The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel

This seems like the perfect writer finding the perfect material. Mitchell's imagination, already ferocious and able to make seemingly anything work in his fractured, polyphonic works like 'Cloud Atlas' and 'The Bone Clocks', can also just hone down on a single setting, in this case, early 18th century Japan, and write the HELL out of it for almost 500 pages.

The amount of historical detail and research that went into this is mind boggling, only writers like Neal Stephenson and Umberto Eco are capable of writing about the past with this level of casually baroque detail. Everything from quesy descriptions of Breech Births, to the paranoia and scheming of Japanese courtiers, to monastic orders dedicated to sexual slavery to the minutia of life aboard a 19th century British War ship...it's all just so perfectly and totally conceived that you feel privileged to even be able to read it.

And while Mitchell's sheer generosity as a writer, his need to give seemingly every character a fleshed out story almost overwhelms at times, the book never ventures too far afield from De Zoet as he tries to keep his head above water amidst a culture of mercantile greed and corruption and feudal Japan's seemingly impenetrable society. This is a gorgeously written book that shows what Mitchell can do when he narrows and slows down his usually far-flung narrative focus. Sections of this are so perfectly written, so amazingly shot through with major incident and the minor details that make fiction life-like that you can see the action from each sentence unfolding in your head like a film. This is one of the few books I've ever read that actually brought a tear to my eye. For me, this even trumps Cloud Atlas. Highly Recommended

I was looking forward to reading this well-recommended book, especially since I live in Japan and have visited Nagasaki and the reconstructed Dejima. But my criticisms are not related to how historically accurate the details of this novel are, rather to the completely unbelievable plot and the stilted and overblown dialogue, and to the stereotyping of characters as well. Maybe Jacob de Zoet himself was believable because he is deliberately cast as a moderate, sensible person. The rest.... I don't even know anyone I could give my copy to without feeling guilty about wasting their time.

A great find – a tip from the librarian at Bomo High.

This book works on several levels. You get the expected historical fiction pleasure of tooling about in another time – and it *is* a pleasure because the book smacks of research. But not trainspotting research of gratuitously saying how many buttons were on a chamberlain’s undershirt, or sliding into occasional cut and paste from a text book, but research that underpins story and creates a wonderfully alternative and rich context. Moreover there’s nothing of the, for example, stupidity of characterisation in something like Cornwall’s, Sharpe's Company, which may be on the money for dates and troop numbers, but makes an appalling hash of characters: two dimensional, sure, but also particularly annoying in the contradiction between the hero’s description (intelligent, cunning, ruthless) and actions (clueless, inexplicable). Mitchell is quite the opposite: if he describes someone as intelligent, cunning and ruthless (or any of a number of other adjectives), then the accompanying actions and speech portray this unerringly. This is as praiseworthy as it is rare. Perhaps the highest commendation I can give Mitchell is that when he slipped in to several chapters of RN world, I felt there was nothing that Patrick O’Brien would have been ashamed of. And he really caught that phenomenal aspect of the time when Europeans were just blundering about the globe, and decisions made in a moment here and there could have such international significance – there often wasn’t a script, or even a protocol, and the vagaries of whether you had this captain or that one opened or closed such a range of doors.

As well as the fun of time travel, we’ve also got the similar satisfaction of global travel: Mitchell applies the same research and writing skills to the Japanese context, weaving in different cultural rules, perceptions, orthodoxies. And (not in a cloying, tick-the-boxes, 21st Century PC way) he shows awareness that the exotic Japanese (or black or Asian slave, or love interest) characters are not merely background or foils for our white European hero, but fully developed personalities with equally rich and important stories (and this without brutally rewriting history to anachronistically dump, for example, confident contemporary feminists into a world where there wasn’t a century post suffragettes and the like to draw on), where the protagonist may be entirely incidental. Jacob de Zoet, sure, is the primary focus, but at several key points (and, perhaps, the key point) he is not pivotal – or even present (but in giving importance to a range of characters he doesn’t also make Orson Scott Card’s ‘Speaker for the Dead’ mistake of making everyone cataclysmically incredible). This aspect was one of several where I was pleasantly surprised at the departure from convention. Not that being unconventional is, in itself, effective, but the way Mitchell does it here I found really gratifying.

Spoilers.

Another departure was that of genre. The first quarter of the book really seems to be setting itself up as a historical romance. Not Mills and Boon style, where heaving breasts and intense gazes are the core of the story, but the ultimate union of the lovers serving as the driving plot device. But at some point we slide out of that story and find ourselves – for a while anyway – in a thriller, even moving towards a classic Japanese martial arts thriller! A villain emerges who would stand comfortably beside (or more sit in the shadows behind) any other evil nemesis, and at one point you find yourself in a tense escape sub-plot. But while the changes are surprising, they’re not jarring, and they integrate with the rest of the story. It’s cool that the characters get to make some less obvious choices, and the story is robust enough not to suffer for it, and to actually be enhanced. And there is still a romantic element, but differently expressed.

The parts would be enough for this book to be worth reading, but it is woven together highly capably. I can’t say there were many places where I was snapped into a strong, visceral reaction, whether of laughter or, say, gasping at some stinging dialogue (and this is probably why I didn’t stretch to the A+), although part of this is the atmosphere of reserve/civility deliberately cultivated in much of both the Japanese and European settings described here.

From beginning to end this was a really satisfying read.

This is a typical David Mitchell performance, but better I think than Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green. The story held my attention, with one notable exception, and much of the book sweeps you along through Mitchell's clever, extremely inventive writing.

The first two hundred pages or so, dealing with Jacob de Zoet's clashes with the thoroughly corrupt functionaries of the Dutch East India Company at Dejima, hard against the city of Nagasaki are informative, entertaining, wickedly funny. I laughed out loud at some of Jacob's interchanges with the learned Dr. Marinus. From what bits I know of Japanese history vis a vis the West from 1600-1850, the book seems tolerably accurate, and vivid to boot.

While Orito's kidnapping and her life in the nunnery interest the reader as well, for this reader the pace bogged down and the plotting was perfunctory at best. Mitchell was constrained to tell us what bad things go on there, but it felt as if he were following a checklist. I also believe the story gets somewhat foggy after we learn the true nature of Orito's feelings regarding Jacob. Without creating a spoiler, I will say that the writer creates an unintentional disparity between Jacob's feelings and what we think he should feel. It is one of the weakest moments in the book. Another is the motivation for Orito's return to the nunnery and her reception there. Unbelievable on any level.

The pace picks up again when the English frigate enters Nagasaki harbor, although the feel here is of an Aubrey-Maturin sea chronicle by Patrick O'Brian. And that is what bothered me most about this very well written book: The mixture of tones and genres. We jump from a rollicking serio-comic adventure story to a Gothic horror tale to the sea yarn, finishing up with a quiet coda worthy of a historical romance.

On top of that, for me at least, Mitchell never goes deep enough to render his work fine art of the highest level. While he touches on some very deep themes he skates lightly over them. As some reviewers and commenters have correctly noted, this book stands a good chance of being seen as ephemeral in the future.

Mitchell has a great deal of talent. Unfortunately he is more a popular entertainer than a great artist. So what is wrong with that? Nothing. Not all writing can or will be great art. I thoroughly enjoyed the entertainment. This is a fun and informative summer read, though not without flaws.

This is not an easy book to read, but it is well worth the effort. Set in Japan in 1799, Jacob de Zout is a young, ambitious and sincere Dutch East Indies clerk determined to make his fortune so that he can marry back in the Netherlands. In this strange world he meets hardened and often unscrupulous employees of the company, Japanese interpreters, and other Dutch merchants out to make their fortunes or on the run from dark pasts. By chance encounter, he meets Orita Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor who is training her as a midwife. The opening chapter of the book presents Orita as the midwife who saves the life of an important concubine to the city of Nagaski's magistrate. The contrast between East and West play out on so many different levels.

There are many characters in this book often called by various names so it can be difficult to follow and the dialogue between the merchants and sailors is sometimes confusing. However, Mitchell is an excellent writer who can create a very exotic setting and environment in which the reader is drawn. The book follows the life of Jacob as intrigue within the company draws out his stay. Eventually, the British arrive determined to take over the trade with Japan and Jacob finds himself at the forefront of this encounter.
The very ending of the book tells of Jacob's final days; an ending not foreseen at the beginning.

David Mitchell is not a slowly-walk-into-the-lake to acclimatize yourself to the water kind of writer. He’s a full throttle polar plunge kind of writer, requiring the reader to fully commit themselves despite knowing what they’re throwing themselves into might shock and hurt.

Jacob de Zoet is no exception. Right up front we get a visceral, icky slice of life from the intersection of Dutch traders and Japanese isolationist government in 1799 where a Japanese midwife attends the birth of a baby whose arm is prolapsed out of the mother while consulting with a doctor through a curtain.

That's our introduction to Orita Aibagawa, the scarred, young student lucky enough to be given permission to study with the isolated Dutch on the island of Dejima off the Nagasaki coast. While the book starts off with Orita, the book actually includes quite a large ensemble cast of characters, with the most important beside Orita, centering around the Dutch Trading Company's members (who are Irish, Prussian, and Dutch) stationed on Dejima.

Among them is Jacob de Zoet, a young clerk whose stubborness and honor will get him into scrape after scrape amid the rampant trade corruption of the Dutch Officers.

Mitchell immerses you in period details-- down to blow-by-blow description of a period gall-stone bladder removal, what sea-tars eat, the formalities of a Japanese beheading, and of course they day to day illnesses, worries, and activities of the isolated Dejima inhabitants.

He also immerses you in backstory. I was almost tempted to rate this 4.5 stars, just because every once in a while I would give a little sigh as one or the other minor character suddenly went off into a soliloquy about their life history-- but in the end had to admit the historical details therein were an interesting sideline.

And then there's the main "crime" of the novel. What I thought was going to be about de Zoet and corruption, ended up being a horrific and bordering-on-insane-uncomfortably-racist crime having to do with a Buddhist Temple, Orita, and various people trying to save her. Can't say much more without spoilage, and truly, the gradual reveal of the goings on Mt. Shiranui make you keep reading. You HAVE to know Orita's fate.

If you're looking for light reading, or fast plots, this is not your book. If you're fascinated with historical fiction and looking to dive deep and soak in characters, philosophy (Mitchell's characters do tend to spout off philosophy at the drop of a hat)and some evil human depravity, then this is your book.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in Japan.

Boring. I didn't make it half way. I tried so hard. The history of the Dutch East India Company was very interesting: What a great backdrop for a novel. However! This wasn't the novel. It was boring. Nothing really happened. The main character wended his way through from an early level to beginning a mid-level career at a job, with all the intrigues this writer could wring from that proposition (I guess), and there was a girl. I really like David Mitchell, but this one lost me completely. There were a few fun facts about the era and the place, but that's it.

Jacob de Zoet is, in large part, a radical departure from the other novels many of us have read by this author. The story, subplots and subtext are tightly contained in Nagasaki Bay and the trading outpost of Dejima. In a way, I felt that the manner in which the story unfolded was a reinforcement of the radical differences between Eastern and Western cultures. The first half markedly slow and ritualized, with inventive politeness and prescribed behaviors; the second a half headlong rush to uncontemplated and unintended horrors.

Were it not for the fact that the story takes place in Japan, one might think of this story as a Greek tragedy, with hubris and deceit at its roots: the mighty fall, the not-so-mighty suffer. Mitchell did not make the mistake of turning this into a novel about geopolitics, painting one culture as inherently good and the other as inherently evil. Though the two cultures express their planning, plotting, deception and mistrust differently, they are both guilty as charged.

And all the while, our hero, Jacob, is just trying to gain enough recognition and earn enough money to marry the woman he loves... that is, until his idea of romanticized love is gutted, replaced by the visceral and forbidden. He is an innocent afloat in a sea of treachery. And there are no lifeboats to be found.

Oddly, I found myself thinking about a similar story from long ago, Shogun.

I am finishing up The Bone Clocks now, and surprisingly two of that book's characters have familial roots planted in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. This actually came as something of a surprise to me, as I had a feeling that Jacob's world would not resurface. I should have known better!

This is a very lyrical book, certainly not designed with speed readers in mind. Take the time to smell the lotus blossoms.

Certainly, the ambitious tales David Mitchell tells, by this his fifth novel, involve dreams, culture clashes, and searches for immortality, creepy or seductive. As parts of "Ghostwritten" and "Cloud Atlas" took place in Asia, so "Number 9 Dream" emerged within Japan. As with "Cloud," a British adventurer and Low Countries contexts appear, and as with "Black Swan Green," a study of an empire at war hovers in the margins, and here these contexts become the center stage, 1800 Nagasaki.

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" follows an ordinary, twenty-something Zeelander clerk in the employ of the Dutch East India Company to Japan, to clean up the books of Dejima, the trading outlet kept apart from the Japanese mainland, an outlet in the harbor, for the rulers strive to keep Christian impacts away, after the natives had eradicated the converts from well over a century earlier (Shusaku Endo's "Silence" powerfully conveys this era, when Portuguese Jesuits tried to colonize the proud islands: I've reviewed Endo's masterpiece, and all of Mitchell's novels, here....)

Mitchell opens this novel with one of two great set-pieces, a childbirth operation and then a removal of a bladder stone, with graphic imagery, tense medical action, and well-elaborated, gruesome details. His research, as with the many stories told by sailors pressed into Dutch service, adds verisimilitude. I admit the title does not seem to apply: "a thousand autumns" sounds nice, but it doesn't match the duration. The pace moves cleanly, and Mitchell as with his other novels does not show off his prose. He employs it diligently to elaborate characters in believable fashion, and he juggles a lot of factual knowledge that must be inserted into the narrative adroitly, although a few scenes find even garrulous sailors or conniving diplomats reciting lengthy explanations that seem to stretch credulity just a bit.

You get to know those on the ship gradually, and like Jacob, you are introduced step-by-step to the predicament faced by the Dutch traders as forces on the mainland and in Britain encircle their outpost. Mitchell keeps the pace of this sprawling historical narrative relatively brisk. The first parts alternate between Jacob and a Ogawa, a Japanese noble, for reasons that I cannot divulge, but which draw in Orito, a midwife, and a mysterious monastery with suitably eerie rituals and menacing presence. Mitchell enjoys the machinations that he sets in motion, and you will too, in a old-fashioned story full of longing, adventure, backstabbing, and court intrigue. While some parts slow down, the latter third, as one key character's fate is left dramatically hanging, opens up more perspectives, such as the slaves, and allows one to see more into both the Japanese setting often left at a distance from the Dutch and the onboard British vessel which enters to complicate matters far more.

It's always fun to trace character lineages from novel to novel in Mitchell. Here, I caught an ancestor of "Number 9" protagonist Eiyi Miyake, a housekeeper from the same island whom Orito knows. Also, Mo Muntervary of "Ghostwritten" finds a Co. Cork ancestor who roams very far from Ireland.

Suffice to say that this remained a lively, often tense, story. I might have trimmed a bit from the final chapter, which felt compressed and rushed, although Mitchell limns mortality well in more than one character's brave fate, and he hones a deft touch which expresses emotion and ethics insightfully. He does not preach, but he lets moral considerations come forward as the characters debate their fates, and he enriches an expansive story when in many parts you have no idea what happens next with a reflection on enduring themes of loyalty, fidelity, aspiration, and determination: always relevant ones.

David Mitchell is a master of the short story form, and has successfully written some amazing novels that stitch together short stories into a fuller narrative. Now for the first time he has moved away from that form and written his masterpiece - a thoroughly well researched, engrossing and captivating narrative that follows the lives of a group of Dutch East India men as they trade in Japan at the close of the 18th and start of the 19th centuries. This was the fateful time of the end of the Dutch East India company, and for a while, of the state that gave it birth. This was the period where a small man made island in the Nagasaki bay became the only outpost to fly the Dutch flag as Napoleon annexed their homeland.

Against this rich historical background, and using the author's love for Japan, and some impeccable research into the history of the period, we have a tale that is every bit as engrossing as that other classic - "Shogun". But this is not a derivative work of that one. This book stands in its own right. It is semi biographical, as many of the characters in the story are historical figures, some of the events are real events and Jacob de Zoet is almost certainly derived from the memoirs of one or more real Dutch East India men.

I loved David Mitchell's "Black Swan Green", but this book is really the one where he has shown his full breadth of talent. The author's talent for original metaphor is more understated in this text - less pretentious, but still powerful. His characterisations are just as rich, his story is involved and interesting and all in all he has written a book that deserves to be a classic. Thoroughly recommended.

Like Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas", "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" is a novel that, as a whole, is greater than the sum of its parts. The narrative is fairly loose and switches perspectives frequently, sometimes giving entire chapters or long sections to minor characters. While this allows Mitchell to demonstrate his storytelling skills, it also makes it difficult to focus on the central conceit of the novel. It's only in the last fifty pages or so that the whole story seems to come together, and only after the book is finished that it can be fully appreciated.

