 1853, Sakoku\u00a0was the Japanese foreign relations policy: no foreigner could enter\u00a0Japan and no Japanese could leave. Violators were put to death. For two hundred years the little island of Dejima was a peephole into and out of Japan because it was only there that foreigners could come and trade goods.<\/p>\n
For much of the time, the Dutch were the primary (if not the only) ones allowed to trade at Dejima, as is the case in July\u00a01799, when this book begins. Jacob de Zoet has just arrived on Dejima. He is a young Dutch clerk working for the Dutch East India Company. A clerk of impeccable morals, he arrives with a new\u00a0chief, Mr.\u00a0Vorstenbosch, to clean Dejima of the corruption it had been suffering for years.\u00a0The last chief deputy had been engaging in illicit trades and privateering. You already know that Jacob was not well received.<\/p>\n
“To man its ships, maintain its garrisons, and pay its tens of thousands of salaries, Mr. Oost, including yours, the company must make a profit. Its trading factories must keep books. Dejima’s books for the last five years are a pig’s dinner. It is Mr. Vorstenbosch’s duty to order me to piece those books together.\u00a0It is my duty to obey.\u00a0Why must this make my name Iscariot?”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Even the fairly honorable among the workers stretch around the rules, which is somewhat understandable if you consider that they are stuck on a small island all year round; they’re not far off when they call it a prison.\u00a0They really don’t want someone coming in to stop the only things that make working on Dejima bearable. Here’s an exchange where de Zoet expresses genuine shock that the illegal activities can go on under the noses of those in charge.<\/p>\n
“The guards and friskers at the land gate don’t find this odd?”<\/span><\/p>\n
“They’re paid<\/em> not to find it odd.\u00a0Now, here’s my question for you: how’s the chief goin’ to act on this?\u00a0On this an’ everythin’ else you’re snufflin’ up? ‘Cause this is how Dejima works. Stop all these little perquisites<\/em>, eh, an’ yer stop Dejima itself — an’ don’t<\/em> evade me, eh, with your ‘That is a matter for Mr. Vorstenbosch.'”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
To me, the first section was very good. In a way, the subtle\u00a0development of\u00a0subjugatoin and\u00a0betrayal reminded me of the much better — because it is much subtler\u00a0— first and last sections in Cloud Atlas<\/em>.\u00a0Getting to know de Zoet and watching him navigate the traps in his way is a real pleasure. De Zoet is the pragmatic and fiercely loyal type we’d expect to see wandering around yelling about “duty!” Back home he has left a fianc\u00e9 whose father doesn’t approve of the match, so de Zoet is anxious to honorably claw his way to the top.\u00a0We get the sense that he holds a lot of promise because of his loyalty to duty, but that that loyalty might just be his biggest obstacle. His motivation gets a bit muddied when he begins to fall in love with a Japanese midwife named Orito Aibagawa. The best advice he can get, though, is “If you do love her, express your devotion by avoiding her.”<\/p>\n
The story, divided,\u00a0essentially, into three parts,\u00a0is very good. The first part focuses on de Zoet’s trials in his first months as Dejima’s despised sanitizer. The second follows Aibagawa to a\u00a0monastery in the interior. The third features a menacing British frigate, come to use diplomacy or force to benefit from the Dejima trading post.\u00a0It’s exciting and I didn’t want to put it down though there were two issues that bothered me from the beginning and that ultimately led me to the conclusion that an interesting story in a fascinating setting is most of what this book has to offer: (1) it became clear fairly early on that Mitchell was going to explain everything fairly nicely, taking me out of\u00a0the narrative process,\u00a0and (2) that the characters, once\u00a0setup in\u00a0clever\u00a0passages,\u00a0were going to be predictably good or bad.<\/p>\n
Regarding my first issue, this is Mitchell’s first third-person narrative. In an interview\u00a0with John Self<\/a> he said in the past he had\u00a0found this\u00a0“infinite” perspective a challenge because he never knew what to leave out.\u00a0As clever most pieces were, I wish he’d left more out.\u00a0The character’s thoughts were often shown in tell-all itallics (which leads to my next issue with the book).\u00a0\u00a0I kept trying to look for more complexity underneath what was being said and thought and then explained, but I always felt that it was all there on the surface.\u00a0The plot brings out many of Mitchell’s main themes — the will to power, subjugation and exploitation, mortality and the fight to achieve immortality — but I felt these themes were there to make the plot interesting and not that the plot was there to explore these themes.<\/p>\n
As for my second issue with character development, for the most part once Mitchell lays the first stone\u00a0of character development, we know how the overall structure of that character is going to look.\u00a0I found that lack of complexity frustrating.\u00a0Though I felt\u00a0the characters were likeably good or likeably bad, they never\u00a0veered from that course, no matter what the plot threw at them. This made them, if not the plot, frustratingly predictable.\u00a0The plot revealed what happened to the characters but that didn’t\u00a0give them new contours for the reader to consider.<\/p>\n
One of my favorite\u00a0chapters in the entire novel — the only one\u00a0in which I marked many passages — was the one small\u00a0chapter done in the first person.\u00a0I think Mitchell’s work is much more interesting when he\u00a0takes that omniscience out of the formula and allows\u00a0the intimacies of\u00a0one human mind to\u00a0suggest what’s going on, limited though that one mind might be in the grander scheme.\u00a0This passage is told by one of\u00a0deputy Fischer’s\u00a0slaves (Fischer being\u00a0one of the bad characters).\u00a0The slave has just been deducing what he owns and what he doesn’t own, being a slave, finally determining that he himself owns his thoughts:<\/p>\n
Master Fischer owns my body, then, but he does not own my mind. This I know, because of a test. When I shave Master Fischer, I imagine slitting open his throat.\u00a0 f he owned my mind, he would see this evil thought. But instead of punishing me, he just sits there with his eyes shut.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Once this chapter is over, the book resumes the third person and that intimacy leaves. So I enjoyed The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet<\/em>, but I don’t feel the desire to read it again, and I feel it would have been better if I\u00a0hadn’t\u00a0read quite a portion of it the first time through.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trevor reviews David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet<\/em>. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4052,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[800,189],"tags":[1022,1024,978,551],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-4053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-david-mitchell","tag-1022","tag-2010-booker-prize","tag-2010s","tag-booker-prize"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/The-Thousand-Autumns-of-Jac3.jpg?fit=358%2C530&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-13n","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4053"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18653,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4053\/revisions\/18653"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4053"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}