Historical fiction is a difficult genre, especially for a time and place unfamiliar to most readers, but Mitchell mostly pulls it off. To his credit, Mitchell resists the regurgitate-all-my-research impulse and instead uses the characters' backstories and interactions to give his novel a sense of time and place. On the other hand, Mitchell seems to have intentionally chosen hard-to-manage names for his characters, a problem usually reserved for middling science fiction authors struggling to populate an alien world. While a world peppered with Dutch and Japanese characters is bound to cause pronunciation problems for English-speaking readers, even the Irish and English characters are given unwieldy names.

Otherwise, aside from minor problems with pacing and focus, "the Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" is an impressive work and highly recommended.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is David Mitchell's most straight forward novel to date. He eschews the multiple, loosely connected narratives for a more cohesive tale with fewer voices. It is brilliantly written, (I believe Mitchell is one of the very best of his generation), and snippets of genius can be found over and over again in his prose.

I enjoyed very much the fact that the novel is set in a unique period of history, about which not much fiction (to my knowledge) has been written. The story begins in 1799 in a still very isolationist Japan whose only real dealings with the outside world are with the aging Dutch empire via an East Indies Trading Company that is in decline. The Dutch live on Dejima, a man made island, and only a select few of them even set foot on Japanese soil, so strict are the policies of isolation. We meet Jacob de Zoet, an honest, young, Dutch clerk who is serving 5 years with the company to try and build enough wealth to be allowed to marry the woman whom he loves back in Holland. It doesn't take long before he realizes this is no ordinary business assignment, and his ethics are challenged by both his fellow countrymen, and the Japanese with whom the company deals. In addition, Jacob meets and is smitten with an exceptionally bright and kind young Japanese woman (Orito Aibigawa) who has been allowed, under strict supervision and conditions, to study medicine with Dejima's Dutch doctor. Jacob begins to question his life plan, and wonders if he should risk making some kind of a life with Ms. Aibigawa, and our story begins to unfold.

The novel is beautifully and brilliantly written and I enjoyed it for the journey as much or more than I did the destination. It provides many exercises in thought, and a look into human condition through the eyes of many interesting characters from around the world. I strongly recommend this book to any lover of good fiction.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the fifth novel by award-winning British author, David Mitchell, who classifies it as historical fiction. Jacob de Zoet is a young Dutch clerk, a Zeelander working for the Dutch East India Company, on a five-year clerical post to Java, where he hopes to make his fortune in order to marry his Dutch sweetheart. He arrives in Nagasaki with the new Chief Resident-elect of Dejima, an island enclave to which the Dutch traders are confined. Soon after his arrival, he encounters a young Japanese midwife with whom he promptly falls in love. Mitchell slowly and carefully crafts his plot to reach a dramatic climax. Mitchell's potted histories of his characters contribute to their depth and appeal, as well as developing the plot. His dialogue sounds genuine, especially the rendering of translated language. Mitchell gives the reader a fascinating peek into the world that was European trade with Japan in the late 18th century. This was a world filled with corruption, bribery, execution and religious persecution. De Zoet learns the diplomacy and the political tactics necessary in dealing with the Japanese, and that men of honour and integrity are few and far between. This novel makes the historical facts, which might have been dry and unpalatable, interesting and easy to assimilate. De Zoet is loosely based on Hendrick Doeff, one of Dejima's real Chief Residents. Mitchell does bend a few historical facts: the incident on which the climax is based actually happened somewhat later; the reference by characters in 1799 to the mass eradication of Tasmanian aborigines is premature; nonetheless, this does not detract from the novel in any way. Some of the prose is truly beautiful: Mitchell manages to be quite lyrical about clouds and weather; there are also several charming illustrations. This is a brilliant novel and easily the best I have read in a long time.

After finishing the author "Cloud Atlas", I had to snatch up another title of his to read, ASAP. This novel is more linear, in contrast to he Matroushka-layout of "Cloud Atlas", although it has its surprises and shifts, shocking you the same way each layer of "Cloud Atlas" did.. I don't normally read historical fiction, but I was confident David Mitchell could reel me in. What I didn't expect was how funny it was, like Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. What I also didn't expect was the amazing change in voice when we get to Orito, about as accomplished as Iain Pears' Instance of the Fingerpost. Through Jacob, we see Orito as a typical Japanese female of the day, trying to become educated and communicating in a second tongue. Shifting to her voice at the beginning of Part Two, we know her true inner self, and can still, through David Mitchell's mastery, reconcile her with how we perceived her at the beginning. Also, with the "Japanese" voice, poetic descriptions alternate with dialogue, sometimes every other line, never jarring but seamless.

The voice shift was unexpected, and so was the humor throughout the book.. Some of it literally of the gallows kind. And, alongside this are harsh realities, like those presented in Cloud Atlas. I prefer my atrocities understated, and non-sentimental, presented not by the author's take on morality, but in the scope of the character committing, observing or experiencing them, true to themselves. I find these things more impactful this way, David Mitchell's way, than when someone gets on a soapbox.

I wish I knew how accurate the research was, but it's still amazing how facts can be brought to life into story. Also, the dialogue seems pitch-perfect for the day, but not as cold as one might think. Before I encountered quality novels, movies, etc. that took place in a another time period, I found the dialogue so formal, or clever, but cold. Authors like David Mitchell can show you how these mannerisms were necessary, a lens through which anyone respectable must act. And, yet, he simultaneously reveals the base instincts and desires inside anyone, allowing us to relate.

So why not five stars. The descriptions alternating frequently with dialogue were not as seamless as they could be, and Orito's story cuts off and then finishes at the end unsatisfactorily. (not in plot, but in execution) RECOMMENDED for fans of David Mitchell, Across the Nightingale Floor, and excellent fiction.

“Hatless and broiling in his blue dress coat, Jacob de Zoet is thinking of a day ten months ago, when a vengeful North Sea charged the dikes of Domburg, and spindrift tumbled along Church Street, past the parsonage where his uncle presented him with an oiled canvas bag. It contained a scarred Psalter bound in deerskin, and Jacob can, more or less, reconstruct his uncle’s speech from memory.”

I would describe The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet as fascinating historical fiction meets the Man Booker Prize. While this particular novel didn’t actually win the prize, Mitchell’s writing has been nominated for many prizes, including the Man Booker. What I mean by this description is that you must read carefully, because not only is there beauty and eloquence in Mitchell’s writing style, but much can be interpreted here. “The Thousand Autumns” refers to the land of Japan, and the setting of this novel is Japan in the year 1799. The Dutch have ventured here to establish a trading partner, and they have found a Japan with a culture not as advanced as the Europeans who try to court them. In addition, they discover culture that is steeped in tradition and superstition.

Jacob de Zoet is a clerk from Holland, sent to Dejima in the Nagasaki Harbor. He is engaged to a young woman back home. Her father has promised his daughter’s hand only if Mr. de Zoet spends five years abroad, earning his fortune. While in Japan, the clerk becomes enamored of a Japanese midwife who is studying European style medicine. As the young woman becomes sold to a questionable shrine, Jacob life is turned upside down when he learns the horrible secret of the shrine. Also, in the midst of this turmoil, there is political upheaval at home, which finally touches their world in Japan.

There are several themes addressed in this novel, from power to subjectation, to religion and superstition. There were times when I felt the novel slowed to the point of boredom for me, but then it would pick up again and keep me enthralled. Despite the occasional “doldrum”, there is much to be lauded about this book.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet By David Mitchell
4 Stars

The titled character, Jacob de Zoet, is sent to Dejima in 1799 for a period of five years. He goes originally to win the favor of his sweethearts father so that he may return successful and marry her. Dejima is a created island that is the Japanese's single port and really their only touch with world affairs. They are very much steeped in tradition, power and oppression. Jacob goes there as a clerk for the Dutch East Indies Company; he is to check the books and make sure all is right.

Shortly after Jacob's arrival he learns quite a few things. There is vast corruption that does not pay to uncover, tremendous power in a small few and oppressing tradition all around. Jacob meets a woman named Orito Aibagawa who is a beautiful albeit scarred daughter of a samurai and midwife to a magistrate of Dejima. Jacob is entranced and his far off love all but forgotten. The rules of protocol make anything further virutally impossible. Orito is lucky to even be allowed on Dejima as any females there are "wives" and courteseans only which makes her even more off limits. The role of women in Japan is a very specific one at this point in time and Orito is attempting to break all the rules.

What follows is a lot of love and hate, oppression, corruption, tradition, history, intrigue and much more. There is a lot going on in this novel. Characters change and grow and are tested to their very limits. I think Mitchell did a good job of keeping all of this straight and incorporating the history of the time.

This was my second go round for this, the audio was just too much and I did not get very far. I was missing out on a lot so when I started it in print it caught me. The beginning grabbed me this time and then I got into the historical/social aspects of the story. What I thought was absolutely boring was not this time. Which really surprised me given the subject matter that I normally am not at all interested in. The society, class structures and pomp and circumstance pulled me in. It was nitty gritty and made me thankful I did not have to live through something like that. Of course I would have been burned at the stake long before for my red hair or died in child birth so I guess it's not all so bad.

I did feel that some parts were a little slower. The business aspects were a bit much sometimes. Having read two of his other novels that did not bother me because they are all tied together in some way. Mitchell's separations can be jarring, but end up being part of the bigger picture. I do wish there had been more on Ogawa and Orito but I was ok that there wasn't.

Overall this book has stuck with me and I am glad that I gave it another chance. Can't wait to see what Mr. Mitchell has in store for us next. He is unique and has an extraordinary imagination with real creative ingenuity.

Wow. David Mitchell writes about subjects as varied as 1980's England, to futuristic Korea, to- 1799 Japan. And he crafts this excellent novel just as well as Cloud Atlas, a book which I loved. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is indeed, about a Dutch clerk named Jacob de Zoet in Japan. He is seeking to earn wealth to win Anna, his fiancee back in Holland. But then he meets Orito Aibagawa, a midwife with a strange burn across her face (much like the comet shaped birthmark in Cloud Atlas) and everything changes. He is irrationally fascinated by her. He forgets everything else he's come to Japan for, even proposing marriage. Then Orito gets sent to a harsh convent when her father dies.

The first 200 pages or so are narrated from Jacob's perspective. Then, it shifts to Orito (mainly). This book is very suspenseful; it took me several days to read it, but only because I was busy doing homework and transferring reviews to Goodreads (which is awesome, by the way). But I really wanted to finish it sooner.

I loved the setting; I don't know much about 18-19th century Japan, but it felt real to me, that's for sure. It was really interesting to see the different political shifts going on between the Dutch and the Japanese. They have a tenuous relationship; Japan isn't a colony of the Dutch, not really. It's complicated, and the tension there just adds to the book's drama. The Japanese and Dutch names are a bit confusing, but I recognized each person when they appeared in the scene, even if I couldn't tell you their exact name.

I didn't really understand Jacob's fascination with Orito; sure, she's a really smart woman, but I guess that's the whole point: it's an irrational infatuation, though it's also deeper than that, more spiritual, I guess you could say. The characters are all really complex; you can sympathize with most of them (except for Abbot Enomoto, that is).

There's also a lot of medical stuff in the book; one of the main characters is a rather cynical doctor (loved that character too.) There are some more graphic parts, just to warn you. Also, some of the stuff at the religious temple were really awful: the women are forced to be "gifted". Another sad example of religion gone terribly wrong. It was really disturbing.

I loved the title, though you don't really get it until later in the book. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet skilfully blends history and fiction together to create a mesmerizing novel.

My book review blog is at novareviews.blogspot.com.

David Mitchell's latest novel is a remarkable achievement. It is deeply satisfying on almost every level. Highly recommended.

As an historical novel, its action takes place at the turn of the 19th century, illuminating a period in which the West was beginning to engage the closed Japanese empire, while meanwhile Europe was itself convulsed in revolution & global war. The principal character is a dutiful accountant, a minor factotum working for the Dutch East India Corporation who is assigned to an obscure trading outpost just off-shore in Nagasaki, where the action unfolds.

Mitchell's novel weaves elements of adventure, suspense, pathos, and erudition into a fascinating story. All the literary arts of an accomplished writer are also on display. He mixes styles & narrators skillfully, incorporating disparate Dutch, English and Japanese characters & exotic Japanese locales. It is a skillful performance throughout; he rarely hits a false note. It is both a very readable book, but also quite ambitious in scope. The clash of cultures theme is, of course, both relevant and timely and universal.

Jacob de Zoet is a somewhat unlikely hero, but his adventures are nevertheless quite memorable. There is no way a mere recital of the plot can do this masterly novel justice, and I certainly would not want to act in any way as a spoiler, so I won't try to summarize the narrative arc any further. Suffice to say that its ample pleasures are also very accessible. I did struggle a bit in the initial chapters to get all the major and minor Dutch and Japanese players de Zoet interacts with upon arrival straight, which is actually an effect that I believe Mitchell intends so as to mirror the protagonist's own unsettling experiences in his initial encounters with "the Other."

I have enjoyed several of Mitchell's earlier books, especially Cloud Atlas: A Novel, which is also an admirable achievement (with distinct strcutural echoes of Calvino's post-modernist classic If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (Everyman's Library Classics)...). This is a far better book than Cloud Atlas, however.

Jacob de Zoet has some antecedents, too. There are echoes of Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon: A Novel and the naval entertainments The Complete Aubrey/Maturin Novels by Patrick O'Brien. But "Jacob de Zoet" is far richer than a mere genre novel and contains significantly more coherent storytelling than Pynchon ever strives for. Some of the literary pyrotechnics that were on display in Cloud Atlas are here, too, but here they serve the story and never detract from it.

I can't resist singling out one roman a clef - de Zoet's recitation and explication to his Japanese hosts of the myth of Phoebus Apollo & Phaeton in the climax of the novel. It is just one high point among many in this richly, rewarding book.

I look forward to what David Mitchell does next. Wow, this guy is good!

This is a historical novel of a little-known place and time, and one only wonders how Mitchell ever came to pick this setting. It takes place in 1799 on Dejima, a small island in Nagasaki Harbor in Japan, headquarters of the Dutch East India Trading Company, Japan's only contact with the Western world. The hero is a young Dutch clerk, Jacob De Zoet, who has come to make enough money in five years to marry his sweetheart back in Holland. With a very Dickens-like cast of characters and plot, the novel includes a flawed hero, an intelligent young woman in distress, various self-serving petty villains, and one truly monstrous evil villain, who eventually receives his just punishment. We have betrayals with long-lasting consequences and heroic sacrifices. Along the way we get a smattering of history and Japanese culture, but this is mainly an engaging story of human beings attempting to find honor and happiness, which could have taken place any time, any place.

The dust jacket says that Mitchell did "prodigious research" to write this book, so I presume it is historically accurate, but that is almost beside the point. The value of this book lies in its plot, which is absorbing; in its dialogue, which is so well done that each character has a different "voice"; and in its narration, which is inventive and original. His inclusion of small descriptive sections in the form of traditional Japanese poetry was an interesting addition.

This book confirms my opinion that David Mitchell is the most talented novelist writing today.

I tried to read this book awhile back, gave up and then recently took it out of the library in audio form. This time I listened to half of the 19 hour narrative and decided to go back to reading it. It was definitely difficult to wade through the cultural aspects of Dejima but the audio actually helped me to follow who the characters were and the pronunciation when I went back to print. That being said, I had to to have the ability to skim pages as the text was so dense in parts that I found myself wavering on ever completing the audio version. All in all, I'm glad that I got through it. The author clearly did a tremendous amount of research and should be commended for that. It did seem to have way too many story lines going on - love story, evil cults, sea challenges, rescues, historical details. I would have appreciated just one or two themes, not the whole shebang.

Talented authors of historical fiction have the gift of immersing the reader into the novel's world--evoking sights, sounds, smells. The really good ones can draw on the cultural subconscious and make the reader understand the beliefs, prejudices and scope of a bygone age. There are a few I would classify as geniuses. Those artists make the reader experience the novel through the eyes of the characters, sharing long forgotten conventions and conversational patterns. David Mitchell is a genius.

Jacob de Zoet is immersive to the point one returns only reluctantly to the contemporary world. The prose is haunting and beautiful. The reader experiences the very exotic and strange world in which the devout and ambitions Jacob finds himself through his 18th century Dutch eyes. It's amazing.

Part adventure story, part character study, Jacob de Zoet is all fascinating and rich in detail. The characters are vivid; the action suspenseful and thrilling. The stakes are high and the consequences steep.

While a little slow to get going, the first section is necessary to get inside the novel, so that the reader fully understands the culture shock Jacob experiences and the dilemmas it creates as he makes the choices that drive the novel. Once past the first section, it becomes a page turner, and on several evenings I stayed up way too late reading because I wanted to know what happened next. Highly recommended!

There are so many wonderful reviews of `The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,' that I simply cannot do this book justice by yet another glowing review. Allow me this much: If you enjoy reading a great adventure novel with fabulously evocative prose, then I do believe that you will find this novel to be a fine one. It evokes a specific period of time, people and place.

When the reader starts this novel, he/she is immediately brought to 1799 Japan. I was fascinated by David Mitchell's skills in describing Jacob's reaction to the people around him. One can see the people teeming the streets, as well as the smells of some foods together with sewage.

Mitchell provides a great deal of historical detail. If you enjoy learning about a country's history, you will like/love this book.
Readers might be interested to know that the structure of this book seems to be in three parts. At first, I found this confounding. After some time, I learned that, with patience, I had a book before me that took me on an adventure which was quite different and wonderful for me.

Shortly after its publication, "The Economist" dismissed it, suggesting that once again David Mitchell had not fulfilled his promise despite a promising beginning and satisfying ending. But the reviewer failed to describe and qualify the richness of its almost 600 pages arranged into 5 parts and 41 chapters. Were they boring, were they bland? Poor judgment! The swish of the cane and the crack of the whip for this lazy reviewer.
In my humble opinion David Mitchell's tome of 600+ pages is a true masterpiece. It is based on solid research on 17th and 18th century Japan, on the history and final year of the VOC (Dutch East Asia Company), on the state of various sciences (economics, medicine, botany, pharmacology), on the art of diplomacy in Japan, and on the 150-year old history of Deshima (the VOC's trade post island linked to Nagasaki by a tightly-guarded stone bridge, the islet itself infiltrated and controlled by Japan's bureaucracy). It is also a love story, a triangle even between straight-laced Dutch VOC-clerk Jacob de Zoet, Japanese translator (3rd class) Uzaemon Ogawa, who are both about 26 years old and who both fancy the young, facially-disfigured but brilliant midwife Oriko, who aspires to become a surgeon.
The novel's length and contents suits the 18th or 19th century better than the 21st. After all, half of mankind is now constantly checking its mobile phones and other social networks for messages other than the release of a 600+ page novel. This awesome novel is about heavenly and earthly themes, such as fighting for or opposing traditions of science and religion, race and rank, high birth and low origins. Its principal venues are 2 very small, tightly-controlled territories the size of a football field: Deshima and the secretive Buddhist convent of Shiranui, where a strange insemination cult is practiced and to which Oriko is abducted and kept against her will. At times this novel reminds of another masterpiece situated in confined space, Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose".
This well-guarded convent is situated high up in the mountains of a thinly populated district, several days travel from Nagasaki and controlled by the immortal and powerful Enomoto, wearer of many hats. Separately, Jacob and Uzaemon feel terrible about Oriko's fate. When they drop their formal ways of address and other protocols, they conspire to rescue her...
Most of DM's book is situated in 1799 and 1800, but eventually it ends in 1817. It is a rich product of fact and imagination and somehow it contains five or six books in one volume. DM's sheer joy of writing inspires every page. It introduces and follows a dozen or more truly interesting characters, infuses lots of intrigue and plenty of twists and turns for readers who enjoy spending a few weeks with a very inspired and warm piece of writing.

Purely by accident and only a month ago, I read the late Michael Chrichton's 2009 novel "Pirate Latitudes". A comparison between the two books is opportune but beyond the scope of this review.
David Mitchell's novel is highly recommended.

David Mitchell is one of my favorite authors, so I was very eager to read his latest novel when it came out. Once I started it, though, I had such a hard time getting into it that I didn't come back to it for several months.

One of my favorite things about other David Mitchell books is the way he is able to write a novel of loosely connected stories and make it feel cohesive. In his previous works, I've never struggled with the shifts from one story to another, because I've found each so interesting. This novel seems like it should be more cohesive given that it follows several key characters throughout, but somehow I found the pace and flow somewhat impeded by the transitions between major sections.

The book is mostly divided into three main sections (with two short ones tagged on at the end). About halfway through the first section, I started getting interested, but it wasn't until near the end of the first section that I was really drawn in. Then, the second section makes an abrupt shift, and we don't hear much about the main character for about 150+ pages. The second section, however, was the only part of the book that grabbed me early on and kept me turning pages until the end. The third section eventually returns us to the main character but in a storyline mostly unrelated to the earlier parts of the book. The third section eventually drew me in too, but I kept waiting for the link back to the earlier parts of the story.

Despite my complaints about the flow of the story, I did enjoy the novel. As with everything I've read by him, each section of the book is beautifully written. The book has got a huge cast of interesting characters, great details about a culture I knew little about, some gripping suspense (once you get into it), and several surprising plot twists. I have huge admiration for David Mitchell, and I applaude his effort to tackle a large historical novel like this. I would definitely recommend this novel to fans of Mitchell. For those new to him, I'd recommend Cloud Atlas: A Novel or Ghostwritten.

(4.5 stars) David Mitchell's past work, full of literary excitement, is famous for its originality and experimentation, so this novel will be a surprise to many of his long-time fans. Here, Mitchell creates an epic historical novel set in Nagasaki at the turn of the 19th century, when the Dutch East India Company was Nagasaki's only trading partner. Using an unusual (for him) third person point of view and a straight chronology which begins in 1799 and ends in 1817, Mitchell introduces Jacob de Zoet, a young Dutch seaman who is trying to earn enough money to marry his Dutch sweetheart; a pioneering Dutch physician; a scarred Japanese woman who has become a brilliant midwife; a samurai magistrate; a venal Japanese abbot in charge of a home-grown monastery; an ape named William Pitt, and an assortment of dishonest traders as they engage in the hurly-burly world of Nagasaki trade.

The result is Mitchell's most unusual novel. Many of the biggest traders from the Dutch East India Company, have been creating personal fortunes by deceiving not only their Japanese hosts but the Dutch East India Company itself. Clerk Jacob de Zoet has been assigned to straighten out the company's books, a job which does not win him friends among his shipmates. Many of the traders are no more civilized in their personal relationships than in their business dealings, as their treatment of the Spanish and African crew reveals, and de Zoet forms his closest relationships with the Japanese: Ogawa Uzaemon, an interpreter of the first rank, and Abaigawa Orito, a woman whose face is scarred but whose brilliance has been recognized by Dr. Marinus, a physician and scholar who is training her in medicine. Together they provide de Zoet with a life, and he is soon in love with Orito.

Part II shifts the focus to the inhabitants of a remote monastery on Mount Shiranui, ruled by an abbot whose sadism knows no bounds. The women there, all poor, are imprisoned, forced to live according to a bizarre code. When de Zoet's interpreter, Ogawa, hears what is happening there, he and a samurai friend set out to liberate the monastery, which allows Mitchell to explore other aspects of the culture, the samurai tradition, the changing loyalties of friends, and the difficulty of creating change in a traditional society in which connections to powerful people are the key to action. Part III brings the British into the trading equation when the Phoebus, flying a Dutch flag to disguise its intentions, enters and tries to take over the port. Part IV, which takes place in 1811, and Part V, which takes place in 1817, continue the story of the Dutch traders who have remained in Japan and resolves the issues in their personal lives.

Mitchell seems determined to give the reader absolutely everything s/he could want in a historical novel--an enormous cast of characters (many of them stereotypes), lively action, exotic settings, fantastic description, unusual events, struggles between good and evil, battles, tragedies, and even some humor. Setting the novel at a time in which both Japan and the west are experiencing major intellectual and political changes, he also deals with important themes--referring to new learning, new ideas, new weapons of warfare, new types of government, and new views of economics. Unfortunately, Mitchell does not develop all this smoothly and bring it all together. It's a hodgepodge that keeps the reader hopping to stay abreast of what is happening on many fronts at the same time. As hodgepodges go, however, it's really good, and it does overcome some of its structural weaknesses by keeping the reader completely entertained throughout. Mary Whipple

Cloud Atlas: A Novel
Ghostwritten
Black Swan Green: A Novel

It goes without saying this book is masterfully written. The characters are rich and diverse, each with his or her own unique voice. The description invokes the senses, so much so that the reader feels he or she is right there in historical Japan. Unfortunately, however, the book didn't always hold my interest, and I found the point-of-view (POV) character changes jarring. The reader spends the first chunk of the book seeing the world from Jacob's POV, and then suddenly we're thrust into another character's mind (Orito). Granted, it's an intriguing mind, but I didn't feel her story was adequately finished before switching to yet more POV characters, one as far as on page 326. To try to identify with a new character this far into a novel is asking a lot of a reader. I was so tied up in the previous character's tale, that I didn't want to let go and enter another's. Yes, things get tied up together in the end, but not really in the way I would have liked. I certainly recommend the book for fans of historical fiction, but be prepared for some confusion along the way.

Quick Version:

Jacob De Zoet, an inconsequential clerk, hopes to make his fortune in Japan and return to the Netherlands to marry his sweetheart. But life on Dejima, the Dutch trading post in early 19th Century Nagasaki harbor, does not always follow the chosen path of her inhabitants.

Long Version:

A bright young man, Jacob De Zoet was fairly certain of his ability to make a fortune and a reputation working for the Dutch East India trading company on Dejima, their island trading enclave in Nagasaki harbor, thereby rendering him acceptable to the father of the girl he wants to marry.

Jacob is a very solid character; he stands strong in his integrity-to the point of injuring his future prospects and rendering his fictional self an almost unbelievable character. Author David Mitchell does a good job sketching a stable, solid character, but Jacob is so righteous that I had trouble accepting him. He is clearly shown to be a very religious man-however, no man is perfect, and Jacob would have felt a bit more credible had he been a bit more flawed.

In its historical feel, the book reminded me a lot of James Clavell's Shogun, although certainly not as broad in scope; Thousand Autumns paints a vivid picture of the time and place in which it is set.

While I was disappointed in the characterization of Jacob, I must admit that the plot does not follow a predictable path, either in his life nor in the lives of his fellows. Some aspects of the plot I found unbelievable, some I loved for how well they wove Japanese culture into the framework of the book, and some simply did not leave me feeling fulfilled (in other words, did not resolve the way I wanted them to resolve).

I chose, based upon several recommendations, to listen to this one on audio; I had been well advised to do so. Narrators Jonathan Aris and Paula Wilcox both do an excellent job breathing life into their subjects. Overall, this is a solid piece of historical fiction which gets my recommendation both as a novel and as a riveting audio performance. It will definitely have me seeking out other works by David Mitchell.

If you've ever wondered what life might be like in the trading village on the man made island off the coast of Nagasaki during Japan's 265 year seclusion, and you like poetic narratives in your fiction, this is a book for you.

Author David Mitchell envisions a multi-cultural pecking order composed of traders, servants, slaves, comfort women, clerks, translators, overseers and a science academy. He paints what could be a realistic possibility of what this isolated culture might be like, so it was a surprise to see "acknowledgements" on p. 481 listing only European sources.

The plots and sub-plots relating to the traders, their self dealing and the prohibitions that they lived under are excellent. The author sets his larger story side by side with the action and dialog of daily life. There is a strict demarcation of people both with Europeans (and their associates from Africa and Asia) on their island and the Japanese on the mainland.

The prose can be downright poetic (p. 127 "The sun is now gone, cicadas fall silent, lilacs and tortoises dim and thin into grays and darker grays. p. 291 ... and a wren of a boy with a gash for an eye is opening his cupped palms.) Poems of one-liners sometimes tell the story. Thoughts are put in italics, sometimes along with speech and/or the narrative. These two techniques can sometimes twine nicely. Pages p. 169 and 433 are two examples among many.

The book is so wonderful, and its work of imagination so striking, you wonder how the subplot of the goddess cult got in. This segment, which may take 100 pages, does tie into the story, but the convent's rituals are too bizarre for a book based on real events. There are a lot of plot shifts and long digressions whle some major pieces of the plot need more back story (i.e. the relationship of Jacob D Zoet and Captain Penhagilon for one).

At almost 500 pages reading this is a commitment, so I recommend this only for those interested in this author or this period in Japanese history.

For those interested in non-fiction of this period, I recommend the non-fiction biographies of Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan and a Native American in the Land of the Shogun: Ranald MacDonald and the Opening of Japan.

I loved Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, for its invention, its haunting imagery, and its wonderfully varied collection of characters and voices. However, it was more a series of thematically-linked vignettes than a true novel. In The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeSoet, Mitchell puts his undeniable imagination and talent to work in a more traditional work of long fiction. All in all, much of what I enjoyed most about Cloud Atlas -- the colorful characters and their unique vocabularies and mannerisms, the historically-based but somewhat fanciful quality of the writing, the posing of deeper questions about human morality and relationships -- is here in this book. Anyone who's a fan of David Mitchell won't be disappointed.

That said, I think what worked well so well in Cloud Atlas's loose pastiche doesn't expand perfectly into a longer story. For all Mitchell's skill as a writer, the larger plot arc is somewhat pedestrian, and the three parts of the tale join a bit awkwardly. Interesting characters and examinations of issues fill the reader's attention for a while, then disappear for whole chapters, if not the rest of the book. I wondered if the work had started out as a collection of short vignettes and episodes, a la Cloud Atlas, but had been turned into a novel. Also, Mitchell wears his political leanings a bit on his sleeve at times -- there's a strong cynicism to his portrayal of capitalism and its authority figures.

But, these issues are minor next to the sheer mastery of the writing. There are brilliant, beautiful passages and scenes. The dialogues and interactions between various characters are filled with wit, humor, and subtlety. Even if the lines Mitchell puts into their turn-of-the-19th-century mouths use a bit of 21st century artistic license, his sea captains, petty officers, salt-of-the-earth sailors, samurai, doctors, magistrates, and translators are entirely convincing. Obviously, much research went into the novel. Even if the whole felt segmented to me, each segment is engrossing. One is never sure what will happen next, or to whom, and by the time the story nears its climax, only the most jaded reader, I think, will be able to put the book down. The melancholic ending almost had me tearing up.

Is The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeSoet as imaginative and daring a work as Cloud Atlas? No. Is it as exquisitely written? Yes.

Audio note: the reader does a generally fine job with the personalities and accents of the various European characters. However, I found his choice to give British accents to different Japanese characters (whenever the narrative is from a Japanese viewpoint) a little disconcerting.

"The belly craves food, . . ., the tongue craves water, the heart craves love, and he mind craves stories." So thinks Aibagawa Orito, the heroine of David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet," a book that more than satisfies that last craving.

The year is 1799. Jacob de Zoet is a 25-year Dutchman, the nephew of a pastor, who is serving a five-year stint as a clerk in the Dutch East Indies Company, attempting to earn a sufficient fortune to be worthy of marrying the beautiful Anna who waits for him in Holland. De Zoet's posting is Dejima, a small manmade island in the harbor of Nagasaki, and the only trading port for Shogun-era Japan, a society that is tightly and self-consciously closed to the rest of the world. But Japan is far away from Holland, and de Zoet finds himself falling in love with Miss Aibagawa, a talented midwife who has been granted permission to study under a Dutch doctor on Dejima. When her father dies, she is taken to a nunnery high on a mountain several days away, which turns out to be the home of a cult that observed very unusual, and horrific, practices. Much of the book deals with an elaborate attempt to rescue Aibagawa made by Ogawa Uzeamo, one of the translators working in Dejima.

Woven into this broad plot are dozens of other memorable stories told by the many characters in this wonderful book. They range from brief but powerful tale of the cook Arie Grote about how he was tricked into joining the Dutch East Indies Company, to the story which constitutes about the last quarter of the book, of the gout-plagued British Caption Penhaligon, who aims to have the British take over from the Dutch as the trading partners of Japan. Mitchell's brilliance come through in writing a book that has so many characters, most with foreign names, and so many subplots, yet is still eminently readable.

Parts of this book are hilariously funny, parts are horribly gruesome, parts of achingly sad, and parts are strikingly beautiful: not be missed is his description in rhyming prose, of a daytime scene in Nagasaki, which occurs at the beginning of Chap. 39. Nearly all of it is deeply perceptive, providing insights on topics ranging from the challenges of translating between languages--a major theme in the book--to the nature of loyalty and courage.

Mitchell's writing is pure genius and his earlier books, especially "Cloud Atlas," are amongst my favorites. I can think of few other authors who could write an historical novel about 18th century international trade, and make it both so meaningful and so much fun.

Off the shore of the Japanese island of Kyushu, just opposite Nagasaki, the artificial, fan-shaped prison-island, Dejima, is the trading post of the Dutch East India Company. In 1799, at the beginning of David Mitchells novel "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet", the Dutch are not allowed to set foot on mainland, and their contact with Japan is provided through the interpreters. The interpreters rank high in the Japanese hierarchy, but they are controlled by the magistrate, who, in turn, is officially under the orders of the Shogun, but also under the powerful influence of Abbott Enomoto.

The dramatic opening chapter of the novel immediately captivates the reader and introduces the main female character, Orito Aibagawa, a young woman with her face disfigured by a burn, who is a skilled midwife. She is summoned to help deliver the magistrate's son.

From then on, Orito is allowed to study Western medicine together with a handful of Japanese men with Dr. Marinus on Dejima. She is the only exception to the rule forbidding respectable women to enter Dejima. One day, a young Dutch clerk, Jacob de Zoet, sees Oriti, and from that moment, he cannot forget her. Dreaming about their future relationship, Jacob draws Orito and sends her messages (unaware that his confidante, interpreter Ogawa Uzaemon, loves her, too). He is devastated when he witnesses Orito's departure from Nagasaki to the convent in the mountains after her father's death - a deal with Enomoto.

The gossip about the convent's macabre mission gains momentum when Orito is there. She discovers many secrets... In parallel, the proof of the goings-on at the convent and temple reaches Dejima, setting in motion a chain of events leading to the next meeting of Orito and Jacob. The world events, the rise of Napoleon and the shuffling of colonial powers in the East, greed and honor are the forces playing in concert to change the existing order at Dejima.

David Mitchell has done a great job with yet another novel, proving himself an accomplished writer. He has done a great deal of meticulous research, and as aresult, the historical background is the perfect mix of reality and fiction. The great number of diverse characters does not make any of them papery - they are real, flesh and blood people, complex and imperfect. Jacob and Orito are very likeable, intelligent and good-natured, yet not free from faults and errors. Although the main events in the plot cover only two years, it is a marvelous epic. It is a rich historical novel, a romance, a social novel, all in one - superbly written.

Japan seems to be a bottomless source of inspiration for writers, its mystery and defense against the outside influence providing great stories. "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" is one of such stories, a delight for the most demanding reader.

This novel goes behind the facts you learnt in Australian history about the Dutch East India Company sailing along our Western coast, often with tragic outcomes. And here we have the inside story of one employee of this company in the late 18th Century, attached to one of its remote operations off the Japanese coast. Jacob's life makes the reader become absorbed in what it must have like to work there in that time because it is so vividly told.

In creating "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" David Mitchell brings to life a Japan in the age of its declining Shogunate and the beginning of European trade expansion in rich detail. Mitchell gets high praise for his research into 18th and 19th century Dutch history and medical practices as well as the closed, mysterious society of medieval Japan. As in other historical fiction not all the dates, persons, or events are entirely accurate but that is not a real concern for fiction placed in an historical setting. Poetic-historical license it might be called. This is an engrossing and extraordinarily well-written novel.

The basic story is that Jacob de Zoet, a young, redheaded clerk of the Dutch East Indies Company leaves his home and Anna, the girl he is too poor to marry. With youthful confidence Jacob sets off to make his fortune. He hopes to win her father over so he can marry her when he returns in three years. Jacob arrives to live at the Dutch trading colony on a secured island near the city of Nagasaki in 1799. His vibrant hair alone makes him stand out among the other island residents. He leaves Nagasaki harbor by ship in November 1817. What happens during those eighteen years and through the over 450 pages of well-written prose--writing that sometimes reads like poetry--is the story of this admirable hero, Jacob de Noet and ancient Japan.
As in any good story danger, romance, treachery, betrayals, heroic love, beauty and ugliness--each finely described, abound to move the plot along. These cannot help but provide contrasts within the meetings between Japanese and Dutch Protestant 19th century cultures. David Mitchell's polished storytelling style makes the varied characters come so alive that once started the book is difficult to put down.
Yet several times while reading this book I felt compelled to stop and return to the Horatio Hornblower series by E.M. Forester. As a break in the book's action I'd slip one of the A & E series DVD's into the player. The time periods overlap with seafaring traders and wars taking place during the insecure time of Napoleon's rise and fall. But most of all I was reminded of how much youthful Jacob de Noet seemed like the young and innocent Horatio Hornblower. Somehow Ioan Gruffuld appeared in my visualized version of Mitchell's story. [Ah, for more of those films!] For readers who enjoy the Hornblower series, David Mitchell's "Thousand Autumns" may bring about memories of a favorite hero; because Jacob De Noet certainly arrives on the literary stage in 2010 as an engaging 19th century hero.

A couple of centuries ago, in an international area of Nagasaki, Japan, the Dutch operate a trading operation with the Japanese. Only a few employees will ever actually be allowed to venture into the Japan beyond their enclave. This is the story of those people of both societies and their relationships and their common interest - getting the best of each other in business.

Despite little change in the formal relationships between countries of today, the details are quite different. Or are they? The story will cause us to wonder at the common application of different standards of honor, religion, friendship, love. The rigidity of such conventions have eased little in parts of the world over the past few centuries.

Mitchell again demonstrates his writing and story telling skills and makes a book of nearly five hundred pages fly by like one two-thirds that length. He somehow avoids the common middle sag that too often visits books of such length.

While the history is interesting, the focus of the book is on the people. They are as stereotyped as those in similar novels. Their actions (and the consequences) are predictable. Why is it that they somehow seem more unique during the reading? That's Mitchell's knack - take the normal and make it seem like more.

The author's venture into historical fiction has turned out to be, unsurprisingly, a success. I wonder what he will attempt next. Regardless of the direction he takes, I'll be there to read it.

This is quite a difficult review to write. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a long book and it could be argued that not a great deal happens within its pages. However, sometimes entertainment is a long road and not a short sprint. Some of the descriptive writing is so breathtakingly, heart achingly adept it cuts like a scalpel through to your heart.

Jacob De Zoet is a naïve man trying to do the right thing. He wears his principles like a jacket and of course the low cunning of the scoundrels around him exploit this weakness. The story is set on a trading post on a man made atoll called Dejima on the shores of Japan in the late 1700's.
It was this unique setting with Japan trying to reach out from the stagnation of centuries of closed borders that held my attention. There was unrequited love, beauty, heroics and layers upon layers. Not one for those that like a quick and easy read but if you enjoy depth and detail this will leave you enchanted.

Searching for a book that takes a few hundred pages to get into, then transports you to a different world where bad things happen to good people at an achingly slow pace, all the while manipulating language in an effortless and brilliant fashion? Look no further.

Here are a few of David Mitchell's winning lines:

"Long ago, he acquired the courtier's knack of distinguishing the rhetorical question from the actual."

"`Joke is secret language . . . inside words.'"

"Jacob feels like an actor obliged to go onstage without a glimpse of the script."

"[B]y the time Penhaligon staggers to the end of one sentence, its beginning has receded into fog."

"`Hatred eats haters,' Meredith told an infant Tristram, `like ogres eat boys.'"

"Naming, thinks Jacob, even in ridicule, gives what is named substance."

"He has rubbed a mosquito bite on his knuckle into an angry lump. He looks into his shaving mirror: his grandfather looks back."

Mitchell is as talented a writer as he is a storyteller. But his books are not easy reads. This novel is packed with emotion and will reward the reader that sticks with the story through the end. There are plenty of characters to keep track of, but Mitchell has shown again that he is a master of character development and using various voices. Here, the perspective and culture of the Dutch, Japanese and English comes through without feeling forced or fake. Recreating the turn of the eighteenth century is no easy feat - yet the descriptions, the language, the settings, the characters and beliefs in this book make the reader effortlessly feel as if he is there, in Dejima in 1800. Only a few could even attempt to pull this off and Mitchell is one of them and the research necessary to pull this off shines through in this book. I highly recommended this book to those who like Japan and are familiar with its culture or anyone looking for a rewarding story beyond the standard action-packed nonsense that fills half of the fiction best-sellers' list.

This is one of those books that you can’t read fast enough, and at the same time you wish would last for months. Mitchell makes 1799 Japan come alive with his soulful writing, the characters are fully formed and believable. Shifting POV usually annoys me to no end, but in this case it makes the plot unpredictable and exciting, it is a puzzle to be solved. I was trying to explain the plot to a friend… usually there is the protagonist and you can draw a straight line of how the story follows him/her over a period of time. I would draw this plot as a series of overlapping triangles. I know - that probably makes no sense. If you like historical fiction, just read it.

David Mitchell proves once again that an author can inventively break the rules and still produce a fulfilling, interesting novel. In The Cloud Atlas, he played with time and story arc in a way that not only enhanced the meaning of the book, but actually made it more entertaining. In The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, he slips in and out of his characters' minds--sometimes in the same sentence--without losing the coherence of his narrative. The technique isn't necessarily new, but I've never seen it done so well.

It's also done not to show off Mitchell's chops as a word smith, but to advance the novel. All too many "modern" writers are so intent on demonstrating their disdain for the classic features of plot, character, description, and point of view that they produce incoherent works that appeal only to critics so eager to embrace the latest fad they fail to see that the emperor has no clothes. Mitchell's work uses revolutionary technique in the service of telling a story.

I applaud his art as well as his ability to wrap the reader in a time and place totally foreign and utterly absorbing.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is a very good novel--an excellent example of fine storytelling. When this novel was published a few years ago, it was met with much critical praise. I suppose that this praise gave me higher than normal expectations of this novel, but I just don't think this novel quite lives up to those expectations. Lots of historical detail, very interesting story line, but sometimes the narrative gets a bit bogged down. I have found lately that the mark of an excellent novelist is a satisfying (but not predictable) ending and this novel certainly has that. I certainly do not want to spoil anything, but suffice it to say, that the ending is heartbreaking--it ties up enough lose ends, but not too many. I enjoyed reading this novel, although there were times I wish there had been just a little bit less of it.

This is an epic story set in feudal Japan at the start of the 19th century. Jacob de Zoet is a young Dutch clerk who comes to work in Japan for a few years, hoping to earn enough money to go home and get married. Contact between Europeans and Japanese is highly restricted, so when he falls in love with a Japanese midwife it's clear that things cannot develop smoothly.

It took me a while to get into the book and occasionally when there were shifts in focus I would lose my way again. There's an enormous cast of characters as well so occasionally I lose track of who was who. David Mitchell has a very distinctive writing style which many people love, but I found it difficult to read. On the other hand, I loved the way that the book pulled me into such a foreign world and I got totally wrapped up in the central relationship between Jacob and Orito. It took me a long time to finish this, but I'm glad that I did.

From the first chapter, I was hooked. Mitchell has a way of making mood and sense of place tangible, and from those opening pages, I was transported. To the places, the time, and the characters' inner worlds. I didn't know what to expect when I started this book, not having read any of Mitchell's works before. But I don't have a single negative thing to say about this book. It moved me, gripped me with suspense, made me laugh, consult my dictionary, and really appreciate this man's way with words. I agree with other reviewers that, yes, it is an 'entertainment', not necessarily a masterpiece, but the characters are so well presented - their dialogue, uniqueness, flaws, and virtues - and the plot so well-executed that it doesn't really matter. And the final pages were perfect. It's just a great book, all around.

Having read his epic and at times mind-boggling work "Cloud Atlas" and the equally demanding work "number9dream" that is set in alternating realities, I came to this novel quite mentally prepared to do some mental gymnastics. While "The Thousand Autumns" was mostly linear in structure, and set squarely in a fixed time and space, it was not by comparison an easier work to read.

The titular hero is a clerk under the employment the Dutch East India Company in 18th century Japan, and becomes enamoured with a local midwife Orito, who sports a burn on one side of her face. But before he can woo her properly (Mitchell does insert some rather amusingly touching scenes that captured the awkwardness of the largely forbidden inter-cultural courtship) she is mysteriously carted off (against her will perhaps?) into a monastic enclave hidden up in the hills. And this is where I think, Jacob as the main character (the perspective had all been his in nearly a third of the novel) loses its hold on the reader. The narrative shifts to Orito's perspective and then a Japanese translator Ogawa, who acts as a kind of bridge between Orito and Jacob. By the time the Jacob reclaims the narrative in the last third of the novel, my sympathies for him have run dry, and the poignant moments lost their effect on me.

That said, the story is well-written, and Mitchell is able to capture the grace and speech of 18th Japanese culture without the usual awkwardness of translated works, perhaps because the author has spent many years immersed in the culture and is himself married to a Japanese wife. Mitchell should also be lauded for the painstaking research he did to depict some of the historical events in an imaginative and creative narrative. The cinematic style of capturing background details in the midst of urgent action in the foreground also works rather well. However, this work only earned 3 stars from me not so much because the book was average, but because I felt the work demanded too much of an average reader like me.

Let's just admit it at the outset. As someone who tries to write, I hate David Mitchell. Hate him with the white-hot intensity of a thousand blazing suns. It'd be bad enough if he were just a great, you know, writer. Plain old everyday writer of some kind of novel: literary fiction, sci-fi, adventure, pastiche, historical. But no. He can't just pick one. He has to be brilliant at them all. In one novel, no less (that one was Cloud Atlas by the way and if you haven't read it yet, you should. Then fire off an angry letter to any award group that didn't give their top prize to him for it. Yeah--I'm talking to you Booker). Worse, Cloud Atlas wasn't his first brilliant book. And then he followed it up with Black Swan Green. And now he's back with The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet.

Well, I say "hah!" to you Mr. David Mitchell. Hah! Cuz Autumns isn't brilliant. It's only kinda brilliant. So there. Double hah!

The title character is a young Dutchman who arrives on the tiny island of Dejima, sole gateway for the Dutch East India Company to 1800 Japan, a closed society. De Zoet is here to make his fortune as a clerk in order to return home and marry up to his intended, Anna. But things quickly go awry: the East India Company is having monetary problems, the Japanese are reticent to give up more of their highly-desired copper; global politics (revolution, Napoleon, the increasing strength of the English, the new America, etc.) are threatening the Company's monopoly in Japan as well as Japan's desire to remain closed; De Zoet is tasked to root out corruption among his fellow workers, making him none too popular; and he manages to fall in love with a Japanese midwife--Orito.

The language is typical Mitchell. Whether it be simple descriptive phrases (a newborn described as a "boiled-pink despot" or daylight being "bruised" by an oncoming storm) or his usual preternatural ability to change voice as needed, shifting seamlessly among differing classes, cultures, nationalities, genders, ages, formal speech or dialect, even human or feline. Dutch or English, male or female, slave or noble, bureaucrat or samurai, prig or whoring drunk--it makes no difference, all are rendered naturally and individually.

The structure is less complex than we usually see from Mitchell, the book much more linear than usual, though we do shift narrators among varying sections. More typical, Mitchell is working with several genres at once, or successively: romance, clash of cultures, international gamesmanship, adventure story (complete with masked samurai and a daring rescue attempt), and a few others. It makes for a heady mix of characters and plotting and one of the best aspects of the novel is how it rarely goes where you expect it to, in terms of either plot or style (or even narrator).

Characterization is sharp and rich from the smallest character to the major ones. If De Zoet seems perhaps a bit distant to us, we feel nothing but compassion for Orito as well as the young Japanese translator who also loves her.

The turn of the century from the 17 to the 1800's offers up rich potential for Mitchell to explore: clashes between cultures as the world begins to shrink, between tradition and progress, science and religion, religion and religion (Christianity is adamantly banned from Dejima), old and new economic and political systems, between old empires and rising empires.

Mitchell also explores, subtly, various forms of enslavement: actual slavery (in one of the most moving narrative sections of the novel, a slave discusses his "mind-island"--the only place he is free as his mind is the only thing he truly owns), economic slavery, sexual slavery, subjugation of the weak by the powerful--either as nations or classes, the oppression of tradition, the imprisonment of birth.

And as one might expect with such a setting, communication and miscommunication is also a major theme throughout, as characters try to feel their way to mutual comprehensible expression, sometimes succeeding, often failing. There is a pattern running through the novel of conversations being broken up, dialogue lines interrupted throughout the conversation with descriptive lines: the play of cards, shots in a billiard game, a drummer's beatings, as if Mitchell is highlighting the sheer difficulty of simple conversation even without all the cultural baggage.

By this point, you're probably wondering why the book is only "kinda brilliant." Well, pacing is sometimes an issue. The book starts off with a bang (actually a birth) that you won't forget soon. The first section is a bit up and down as we're thrown a large cast of characters relatively quickly. But after that first section, pace is never an issue: fast when it needs to be fast and slow when it needs to be slow.

All right, I admit, it's a small complaint. One might even say petty. But I can honestly say that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is no Cloud Atlas. And yes, I know that since Cloud Atlas is on my list of top 10 books of the past 20 years, that isn't so damning. Fine then. Curse you David Mitchell. Thousand Autumns isn't the best book of the past decade, but it's damn good and yeah, might even be a bit brilliant. Read it. And if you're a wannabe writer, the We Hate David Mitchell Club meets the first Monday of every month--see you there.

This is the kind of book you pick up off an airport book store and, to give it a chance, read a few sentences, and ... You're plunged into an intense childbirth medical scenario, only the baby's arm sticking out of the womb and it's 1799 in Dejima just offshore of Nagasaki, Japan. That first set piece is a masterpiece and nothing afterward exceeds it, but by its end you're hooked. Well, you're hooked if you love Japan, love the whole mystery and uniqueness of Dejima as a Dutch trading and listening post carefully used and guarded by the shogunate. The love story is also very well done and believably modern. Otherwise, there are the countless stories every character has, from up and down the class hierarchy, all sounding very real.

It's interesting and well written which is a good enough reason to read just about anything, but it wasn't very compelling. It's central plot was pulp fictional, but hardly ingenious, and for me it did not live up to the inherent interest of its unique setting in time and space. As a piece of historical fiction it was fine, but I expected more.

David Mitchell's previous books have all been highly entertaining, if rather wrapped up in the cleverness of their own construction. Dazzling in their construction, they have testified to the power of storytelling and the imagination, if not really much else, tending to be somewhat forgettable after their immediate charm wears off. Storytelling is certainly one of the themes of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but here Mitchell marshals all his writing skills and historical research towards a clear purpose, using language, customs, tradition, history and even music and medicine, all towards expressing the feelings that Jacob de Zoet, a clerk who has signed up for a 5-year trade mission for the Dutch East India Company based in Batavia (Java) with the Japanese at their base in Nagasaki harbour, has for a young midwife he meets there, Orito Abigawa, as well as the impediments of culture, tradition and language that stand in the way of him expressing his feelings towards her and advancing his desires.

Or, you could view it the other way around and see the novel as a historical fiction, and in the tentative, hesitant, cautious courtship between de Zoet and Abigawa see an expression of the growing relationship between East and West - Mitchell's novel is generous enough to allow that interpretation also - but his writing skills clearly advanced and on a new level entirely in his expression of the delicacy of feelings and emotions, (along with perhaps consideration that Mitchell is himself married to a Japanese wife) it would seem that his primary purpose in The Thousand Autumns is to write a wonderful, magical, delicate and beautiful love story.

Storytelling of course comes into it, the theme of books having the power to transform the world and build bridges - cultural as well as romantic - but it's rather understated here in comparison to Mitchell's previous novels, less showy and better integrated. It's there in the book of Psalms that Jacob smuggles to Dejima despite the Shogun's strict ban on any Christian objects being brought to Japan - a powerful symbol and one that is feared by the Japanese - it's there in the creation of a dictionary that de Zoet hopes will bring him closer to Miss Abigawa, and it's there in the medical journals that allow Abigawa to be an important midwife. It's there in the memories of each of the characters in their relation of the twists and turns of live that take them to where they have arrived.

The setting and the period - covered in wonderful, relevant detail by Mitchell - all testify to a closed Japan becoming more open to the world outside, gaining trust, of accepting learning over superstition, of science over tradition, of putting people before protocol, the growth moreover not taking place on one side alone, but in the common acceptance of and respect for each other's traditions. Within all that is a rather more personal story about love, between a white European and an Oriental woman, with a great mythical adventure built around it. Or maybe I'm letting my imagination run away with me - but that's what Mitchell does so well and isn't that what the best books are supposed to do?

As I write this review, it is the bookies' favorite to win the 2010 Man Booker Prize. Mitchell is a very respected writer and many people rate his previous novel Cloud Atlas as one of the best books of the last decade. There's also quite a bit of sentiment that Cloud Atlas should have won the 2004 Booker Prize. All of this combined with the fact that Jacob De Zoet is a very good book make it the likely choice as this year's winner.

Now to the book. I haven't read Cloud Atlas nor any other Mitchell books so I read this novel without history or expectation.

This is a novel anchored in history and is extensively researched. The story goes from 1799 and extends into the early 19th century. It is the tale of Jacob De Zoet, an ambitious clerk for the Dutch East India company. He has come to Japan to make his fortune trading with the Japanese so that he can return to Holland to marry his sweetheart. He doesn't actually start in Japan as the Dutch are relegated to a very small island just off the port of Nagasaki. Here the Dutch are basically imprisoned while they trade and interact with the Japanese. De Zoet's initial job is to perform a forensic audit and look for corruption in the previous company leadership on the island.

Mitchell writes with great detail though the book moves along well. It moves from a very interesting historical novel with De Zoet as an honest man in a world of corruption. He falls in love with Orito, the very strong Japanese female character who learns and studies with the Dutch doctor.

About 1/3 of the way through the book, the tone changes and in my opinion, not for the better. Orito is whisked away to a convent and the story very much becomes more of a historical thriller as efforts are made to rescue her from the convent which has many secrets.

Ulitimately, a very well researched novel with a lot of substance changes to a thriller and then to a frustrated tale of revenge.

I liked this book a lot and it's a bit of everything. It may not be Mitchell's strongest book but it's enjoyable. This is an unusual comment for me but I wish the actual story had been a little more standard without some of the gimmicks such as the events at the convent. There was quite a lot of good material to be written about in what was a very interesting setting as the Dutch and Japanese learn to deal with their culture clash. De Zoet's troubles as his attempt to be an honest man in difficult circumstances was also very well done.

It's not perfect but I definitely enjoyed this novel and recommend it.

David Mitchell's new book is an historical novel, set in turn of the 19th century Japan. The title's namesake, Jacob, is a young man out to make a name and some money for himself with the Dutch East Indies Company. Taking on the job of an accounting clerk, he is sent overseas and arrives in Nagasaki wide-eyed, virtuous (maybe even a little self-righteous) and ready to change the world. What Jacob encounters is corruption, xenophobia and racism on both sides of the Dutch/Japanese cultural divide. Furthermore Jacob soon learns that not everyone is as thrilled with his mission - straightening out the books - as he is; in fact he is treated with open contempt and suspicion.

At its core The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet is an old fashioned coming of age tale - and a pretty good one at that - with some adventure, (including a little high seas - actually in the harbor - swashbuckling), a battle between good and evil, a little black magic, friendship and of course a love story. But the narrative does wander - a lot - including Dutch accounting practices, the minutiae of life in a convent, the history/background of some of the book's lesser characters and a fascination with bodily functions - think of Updike with a copy of Grey's Anatomy.

I haven't read any of the author's previous books so I don't know if this is an idiosyncrasy of his writing style or unique to this book. My point is that this literary meandering may test the patience of some readers. Per the author's fascination with bodily functions, the book opens with a fairly graphic description of child-birth which may leave some queasy. Also the book is - appropriately so - full of Japanese and Dutch names, but the author switches between first and last names on a regular basis which at times confused me, but I'll own up to that shortcoming.

All that being said, (written), I enjoyed this book. And although I've read that this author is part of the "new guard", A Thousand Autumns reminded me of a dense 19th century European novel. And that brings me to my hesitance in universally recommending this book. This is not a quick, mindless, beach read but a book that demands the reader's full attention - for more than a weekend. So be forewarned if you do pick up The Thousand Autumns - this is a slow read but one I think that is well worth the effort.

I would be very surprised if The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet doesn't find its way onto this year's Booker prize list. It certainly deserves to. As we've come to expect from David Mitchell, it's a rich story, encompassing several points of view, and, for me at least, it is a more coherent tale than his much praised Cloud Atlas: A Novel. The book features a whole range of characters and each has their own story to tell - even the quite minor characters - and mostly they involve some kind of choice and consequence scenario. It's highly readable and entertaining.

Jacob de Zoet is a clerk for the Dutch East India Company, who arrives in Nagasaki harbour in 1799 primed to help uncover evidence of corruption at the trading post of Dejima. A painstaking, honourable man, his intention is to make his name and return home to claim the hand of his bride. Then he meets Orito Aibagawa, (midwife and would be surgeon), new choices seem possible and his carefully made plan begins to unravel.

Dejima is a man made island that offers a a window on the closed world of Japan. In 1799 Japan remained deliberately cut off from the rest of the world, Japanese people were forbidden to leave the country and influences such as Christianity were stringently repelled. Mitchell evocatively describes the physical and mental melting pot of Dejima and Japan as well as the mindsets of the Dutch and their slaves. This affords numerous opportunities for cultural clashes and, as ever, we learn most about societies on their edges. Jacob and Orito move through a maze of events as Mitchell blends historical realism with a hint of the supernatural. There's a fair dose of humour too - my favourite line being "celibacy is for vegetarians" which just made me laugh!

There are plenty of twists and turns in the plot and the fortunes of the characters as we follow, at different points, the plight of the Dutch, the Japanese, the interpreters, the British and the slaves. It's beautifully researched and quite brilliant story-telling. The only downside is that the names can get a bit confusing at times - there's a lot of them - and at times I found myself "getting into the story" only for Mitchell to switch tacks. But I found it less frustrating than I did with Cloud Atlas.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is another masterpiece for David Mitchell. If you like historical fiction, and literate (but not too dense) writing, I highly recommend this novel. Read the jaw-dropping opening chapter (which works as a perfect short story in its own right) and if you're not immediately hooked, then you can turn away without too much investment. Otherwise, prepare for quite a journey...

1000 Autumns immediately tosses you into the world of 1799 Japan, where Dutch traders struggle stay in business with the isolated nation, despite rampant corruption. If you have no background in this setting, you'll probably struggle a little bit to absorb all the detail in the opening section. But don't worry, it was all completely new to me, and I was able to keep up. Just expect to read rather slowly during the first section, so you can appreciate everything that's going on. After this lengthy introduction, the novel kicks into high-gear with bizarre, almost fantastical intrigue. I won't go into any more detail here, for fear of spoiling the masterful plot.

At about 500 pages, the novel almost feels to short. The world Mitchell creates is so enveloping, that you don't want it to end. This is not escapist fiction, however, and Mitchell keeps his novel firmly grounded in strong, believable characters, and a rich and true setting. He deliberately undercuts romanticism and cliche whenever possible, and you're left with a concrete and beautiful experience of something strange, foreign, and timeless.

If you really enjoy this novel, I also highly recommend Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. That novel takes the level of historical detail found here and fractures it into six incredibly diverse tales with a central unified theme. Both novels are amazing in their own way.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - by David Mitchell
5 stars

By description, Thousand Autumns seems like standard historical fiction of a somewhat obscure period of early nineteenth century Japanese/ Dutch history. A young Dutch clerk ships out to make his fortune in the employ of the Dutch East India Company. He encounters all the dangers of travel, the moral corruption of his superiors and the inscrutable intrigue of the orient. He falls tragically in love with a high born Japanese lady. The story takes place several centuries after James Clavell's Shogun, but doesn't the plot sound familiar?

Don't be tempted to think so. David Mitchell has written something that is completely unique. The historical detail is very rich, and the action has great drama and suspense, but it is the character development that makes the book. Much of this story is told through the internal thoughts of multiple individuals. It is as if we can look at the same events through different sets of eyes. And at no time does any one individual have all the pieces of the puzzle. There are so many themes embedded in this book: honesty in the face of corruption, misuses of power, the value of education in the face of superstition. I finished it yesterday and I've reread parts of the book today. I'm still fitting together pieces of the puzzle.

I know this book has a 5 star rating from other reviewers and I may get to that point as I continue to think about it. I'm prevented from giving the final star by the very thing that makes this book different from the rest. I find Mitchell's writing style to be difficult to digest. He writes in broken sentences, using italics to designate the thoughts of a speaker. The sentences of spoken conversations are interrupted continually with the broken sentences of the character's unspoken thoughts. I found myself reading each conversation 2 or 3 times. Once, to put together the sentences of the spoken words and once to complete the sentences of the internal words and once as the author wrote it. This made a long book take much longer to read.
As much as this annoyed me, the story was well worth the effort. Rereading gave me the opportunity to admire Mitchell's splendid use of language.

As to that splendid use of language, I've talked myself up to a 5 star rating. At the beginning of Chapter 39, there is a page and a half riff on seagulls that is nothing less than inspired poetry.

This book starts out very slowly as it introduces a plethora of characters. It is set in Nagasaki at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Jacob de Zoet is a young Dutchman, working for the Dutch East India Company in Japan. He has left the Netherlands in hopes of making a fortune in the East so he can marry the girl he is leaving behind. Jacob comes to Deijima, a manmade island that the Japanese have set up as the sole location for trade with the West. Jacob is traveling with the new chief, Unico Vostenbosch, who is tasked with rooting out company corruption. Jacob is a likeable, honest, even eager acolyte in serving the company, a position which gives rise to conflicts with the existing corrupt staff. The non-Japanese (Dutch, Irish, English, Ceylonese and American) are physically confined to this island as the Japanese attempt to keep Japan closed to western influences. Jacob meets and quickly falls in love with Orito Aibagawa, a Japanese mid-wife. This relationship is not possible in this setting, so Jacob uses some subterfuge to convey to her his feelings. This section of the book is slow going and somewhat frustrating as the interactions between the Europeans and the Japanese plod along. No doubt intentional on the author's part to allow us to feel the stifling atmosphere experienced here.

In the middle section of the book, Orito is literally "engifted" to a nunnery to pay off her late father's debts. The shrine where she is sent is overseen by an evil lord, Enomoto, who with his monks is impregnating the women and then murdering their children. Orito has been brought there to serve as the midwife for the nunnery. She is deeply unhappy and contemplates escape. Unbeknownst to Jacob, his interpreter, Ogawa Uzaemon also is in love with Orito. When a scroll outlining the terrible acts committed at the nunnery comes into Uzaemon's possession he decides to act to free Orito. Before going off Uzaemon gives the scroll to Jacob. Uzaemon is not successful in freeing Orito and is killed by Enomoto.

In the last section of the book a British frigate arrives and the actions that follow set the stage for all of the plot lines to be pulled together. I won't give away the ending but I found it deeply satisfying.

The historical aspects of this novel are well researched and ring true. The setting for this story is exotic, rich and gripping. The author's ability to write dialogue for characters from different ethnic backgrounds and account for their language and style is exceptional and adds to the realism of this story. His ability to place these characters within the world events of the time period also adds to the richness of this story. The love story while somewhat understated I found to be very powerful and even haunting. The author is able to describe Japan and Japanese society in a way that shows it to be corrupt but also alluring and complex.

This book requires more attention than your standard summer read but in my opinion is an epic saga full of adventure and memorable characters - well worth the time.

So far I've written reviews about fantasy, science fiction and horror novels and novellas, but this time I'll write a short review about a historical novel, because The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is of exceptional quality and it contains a couple of slightly fantastical elements. At first I wasn't sure if I should write this review or not, because this novel isn't speculative fiction, but I decided to write it, because The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a damn good novel (and I think that several fantasy readers will enjoy reading it).

David Mitchell is an interesting author, because he writes different kind of books and he isn't afraid to blend different genres (for example, Cloud Atlas is a combination of mainstream fiction and science fiction). His new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is a successful and satisfying combination of love story and historical adventure. It's literary fiction at its best and it's David Mitchell's best book so far.

David Mitchell spent four years working on this novel and it shows in the text: all the small details are accurate and believable, the story is intriguing and the prose is nuanced, eloquent and beautiful. It's almost amazing how beautifully the author creates a fascinating and stunning vision of Feudal Japan. By using historical details, exquisite worldbuilding and excellent characterization, he brings the story to life.

Here's a few words about the plot and the characters: The events take place in Dejima (in Nagasaki Harbor) in 1799. The artificial island of Dejima is Japan's only window to the West. The main characters are Jacob de Zoet, a clerk and Orito Aibagawa, a midwife. Jacod de Zoet tries to earn his fortune in Dejima, but fate has different things in store for him, because he falls in love with Orito Aibagawa. Uzaemon Ogawa is also an important character, because he's an interpreter. The author writes fluently about the lives of Jacob de Zoet, Orito Aibagawa and Uzaemon Ogawa. He also writes fluently about political intrigue and dark cults (dark and mysterious cults add a slightly fantastical element to this novel).

The author has divided this book into three parts: "The Bride for Whom We Dance", "A Mountain Fastness" and "The Master of Go". The first part tells how Jacob de Zoet arrives to Dejima, the second part tells what happens to Origo Aibagawa in the mountains and the third part tells how things end. Each part is different and together they form a solid novel.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet isn't a novel for hasty readers, because it's a complex and sophisticatedly written novel. It demands quite a lot from its reader, but it's worth reading, because it's a rewarding reading experience. If you like good prose and appreciate a gradually developing plot, you'll love this novel.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, but unfortunately it wasn't selected to the shortlist. In my opinion this novel should've won the Booker Prize, because it's a fascinating and extremely well written historical novel.

By the way, if somebody happens to wonder where the name of this book comes from, it's a reference to one of the native poetical names for Japan, The Land of a Thousand Autumns.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is one of the best historical novels I've ever read. It should be read by everybody, who's interested in history (and especially Japanese history). It can also be recommended to fantasy readers, because the second part of this novel reads almost like a fantasy book.

This novel opens in 1799, on the island of Dejima in Nagasaki Bay, where the Dutch East India Company was the sole trading point between Europe and the isolationist Japanese. Young Dutch clerk Jacob de Zoet has been tasked with stamping out corruption.

`The Company desires me, sir, to be thorough in all things.'

Dejima is a small island and is inhabited only by translators, prostitutes and traders. Access to mainland Japan is over a small fiercely guarded bridge. The Europeans resident on Dejima are isolated in every sense.

Jacob de Zoet is drawn to Orito, a midwife who has found favour with Hiroshima's governor and has been permitted greater contact with the Europeans as a consequence. Orito is working with Dr Marinus, the resident physician. Jacob and Orito fall in love, but culture and politics keep them separated. Jacob falls out of favour with his superior, and Orito is sold to a shrine after her father dies. These separate events, and what follows, serve to underline the difference between two very different worlds.

`Details beget facts, and facts, judiciously sent forth, become assassins.'

Meanwhile, world events are changing the balance of power between the Dutch and the British. This becomes clear when Captain John Penhaligon of the British Navy sails into Dejima with a view to dislodging the Dutch.

`Everything is happening too slow and too fast and all at once.'

This is a wonderful work of fiction. The main stories are those of Jacob de Zoet and Orito and to a lesser extent John Penhaligon. While the underlying historical basis is solid, not all facts and dates are accurate. But it doesn't matter, not for this story. This novel has its own rules, and is enhanced by the rich detail in the writing. And the ending? I think it's best to read the novel to appreciate the context.

`Looking backwards, Jacob sees pages from the months and years ahead.'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

David Mitchell 's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a well done work of literary fiction, told in three parts. The story takes place in coastal Japan at the end of the eighteenth century (1799). Jacob de Zoet is an innocent young Dutchman who comes to work at the Dutch East India Company, on the artificial island of Dejima. Jacob hopes to work at the post for (5) years as a clerk, so he can earn a lot of money and return home to marry his wealthy fiance. The post is almost like a prison, and his coworkers are corrupt and unsavory characters. Despite the politics and corruption, Jacob is determined to stand firm, refusing to go along various schemes and scams that he finds while auditing the records. Needless to say, Jacob is not very popular.

In part two, Jacob's infatuation with a disfigured, Japanese midwife named Orito Aibagawa moves the story into high gear. She is the daughter of a doctor and a samurai, and both Jacob and one of the translators he befriended are both attracted to the disfigured Orito. Without giving away too much of the story, I'll leave part three to the reader to experience for themselves, and just say the ending did not disappoint.

MY THOUGHTS - The novel was written in the third person, and was not a light read. I received this book in June, and finishing it about a month later, and actually felt glad that I took my time. This was my first David Mitchell novel, and I felt that this book required slow and steady doses for maximum reading pleasure. I loved the vivid historical details, in fact, attention to "every" detail was a strength of this novel. Some parts were a bit slow for me, but the story did have sufficient doses of action, and laugh out loud humor, to hold my interest. Add to that an eccentric group of quirky characters, and colorful descriptions of life on a small island (drinking, gambling, prostitution), made for thoroughly all encompassing historical read.

RECOMMENDED - 4.5/5 stars

What I thought was going to be an exciting story about a little known point in history failed to really go beyond just being a nice story ... very much in the range of only 'pretty good'. I like Jacob (main character) a lot ... and the other Dutchmen are fleshed out enough ... but the story just never seems to fully pull me in. I kept expecting something big to happen and after finishing the book ... I couldn't help but feel that I must have missed something. If you start the book and enjoy it, then you probably will finish the book on the same level. If you start the book and find it not to your tastes, or if the setting doesn't entice you ... you probably should put down or find something else.

To my mind, the eponymous hero of David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" has much in common with Eben Cook of John Barth's "The Sot-weed Factor". Both are naïve sojourners in a strange land, at a strange time, blissfully unaware of just how out of their depth in surroundings of complex political intrigue they are; both besotted with a fatally mismatched and unattainable woman; and both ultimately displaying a bravery based as much on stubbornness as on high-principled idealism, tinged with an ignorance that borders on stupidity and foolhardiness. And while Mitchell's tale of a nineteenth century Dutch trading colony in an isolationist Japan has nothing of the burlesque farce which suffuses Barth's tale of late seventeenth century colonial Maryland, carrying instead a dark undertone of threatening menace, the two works nevertheless share a similar level of complexity and both make for equally weighty, totally engaging reading.

In short, this latest tome from David Mitchell is nothing short of an absolute gem, albeit not one that most people will romp through at speed. It takes time for the real tale to emerge, and effort is needed to follow all aspects of the plot, which is complex and intricate, never quite going in the direction you think it might (or even should). The writing is, as one might expect of Mitchell, exquisite throughout.

If you like having your thinking stretched and your expectations confounded, this is most decidedly a book for you. It is definitely one to treasure.

The second novel I've read by Mitchell, I remain a fan of his conscience devotion the the genre of historical fiction. Unlike Cloud Atlas, this story remains rooted in a specific place, Nagasaki; and specific time, the era of the decline of the Dutch East India Company, or DOV, in Dutch acronym. Because of the setting,a Dutch-managed trading island called Dejima that sits in Nagasaki harbor, there's lots of scenes of underscoring the harsh serendipity of travel by boat in the 18th and 19th centuries--and that the novel does share with Atlas.I did not know that Holland held the trading monopoly with Japan for hundred of years; and that because of that, whole schools of study of Dutch language and customs grew in Japan. It's hard to fathom how these early greeters of each other's culture's struggled to communicate, seafaring men being not the greatest speakers and teachers of the King's Dutch. Good read from consistenly magical story-teller.

I love David Mitchell's writing on the whole and I enjoyed this too, but I can see why it didn't really feature in any of the prizes this year. Although it is absorbing and and the story moves along at a cracking pace, there are a number of flaws in the structure and plot which give an episodic and unconnected feel. The opening section of the book...the clerk de Zoets arrival at the Nagasaki Trading Post of Dejima and his attempts to comes to terms with the politics of the enclave and his clumsy attempts to reach out to the beautiful Orito are convincing and moving. But other sections of the book when the plot moves away from Dejima don't work so well; the character of Lord Enamoto is not believable and is so much of the pantomime villain that the scenes involving him and his shrine and cult are a bit ridiculous. This is almost, if not quite, Dr Fu Manchu territory. Similarly the British navy drift into the plot in the final section to no obvious purpose other than as a deus ex machina albeit an unusual use of this device.

However this is still very entertaining and Mitchell retains his brilliant ear for language and dialogue. And there are some richly comic scenes. But ultimately it's a bit unsatisfactory and unfullfilling. If you haven't yet had the pleasure of reading Cloud Atlas or Black Swan Green I'd recommend those instead

To my mind, the eponymous hero of David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" has much in common with Eben Cook of John Barth's "The Sot-weed Factor". Both are naïve sojourners in a strange land, at a strange time, blissfully unaware of just how out of their depth in surroundings of complex political intrigue they are; both besotted with a fatally mismatched and unattainable woman; and both ultimately displaying a bravery based as much on stubbornness as on high-principled idealism, tinged with an ignorance that borders on stupidity and foolhardiness. And while Mitchell's tale of a nineteenth century Dutch trading colony in an isolationist Japan has nothing of the burlesque farce which suffuses Barth's tale of late seventeenth century colonial Maryland, carrying instead a dark undertone of threatening menace, the two works nevertheless share a similar level of complexity and both make for equally weighty, totally engaging reading.

In short, this latest tome from David Mitchell is nothing short of an absolute gem, albeit not one that most people will romp through at speed. It takes time for the real tale to emerge, and effort is needed to follow all aspects of the plot, which is complex and intricate, never quite going in the direction you think it might (or even should). The writing is, as one might expect of Mitchell, exquisite throughout.

If you like having your thinking stretched and your expectations confounded, this is most decidedly a book for you. It is definitely one to treasure.

The second novel I've read by Mitchell, I remain a fan of his conscience devotion the the genre of historical fiction. Unlike Cloud Atlas, this story remains rooted in a specific place, Nagasaki; and specific time, the era of the decline of the Dutch East India Company, or DOV, in Dutch acronym. Because of the setting,a Dutch-managed trading island called Dejima that sits in Nagasaki harbor, there's lots of scenes of underscoring the harsh serendipity of travel by boat in the 18th and 19th centuries--and that the novel does share with Atlas.I did not know that Holland held the trading monopoly with Japan for hundred of years; and that because of that, whole schools of study of Dutch language and customs grew in Japan. It's hard to fathom how these early greeters of each other's culture's struggled to communicate, seafaring men being not the greatest speakers and teachers of the King's Dutch. Good read from consistenly magical story-teller.

I love David Mitchell's writing on the whole and I enjoyed this too, but I can see why it didn't really feature in any of the prizes this year. Although it is absorbing and and the story moves along at a cracking pace, there are a number of flaws in the structure and plot which give an episodic and unconnected feel. The opening section of the book...the clerk de Zoets arrival at the Nagasaki Trading Post of Dejima and his attempts to comes to terms with the politics of the enclave and his clumsy attempts to reach out to the beautiful Orito are convincing and moving. But other sections of the book when the plot moves away from Dejima don't work so well; the character of Lord Enamoto is not believable and is so much of the pantomime villain that the scenes involving him and his shrine and cult are a bit ridiculous. This is almost, if not quite, Dr Fu Manchu territory. Similarly the British navy drift into the plot in the final section to no obvious purpose other than as a deus ex machina albeit an unusual use of this device.

However this is still very entertaining and Mitchell retains his brilliant ear for language and dialogue. And there are some richly comic scenes. But ultimately it's a bit unsatisfactory and unfullfilling. If you haven't yet had the pleasure of reading Cloud Atlas or Black Swan Green I'd recommend those instead

A book that promises much but fails to ultimately deliver on a subject with numerous historical and emotional possibilities. The author frequently indulges in wordy passages that do little to illuminate anything beyond demonstrating his prowess with vocabulary. A good editor would have tightened both the narrative and avoided the letdown that occurred with the final fate of the Japanese midwife student sold to a cultlike monastery. After all the critical raves I expected much more and was very disappointed.

David Mitchell loves to write books that challenge him as a writer, and writing historical fiction about a Dutch trading post in the bay of Nagasaki certainly qualifies -- especially without writing in Dutch or Japanese, while still trying to maintain an air of authenticity in the language and dialect.

"Autumns" succeeds, for the most part, in transporting the reader, and if you like where he is taking you, you'll enjoy the ride. Occasionally, Mitchell overdoes it with prose that seems written mostly to amuse himself ("A smoke-dried Dane makes a Finn's cock of a tangled vang") or that is just a bit too experimental.

David Mitchell is the kind of writer that has his fans rabid for his next book. He is truly a gifted wordsmith who thinks with big ideas, and executes them brilliantly. This time, he tackles a historical novel, which for the most part is pretty linear in it's story telling, but intricate within the construct. The book is dense. Densely plotted, demanding, and full of a massive cast of characters, who float in and out, and more punctuate the world he's created rather than flesh it out.This was my only beef with the novel. I felt characters could have been dropped without detriment to the narration, to streamline the cacophony of names I was trying to keep straight.Where the novel works best is at it's most human moments, in particular, the final ten pages of the book, where after the grand set pieces of the plot have been played, he artfully brings it down to the most lovely, simple exchanges of life, love, and regret. It's not necessarily a book I'd recommend to everyone, frankly just because of the attention it demands, but if you appreciate supple, gorgeous writing, and have patience to go the distance, you'll find it a rewarding, moving, reading experience.

To be honest, I'm surprised that so many of the reviews for this book are positive. I suspected that more readers would have stumbled upon it via book clubs and hated it or not bothered to finish it at all. It's challenging in all the best ways, though, and well worth the time.

At first, I kept thinking, "An hour has gone by and I've only read 11 pages,"--which kind of reminded me of my response to the first section of CLOUD ATLAS--but I got used to Mitchell's sentences and then I was hooked. It's dense, but that "density" pays off by building, from the wet ground up, a whole world on a little island just off of Japan in the late 18th Century. Characters that would have been mere brushstrokes in the hands of lesser authors become fully realized in this book.

At the end of 2011, when I look back on the books I've read this year, THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS will definitely be at the top of my list.

This is not a book that one can simply skim or plough through. For the more voracious readers, who like to devour their books at break-neck speed, this could prove to be a hinderance. Just as you wouldn't rush through a five-course meal, neither should you rush through Mitchell's epic tale (told in five parts).

My biggest struggle came with the first part as it introduced a great number of characters, many with long Dutch or Japanese names that were a bit hard to keep straight. I found myself having to read slower than usual in order to absorb and remember the characters. As a result, it took longer for me to get hooked. Once I got past this section, however, the reading became less labored and the story line(s) quickly picked up the pace.

The story starts simply enough as we watch Orito Abigawa, a disfigured Japanese midwife, deliver the son of the local magistrate. In a world of superstitions, Orito opts for knowledge and study. She delivers, what appears to be, a still born, but as soon as the child begins "mewing" she is heralded as a miracle worker. Because of this, Orito is given permission to study with the Dutch Dr. Marinus on the island of Dejima, a trading outpost in Nagasaki Harbor and the closest foreigners are allowed to the city of Nagasaki.

Jacob de Zoet's entrance into the story is more chaotic, as we are thrust into the arguments of what becomes some sort of legal hearing to uncover thefts and mishandling of funds on the Dejima outpost. de Zoet is the clerk for the hearings and is soon tasked with straightening out the books. If all goes well, he will be promoted and back to his fiancé in one year's time.

Just as those on Dejima can't see far beyond the walls that surround their island, Mitchell gives us only pieces of a larger story (or series of stories). The stories of Orito and Jacob, that are initially woven together, quickly diverge, additional story lines are skillfully inserted, and new patterns take hold. Mitchell takes us through 19th century Japan, into the streets of Nagasaki and the Samurai family of Ogawa; he takes us to the Mount Shiranui Shrine in the Kyoga Domain; and at the same time, leaves us on Japan's doorstep (Dejima) to deal with the outside world. At times we get so absorbed in the story line we nearly forget the other characters who, in the previous act seemed so important.

Mitchell's writing is like a river whose currents are layered, pulling and pushing its readers along. To fight it is to struggle against the story, and to relax is to let the currents pull you in different directions, trusting (hoping) that somehow they will lead you to solid ground. With Mitchell you have to have faith that, although the stories diverge, they will somehow tie back into and satiate one another.

Isaac Fitzgerald over at The Rumpus summed it up quite nicely:
"Taken all together, The Thousand Autumns is a strange, chimeric creation. It's deeply researched, like a proper historical drama, but it's also luridly melodramatic, like a 19th century adventure story."

I admit that I found the story line a little confusing at the beginning of the book, but then the story and characters started to come alive. I knew very little of the Dutch East Indies Company which operated in Nagasaki Japan and Java (Indonesia) around 1800. I found the book very well researched, very informative of the period and some of the types of people involved, and the life styles of the various level of people in society both on the Japanese side and the Dutch side. I can tell when I find a well written book, because as I read, I find myself stopping and saying Wow! The way certain authors can express feelings and ideas is richly fulfilling and David Mitchell did this several times during the book. Examples, "Thank you, Uzaemon thinks, for helping me turn my back on you. 'If I disappoint you, Father, I'm sorry.' 'How gleefully' - the old man's eyes close- 'life shreds our well-crafted plans.'" Also, "If only, human beings were not masks behind mask behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders." I enjoyed the unexpected twist at the ending. Beautiful book to read. I recommend reading this book.

David Mitchell is definitely a big talent. And THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET, which deserves a five-star rating, is definitely a bravura display of this talent. Even so, this is a slightly strange book. Excellent but with faults, is my verdict.

THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS is a five-part novel, where Part One, Two, and Three absorb 461 of this book's 479 pages. IMO, the big subject in these fast-paced 461 pages is the dominance of ruthlessness and treachery over decency and idealism. Explaining how Mitchell explores this dynamic would lead me to spoilers. As a result, I observe only that treachery wins in these 461 pages in the spheres of business, religion, civil authority, and friendship. But the final 18 pages? Nope, decency and professionalism are the winners. The ending of this novel, in other words, is inconsistent with bulk of the book. The upshot is that THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS is ultimately just an elaborate and entertaining yarn, in which Mitchell fails to make a statement. His melodramatic ending, while rewarding, refutes his book.

Mitchell is capable of engaging, and sometimes even beautiful, prose. But he also has a stylistic tic that can be irritating. To illustrate this tic, I now...

...look right and see clouds reflected in a window across the street.

...look left and see five stacks of hard cover books, which I am determined to read one day.

While such quickie and random observations are definitely true to life-as-it-is-experienced, they can have a disruptive effect on text. And these one-line observations are everywhere in THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS. It's almost as if Mitchell, in writing this novel, is constantly interrupting himself, often in a cutesy and arbitrary fashion. For example, I open at random to page 142, where Jacob, an accountant, is talking to Ogawa, a Japanese interpreter. On this page, I count four such one-liners with the worst and most annoying: "Jacob removes his spectacles, looks out, and sees a dog cocking its leg."

Mitchell is among the few writers that I can name (Pynchon is another) who creates the equivalent of crowd scenes in movies. In his crowd scenes, Mitchell throws a dozen or so characters--in the form of names--at his readers in just a few pages. When Dr. Marinus visits the Shirando Academy, for example, the reader enters a bubbling cauldron of 14 academics, who Mitchell introduces in a mere six pages. There are equivalent reading experiences when Jacob first enters the Dejima, the Dutch trading post in Nagasaki Harbor, and Orito enters the Mount Shiranui Shrine. In a movie, this sudden introduction of many characters is a surmountable challenge, since good costuming and casting can convey an immediate impression of character. But in Mitchell's novel, these scenes are the larky equivalent of information dumps.

Despite these grouchy observations, I must also say that I did greatly enjoy this novel. It was, as they say, hard to put down. And, it did occasion numerous visits to Wikipedia, where I learned about Japanese customs, political structures, and trading policies in place around 1800, as well as the estimable Hendrik Doeff, who Mitchell indicates was his inspiration for Jacob De Zoet.

Recommended (but with reservations).

It's clear David Mitchell did a Ph.D's worth of research for this novel set in 1799 Japan, and, unfortunately, every bit of it ends up on the novel's pages. Historical fiction requires a delicate balance between creating a rich and believable historical background for the storytelling in the foreground, and in the case of Autumns the pudding has been overegged.

The novel's plot is not overly complicated. The titular character arrives at the Dutch trading station of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbour in 1799 as a simple clerk in the pay of the Dutch East India Company. Jacob soon runs afoul of his scheming and corrupt superior and, more importantly, falls in love with a Japanese midwife named Orito. Orito attracts the attention of Lord Enomoto, a powerful noble who controls a mysterious shrine high in the mountains several days journey from Nagasaki. Orito is enslaved by Enomoto and put to work in the shrine, which turns out to be a perverse and evil cult that sacrifices babies. The bulk of the novel is concerned with Orito's imprisonment in the shrine, and an attempt to rescue her by Ogawa Uzaemon, a member of the samurai class who is also in love with Orito. The final quarter of the novel suddenly introduces a new danger for Jacob: a British frigate comes into Nagasaki Harbour and demands that the Dutch surrender their trading rights.

There's a fair bit going on there, and at times the story proceeds at a gallop, but far too often the novel is marred by narrative digressions and anecdotal asides about characters who are not central to the plot. These literary "speed bumps" become maddening after a while. One example: when the frigate arrives, one of the Dutch contingent (an Irishman, as it happens) is terrified he'll be recognized by a particular British officer. The Irishman was a convict in Australia and escaped after killing a guard. The Irishman's story is told in very full historical detail, and it all turns out to be redundant; the two never even come close to meeting. This is only one of many speed bumps in the book. Some of them are diverting, but most of them feel like a showoffish display of historical research.

Leaving aside the incessant history lessons, Autumns works well as a literary novel. Mitchell's prose has a nice rhythm to it, and his imagery and descriptions are lean and effective. He also gives the novel another layer of tension by making it clear that his characters are part of global changes as well as personal ones. The Japanese characters are coping with the inevitable intrusion of Westerns ideas and technology into their hermetically-sealed culture, while the Dutch are coping with their nation and empire being eclipsed by the British.

The main characters I didn't find terribly compelling. Jacob is conscientious, good at his job, fairly pious, and moral. In short, dull. He's faced with all kinds of difficult choices and situations, but that doesn't change the fact that he's not someone you want to spend a lot of time with. The same can be said for most of the Japanese characters, who, thanks to a repressive, status-conscious society, are terribly circumspect in what they say and do. The most colourful characters are minor ones, and they tend towards the cliche. Marinus, a Dutch doctor, is an Enlightened Man of Science(tm), and as such his orotund utterances are stuffed with rhetorical flourishes, Latin words and phrases, and the driest wit. He's mildly entertaining, but he feels like a stock character. The working class Dutchmen in Dejima are easily indentified: Mitchell makes them sound like a cross between a Thomas Hardy peasant and Geoffrey Rush's Barbossa character from Pirates of the Caribbean. Did they really need to sound like caricatures to let us know they're not of the same social class as Jacob and Marinus? And speaking of dialogue, Mitchell is overly fond of italicizing key words in almost every spoken passage, as though he doesn't trust the reader to figure out where the emphasis lies in the sentences. It's really irritating.

Autumns has received nothing but rave reviews, which I can only put down to reviewers rewarding Mitchell for his prose and his hard work in the library. As an entertainment, as a piece of historical fiction, Autumns is a distant second to anything by Patrick O'Brian.

Read more of my reviews at JettisonCocoon dot com.

Unbelievably moving and fascinating - I still can't believe I almost passed this one up. I bought it used, and wow do I pity the person who left a bookmark at page 180 when the plot lines of the main character's entire life wrap up in the last ten pages of the book! It's so incredibly thoughtful, consuming, and adventurous - it has all the well-planned, unpredictable story that might normally belong in a thriller but without the frenetic, anxious pace of a thriller. Instead it takes a lyrical, dreamy pace that works well for the story. I feel inspired to take a wide-angle view of my own life the way Mitchell has done with Jacob de Zoet. David Mitchell is a brilliant writer, please read this book.

This was the first David Mitchell book I've read, I ordered Cloud Atlas based solely on the strength of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. It's historical fiction about Dutch trading in Dejima, Japan in the late 18th century. Dejima was a man made island that the Dutch created in Nagasaki Bay to get around the strict isolationist policy of the Tokugawa Shogun who ruled Japan at that time. They are trading in Japan without formally entering into Japan. Their presence is a loophole of sorts and no one knows how long it will last or what it all means, other than opportunities for huge amounts of money to be made very quickly. Naturally this attracts some unsavory individuals on both the Japanese and Dutch sides and the intrigues which are conducted are the subject of this book.

This is a book which is about grand scale statecraft as well as a very personal story of forbidden love and later a story about revenge and justice, Japanese style. It uses many different perspectives because Dejima had such a rich diversity of people involved there. The plotlines are weaved together with such skill by Mitchell that I found each section to be just as fascinating as the last. On my last session with this book I was up until 3:30am completely unable to put it down until I finished. I was pretty tired for work the next day but God was it worth it.

Mitchell has a lot of speaking characters in this book, probably nearly 100, and that can be a little difficult at first because the reader is taking in names, places, and the social and political situation of a very different time all at once. There's a lot of characters but none of them are interchangeable stock characters. Mitchell gives each of them a distinctive voice and intriguing backstory. Some of the voices heard are from the most disenfranchised and abused individuals of the colonial era like an Irish carpenter who has become an indentured servant for the Dutch in Japan and a Malaysian slave who has been whisked away from his family for over 10 years with no immediate prospect of returning home. Their stories are unforgettable, and so are the tales of the Dutch trading officers who are paid to be in Dejima. Some initially seem to fit into a cliched mold for example, "corrupt trading bureaucrat", but the hardships which led them to seek work so far from home are explained in a very sympathetic way by Mitchell and they transcend cliche.This is not to say that every character is secretly good, there are definitely some bad guys here, but Mitchell has written a generous and big hearted book which encourages the reader to look closer before judging.

One of the valuable features of a reading group is that it encourages readers to explore works they would not otherwise choose for themselves. This can result in unexpected finds but it can also result in tedious reading. In either case, the chance is worth taking. Our reading group recently chose David Mitchell's novel "The Thousand Autums of Jacob de Zoet" (2010). Although Mitchell has a broad following, I had not earlier read him. In thinking about the book, I found useful many of the the store reader reviews which express a wide variety of responses to Mitchell's novel.

Mitchell's book is a lengthy, sprawling historical novel set near Nagasaki, Japan between 1799 and 1811. Most of the action takes place during the first year. The book considers European efforts to open up Japan for trade. Most of the book involves the activities of the Dutch. The late sections of the story show the rivalry between the Dutch and the British. Japan at the time was an isolated, by choice, feudally organized culture that wanted to severely limit European trade because, among other reasons, it strongly opposed earlier efforts by missionaries to convert the Japanese to Christianity. The Europeans were interested in markets and economic domination.

The main character in the novel is the young Jacob de Zoet. He is a bookkeeper who travels with the Dutch East Indies Company to Japan in the hopes of earning enough money to win the hand of Anna, the woman he loves. Jacob is a devout Christian. He smuggles a family psalter into Japan at great risk to himself. As the story progresses, Jacob falls in love and proposes to a beautiful, intelligent Japanese woman, Orito, a midwife studying European medicine, whose face is severely burned. Besides the historical theme and the love theme, the book explores the character of de Zoet, among other people, and how he develops during his stay in Japan. Jacob's mission was to examine the books of the trading company and to root out corruption and fraud. He has a strong sense of honesty in the middle of a corrupt trading partnership between the Dutch and the Japanese together with intellectual curiosity and a wish to better himself.

An extraordinary number of characters and types people this novel, and the story is told from a number of perspectives and voices. The tone shifts throughout. The book raises several issues involving personal moral decision. At three critical places, de Zoet, Orito, and the British frigate captain, Penhaglion, are presented with significant ethical choices and engage in a combination of reflection, moving forward and backtracking. With its large cast and meandering storytelling, the book also explores Dutch social structure, including its servants and slaves, Japanese society, Dutch-British relations, and the rise of Napoleonic Europe. A substantial portion of the novel is set in a wicked Japanese monastery and nunnery. Activities at the monastery are outside the pale of any ethical standards, both those of the Japanese and those of the Europeans. I would have liked a consideration of the nature and purpose of Japanese monasticism, rather than only its corruption.

The book displays a collage of themes and a collage of action. Much of the book has the quality of a yarn more than a historical novel or a character study. It includes graphic portrayals of medical operations, beheadings, tortures, long, carefully planned intrigues, narrow escapes from disaster, poisonings, and much else.

Some of the scenes in this book work well. De Zoet's character is developed as is that of his friend, the scholarly Dr. Marinus. I was pleased to see Marinus play Scarlatti on the harpsichord. The scenes of life on the British frigate, Phaeton, and of its captain are among the best in the book. They reminded me of the wonderful novels of Patrick O'Brien dealing with this time period.

On the whole, I was markedly dissatisfied with this book. It is written with a panoramic sweep that is overly broad and not sustained. I thought the book might have benefitted from more modest ambitions. The treatment of Japanese culture, and the Japanese attitude towards the Europeans remains at a basic level. I would have welcomed a more thoughtful, focused treatment. Although the book includes some good, clear writing, it suffers from its form, from verbosity, overwritng, and straining for effect. Some of the long passages, such as the opening of chapter 39, that have attracted admiration seem to me strained and theatrical. The book pulls in to many directions at once and dissipates whatever strength its themes might have. The writing is slow and difficult. I did not find the content of this novel justified the serious effort required to work through it.

I would have welcomed a serious treatment of Japan, its culture, and its early relationship with Europeans. I did not find such a treatment in this book. What there might be is buried among a welter of other material. It was valuable, as suggested at the outset of this review, to make the effort required to read this novel as part of a book group to share thoughts and as part of a community of the store readers. It is also important to me try to explain the reasons for disliking a book that has been praised by other good readers. In spite of some valuable aspects, this book left me seriously disappointed.

Robin Friedman

This novel captivated me for many reasons. It is centered in Dejima at
the end of the 18th century, a tiny man-made island in Nagasaki Bay
where Dutch traders function as Japan's interface to the world at a
time when Japan had deliberately isolated itself. Each culture is
exotic to the other, and as the novel progresses, we see each from a
variety of internal and external perspectives. The characters are
complex, the plot exciting. As always, David Mitchell is very skilled
in his use of language.

What attracted me to this book was the setting and time, turn of 19th century in the very isolated and impenetrable culture of Japan. It seemed a good bet that I would not be able to forecast what might happen within its narrative. Word to future readers: don't you attempt to either.

Also, be forewarned that in the first part of the book you have to become acquainted with multitudes of characters, hackneyed dialog, and Mitchell's stratospheric vocabulary. For many like me, this was a struggle. But as the story unfolds, and the sensational twists emerge, it becomes clear who the characters of focus are. Reaching that point, you are firmly in the author's grasp, and will be dazzled by the multiple first person perspectives that underpin the story.

Mitchell's writing is permeated by imagination that is nothing short of remarkable. On any given page, a character you thought you knew something about suddenly quips out an anecdote that is stunning. With these sub-stories, characters assume greater dimension and give cleverly devised context to events that ensue.

If you are in the mood to treat yourself to a masterpiece of our times, read the story of Jacob De Zoet.

I heart David Mitchell. I want to have his babies. But since this is not possible (he lives in Ireland with his wife and children), I content myself with his words. 'The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet' is his fifth novel, about a Dutch clerk, a burned midwife, a Japanese translator, an English captain - their lives intersecting in a port of Nagasaki, Japan in the early 1800's, and his writing is more startlingly poetic than ever.

Mr. Mitchell's skill with dialect, so commanding in 'Cloud Atlas' is evident here as well. The cardshark Ari Grote's speech is hilarious, witty, and colourful, and the other sailors, slaves, and henchmen, hailing from Ireland, Batavia, England, Ceylon, and of course Japan, have each their own particular language and style.

The book switches between different perspectives, each one opening a world behind the character, filling out enormous spaces I often didn't even realise were there, rounding out even villainous characters, and showing the author's enormous abilities with psychology and dialogue.

The plot gets off to a slow start, but by the second third of the book, I was hooked (and not just because the POV switched to that of a hot Japanese girl surgeon with a burn mark on her face).

I wish I had noted some of my favourite lines, which were often one line poems inserted throughout the book. But any one page will yield gorgeousness. Here are three random selections:

'The notes are spidery and starlit and spun from glass. The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.

'Melt what I am into you, she begs the darkness.'

'The fine black silk is crisp as snow and heavy as air.'

I highly recommend this book.

My whole life I have read and re-read James Clavell's excellent historical novels about many different parts of Asia.

Shogun is by far my favorite, and in many ways The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet could easily be a sequel. It combines the intrigue of Japanese culture of Shogun with the exciting accounts of colonial era trade and commerce of Taipan.

It is set in a post Christian era feudal Japan, when the country was still a mystery and still technologically behind the west, while only 130 years or so from waging a very modern war.

I fell in love with the romanticized aspects of pre-modern Japan long ago, and I enjoyed accompanying Jacob de Zoet on his journey of doing the same.

As with all of Mitchell's books, the attention to period detail is superb, down to the nuances of dozens of languages and cultures. He truly transports you to this time and place in a way I have not experienced since Clavell.

I will continue to eagerly consume Mitchell's works, those of one of my new favorite authors.

This was a great historical novel focusing on just a few characters and a short span of years. It tells the tale of Dutch clerk Jacob de Zoet, the pious son of a deacon, and his unexpectedly long stay at the Dutch trading post of Dejima, at the time (late 18th/early 19th century) the West's only contact with Japan. De Zoet is the main character, but the novel switches POVs throughout, with the middle third focusing mostly on Japanese characters. It's a long, complex story full of love, betrayal, and cultural misunderstandings, ending with a naval attack based on an actual historical incident. There are vivid, sometimes literally poetic descriptions of everything from trees and Nagasaki Harbor to the fellows hauling chamber pots, and some quite brilliant internal monologues, which earned this book its Booker Award nomination. If you like historical fiction and character dramas, I highly recommend this book.

this is the third book I've read from the author, the other two being "cloud atlas" and "the boneclocks." for anyone like me not knowing much about Japanese history, this book was a real eye-opener. lyrically and graphically written, the reader becomes very involved in his writing and this special fictional period history. very few things make me cry anymore, but the ending of this book did...

While I finished <i>The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet</i> several days ago I am just writing the review now. Not because life got in the way, as it tends to do, but because after finishing the book I felt the need to let my subconscious marinate in it's entirety. As always Mitchell's prose is astounding. He has a unique way of transporting the reader to the world. Also, throughout this book he interjects dialog with description, often alternating lines. While it takes some getting used to it adds an atmospheric quality to the book.

The part of the book that I was unsure about when finishing it, and am still unsure about, was the culmination of the plot. I won't give anything away, but it's so atypical that it requires a lot of thought. However, once you think about it, you realize that any other ending would probably be hollow. I highly recommend spending the time reading <i>The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet</i>; David Mitchell is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" by David Mitchell is an exceptional book which can easily be passed as a romantic historical fiction. The book opens in the last part of the 18th Century in feudal Japan, where the reader is positioned in the middle of a difficult labor of the wife of a Japanese nobleman. The baby dies in the process, however the midwife, Orito, saves him and gets her wish to study medicine with a Dutch doctor named

We are then introduced to Jacob de Zoet, a Dutch clerk from the Dutch West Indies Company dreaming of making a fortune and coming back home to marry his sweetheart. Jacob is an honest man, incorruptible, who is sent by the company's new director to straighten out the corrupt books. Soon Jacob finds himself in Dejima, a small island off of Nagaski where the not-yet-ready-for-foreigners Japanese government performs trade and exchange. Dejima is a universe upon itself filled with corrupt Dutch officials, sailors, Japanese magistrates, interpreters and a few slaves as well.

The naiveté of Jacob causes him to be a small part of a petty corruption fiasco which is then held over his head, leaving him exiled on Dejima. Jacob's honesty proves to be his blessing and his curse, as he constantly misses signals from his Dutch companions as well as the Japanese business associates, which are comical to the reader but have devastating results for Jacob.

Jacob and Orito meet, and Jacob falls in love with her - only to try and rescue her from an unspeakable evil planned and executed by her step mother and a Japanese priest who sucks the life out of living creatures. How does a lowly Dutch clerk takes on an evil sadist who makes Dumas' Richelieu seem like the Pope?
That is the genius of this novel which equally contrasts the Dutch and Japanese perspectives while preserving a mystery and allows honor and decorum triumph over corruption and wickedness.

The first part of the novel is wonderful, the story is interesting, the setting fascinating and the prose is fantastic. Mitchell's writing is fabulous, the language is rich and extravagant and the story flows. The author's humor shines through the book as he incorporates little snippets of haiku among the narrative.

The second part however is overflowing with bizarre tragedy and the narrative constantly relies on the "meanwhile back at the farm (temple)" jumps in story. The large cast, which was so eloquently introduced in the first part, seems to be a burden in the latter part. The character studies so fluently staged are now disconnected across time and ocean.

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet"is an epic which is meant to be read slowly and deliberately, the tale is smart and the story is fun. Even though the book incorporates shoguns and samurais, most of the account is carried by clerks and translators. The epic rescue attempt in a sanctuary surrounded by snow capped mountains is no less exciting than the description of diplomatic rituals and the "arse-licking pilgrimage" one must make before meeting the shogun.

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This dense, finely drawn and learned novel of an obscure time and place is filled with peaks of excitement rarely encountered in popular literature. Yes, to be honest, there are some stretches of tedium but, fortunately, these are rather few and easily skipped.

Keep in mind that this is a nuanced drama, populated by colorful and unforgettable characters and by twists of plot that will keep you enthralled. One does need to be a patient reader, however, since this is, indeed a weighty tome approximating 500 pages.

David Mitchell is one of my favorite modern authors. I read and enjoyed 3 of his books (Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, Black Swan Green). This one is not as good as the others although it's still worthwhile reading it.

Mitchell gave an interview in which he said it took him 4 years to complete the book and that he had made 3 tries at writing it, using some of the material from the failed attempts in the final version. This patchwork construction is very obvious. Cloud Atlas is composed of a patchwork of stories but it's brilliantly executed in the way the separate stories are woven together. Thousand Autumns doesn't achieve either blending or separateness of the stories and so, leaves the reader feeling as storm-tossed as one of the ships in the novel. He also stated that he studied many authors of historical novels throughout history to understand the process better. Unfortunately, there were some spots where it seemed as if he were imitating Patrick O'Brian a bit too closely. Mitchell has said that he doesn't want to get stuck writing in one particular, easily identifiable style. I'd argue that he already has that, even when he's using many varied styles. He needs maybe to be more careful not too seem that he's just copying someone else, who will of course be better at it.

I'm afraid at times I was annoyed by yet another of the zillion minor characters relating their life story to Jacob, the protagonist, for seemingly no other reason than to expose the author's fine historical research. While some characters continue throughout the threads of the story and are important to remember, there is such a cast of others it's hard to keep track. However, I certainly admire Mitchell's ability to create distinct characters and it's amazing that with so many, each is somehow different from the others. (I feel like the king in the movie Amadeus when he told Mozart there were too many notes. Here there were too many characters. Dare I suggest that maybe the book could have used more editing? It's awfully long.)

Historical fiction is a new genre for Mitchell. I think I'd call this historical fantasy though. It's surprising to me that with the issues available from the time period he's chosen (1799), that he felt the need to create such an unrealistic cult. It's so extreme that if the religious order involved Jews instead of Japanese, it could clearly be called anti-Semitic. The bloodthirsty nature of it is even extreme by Samurai warrior standards - I'm not sure I understand the author's point. The entire sub-plot of the cult didn't hang together or make logical sense as we've come to expect from Mitchell.

I was also surprised to be stumbling over basic construction issues, as a reader. Since the setting is in the past, historical novels generally use past tense - as do most contemporary novels. As the pages wore on, the use of present tense never got comfortable and eventually just seemed tedious and contrived. Also, since the first parts of the novel are written entirely from one person's point of view, why not just go for first person narrative? Mitchell is very good at that and I wish he had just gone with his strength in that area. When a book is written in third person, I keep expecting the 'narrator' to describe something that the main character doesn't know or can't see - or just a description of scenery or locale. That doesn't occur until the last portion of the book. Then suddenly, the narration shifts briefly into first person where we bizarrely view the world through the eyes of a slave for a couple pages. That would work fine if we were just shifting first person narrators for a short time. But instead we return abruptly to the uncomfortable narrow-focus third person. Really very awkward and quite disappointing from such an experienced and fine writer. If there's some hidden meaning behind why he did this, I guess I missed it.

Now faults aside, this book deserves its three star rating for what this author does well. The larger issues discussed in this book revolve around how cultures are defined by their use of language, how religion influences a person's conception of their world view and place in society, the nature of individual integrity across societies - heh, minor stuff like that. I'm really looking forward to my book group's discussion later this month to talk about the many levels the novel operates on and how the major characters' dilemmas show these aspects. This author's research was clearly well done and the book moves along, in spite of my having to set it down once in a while in exasperation.

Mitchell said he plans to continue using at least one of the characters from this book again. I kind of hope not. I enjoyed his other books so much more than this one. I'm hoping he'll move away from this book, this genre, and this historical setting in future works.

A fascinating look at circa 1800 in Nagasaki during a time of Dutch trading. The characters are well written, you really feel the tension between the cultures, but the author rambles at times. In addition there are several story strands that jump back and forth making the story hard to follow. Mitchell is a very unique writer with fits and starts and jumbles of words, but by the middle of the book it was definitely a page turner.

A surprising live birth for a concubine, a grisly scene, and the story opens. The setting is the vicinity of Nagasaki. At customs, just off the SHENANDOAH, Jacob de Zoet is commanded to unlock his chest. Adam Smith's THE WEALTH OF NATIONS is found. Jacob is a clerk in the Dutch East Indies Company. He is induced to engage in forgery. Jacob has an enemy, Snitker. Snitker claims he should have gotten the clerkship instead of Jacob.

De Zoet has signed up to serve the company for five years. Jacob accuses Mr. Grote of cheating at cards by using a system of notches. Grote offers to make good his losses. Jacob is tasked to give definitions to the Japanese interpreters. Hanzaburo, house interpreter, advises Jacob Tall House has been subject to thievery. Jacob is afraid his Psalter has been stolen, (it hasn't). Since the 1660's it has been forbidden to proselytize the Christian faith. His friend Marinus is a botanist and doctor of medicine. He self-identifies as a scholar, physician and traveler. Jacob is elevated to the post of Deputy Chief Resident by Unico Vostenbosch. When Jacob refuses to sign a crooked summation, he loses his new position and is made to remain in service at Tall House as Clerk de Zoet.

Miss Aibagawa, daughter of a samurai and doctor, but with a burnt face, has been sent to be a Sister at the Akatakiyamu Shrine, the spiritual seat of Lord Abbot Enomoto, daimyo of Kyoga Domain, (and Jacob lovers her. He has had it explained ti him that cultural prohibitions jeopardize any association he would seek with her.). Newest Sister Orito, (Miss Aibagawa), makes a nick in the wall to count the days. A Japanese man, Ogawa Uzaemon loved Orito, but his father will not permit him to marry her because she has a blemish. Seeing her eyes in a reflecting pool, Orito decides to refuse to take the drugs offered to her. Dejima is an artificial island, filled land, in Nagasaki Bay. Marinus is on Dejima. He is performing a lithotomy on Wybo Gerritszoon. Otane, the herbalist of Kurozane, travels to see Uzaemon. Written information prepared by an acolyte where Orito is being held is delivered to him.

Final events in the book I leave to the reader to discover. Dutch and Japanese customs and interests are of equal importance to the themes presented in this sensitive and compelling work of fiction. The author's genius is to blend the affairs and the roles of a rather large cast of characters seamlessly and seemingly, effortlessly. Malay and English elements are also part of the mix. The book is both colorful and exciting.

David Mitchell's new novel confirms his reputation as a `ventriloquist', a writer who can vary his voice to fit his creation without the reader seeing his lips move. Mitchell breathes life into many areas of 18th Century Japan in association with the Dutch East India Trading Company's outpost near Nagasaki. Jacob De Zoet is a chief clerk and unofficial translator for the company who lives a life of contractual exile in the Orient. In his work, De Zoet has access to inside information about Dutch and Japanese interactions and uses it to benefit his company. Although James Clavell comes to mind in comparison, Mitchell's lyrical tale is so rich and immediate that it can be considered a detailed expansion of Shogun rather than an extension.

The story involves western characters of many races and countries of origin facing a common fate, adventure and separation from family roots and security. It includes eastern characters with a common fate of a strictly structured life based on a thousand autumns of cultural tradition. Mitchell's style is simple and direct with wonderful penetrations into the minds of the characters and descriptions of nature in Japan. A technique of alternation of dialog and insights with Tanka like descriptions of physical surroundings puts the reader in the `here and now' of the novel. High excitement, remarkable peace, painful hardship, permanent loss, and transcending love are emotions the reader feels on virtually every page. The reader also learns the history of Dutch/Japanese relations during a time when west and east are slowly merging cultures.

I highly recommend this novel to readers who enjoyed James Clavell's work and who want to learn about peace and war, persistence and death, productivity and setbacks of life in the land of the thousand autumns, the root of the sun. It is an insightful experience to read the novel because of the repeated immersion in the 'now' of intense emotion.

In 2004, David Mitchell impressed readers and critics alike with Cloud Atlas, his genre-defying (and Booker-Prize-shortlisted) novel with a structure more akin to a set of Russian nesting dolls than a typical novel. In his most recent novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Mitchell skips the literary fireworks in favor of the more conventional form of the historical novel. Mitchell's protagonist--Jacob de Zoet--travels around the world in 1799 to the trading post maintained by the Dutch East Indies Company off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan. The Dutch traders are confined to the man-made island of Dejima, lying just off the coast of Nagasaki and connected to the mainland by a heavily guarded bridge. Seeking to earn enough distinction and money to wed the sweetheart he left behind in the Netherlands, de Zoet is tasked with investigating Dejima's notorious corruption. In de Zoet's time, Nagasaki was a mysterious land ruled by powerful samurais and enigmatic traditions, and the inevitable clash between East and West provides the animating force for most of the novel's action.

With its large cast of colorful characters and its adventure-laden plot, including a forbidden love affair and a daring rescue attempt from a dangerous sex cult, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet maintains its quick pace for nearly five hundred pages. Throughout it all, Mitchell employs the conventions of the genre while avoiding most of its clichés. This book's fault, if it has one, is its exuberant excess. The plethora of characters, subplots, and historical details can be challenging to keep up with, particularly in the first hundred pages. This superabundance is also the novel's greatest strength, however, as it results in a realistic rendering of an entire world with all its messiness and complexity. While not as groundbreaking as Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is an old-fashioned historical adventure tale that also manages to be thrilling and inventive.

Parts of this book are brilliant both in writing and evoking a distant time and place, parts are pure cliche melodrama, and parts are totally unnecessary to the plot, which really begins about halfway through the book. But the moments of brilliant writing and scenes win overall, and if you are prepared to speed read (or simply skip past) huge blocks of dialogue and tangents which nearly bring sections of the story to a stop, you will be rewarded by a historical novel that really brings this period of history to life. The ending is particularly poignant. But...be prepared...for a writing style that loves nothing more...than using dot-dot-dot...which is so overused as to be highly...annoying. Get past the many negatives (are the any editors anymore?) and a very good story--with bursts of spectacular writing--awaits.

I have read and enjoyed several of Mitchell's books, including Cloud Atlas, but this one will stay with me the longest. Along with Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies (with which it shares many virtues, although the language and imagery in this book transcend just about everyone's), this is the best I've read in a while. Like the best books, it transports you to another place and time that becomes vividly real in its detail, and then leaves you with a real sense of loss, and wanting more, when the journey is over. It requires close reading and a bit of patience as the novel acclimates you to Dejima/Nagasaki in 1799, and then becomes a page-turner with a riveting and exquisitely beautiful climax. I'm jealous of those who have yet to read this wonderful novel.

I was sad when this book was over but it took me a loooong time to get there. The first third of the book has a slow moving plot. It take some effort (and re-reading) to get to know and understand the characters. This is not a complaint - just be prepared.

This author is trying to tell as story - to create literature - rather than simply entertain a reader. I will definitely re-read this book again.

`The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet` has at least 150 named characters in difficult to pronounce and remember Japanese and Dutch. It's not a complaint, just a forewarning that Mitchell makes you work, this is not a breeze through. At the same time, the story is lively and holds your interest and has quite a few unexpected twists. Mitchell's writing is poetic and never tires, though heavy on movie-like action and dialogue, it is an immersive experience in an exotic world. In addition to real locations, like the man-made island of Dejima [Wikipedia], some of the events depicted are based on true history, such as the Nagasaki Harbour Incident [Wikipedia], and subsequent suicide of a Japanese character, although Mitchell changed the details of those events to fit the storyline.

Big universal themes of liberty and enlightenment are at the heart of the book and elevate it beyond a mere adventure story. In the late 18th century two revolutions, in France and America, unleashed two powerful forces on the world: libertarian ideas which would lead to Democracy; and the empowerment of the common man which would forge the bonds of national communities. The novel is about these themes of liberty, freedom of the individual, the power of truth. It's a novel set in Japan, but it's also a global novel about the world on the cusp of modernity.

As a reading aid, here is a list of characters for short-term memory-challenged readers like myself [URL-link in comment below].

THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET was, I think, the most difficult book I've read this year.

Another reviewer mentioned that if you were tired of the summer reads and ready to pick up something worth reading, then this is the book to do it with and I completely agree.

The story here is so gritty and so real that, at times, I wasn't sure whether my horror or fascination would win over. There were several times that I had to put the book down and just chew on what I was reading.

David Mitchell brought these characters to life. The story begins in the year 1699 in a little Dutch port in Japan. (Dutch as in, the Dutch lease it from Japan). There is a gruesome child birth, detailed and even a picture provided to give you the full on picture of what is happening. Then the story meanders away from that fateful birth and moves on to Jacob de Zoet, a Dutch clerk.

This character is so magnificent. Jacob is so honest that, when certain situations were put before him, I knew without a shadow of a doubt what his answer would be. And when he meets the burned Japanese woman apprenticed to Dr. Marinus, I knew what his intentions were toward her.

This is not a romance story in the typical sense. This is a story of heartbreak, love, fear, death, betrayal and life. It's beautifully written and detailed to the finest point.

So I'd like to repeat what that reviewer said and encourage you, if you are tired of little bits of fluff, to pick up this book and chew on it.

This lovely, character driven story is set at the turn of the 19th century in the Dutch East India Company's trading post of Dejima. We follow the life of Jacob de Zoet, a clerk assigned to look into the corruption and fraud that is endemic in the company's business dealings in this far distant place. His incorruptible approach causes friction amongst his co-workers and he plows a lonely furrow, failing to progress up the company hierarchy because he won't turn the expected blind eye. But he is not as impervious as he seems, and falls in love with a young Japanese midwife, Orito Abigawa. The relationship seems impossible, and he battles to understand all the differences of culture, tradition and language that prevent him expressing his feelings towards her.

In typical David Mitchell style, the story moves from place to place, broadly split into four parts that come together at the very end. This can take a little getting used to, but is not as pronounced as some of his previous work. As ever Mitchell writes with painterly language, stylish and at times quite beautiful. His characters are varied and all are strangely sympathetic in their own way; after I finished the book, I missed their company.

This was a great book. The people who didn't like it seem to have expected it to be something else. One one-star reviewer said they "flipped through?" Read a book, I say. Initially driven by beautifully human tedium, it becomes something else about which I can't be specific without ruining it. It's a beautiful novel. I really didn't like "cloud atlas" by the way.

This was a book that I was anxiously waiting to read. It had many qualities that attracted me to it, recommendations from people who I usually trust on book selections, 18th century Japan setting, and a story that promised to be intriguing. It totally failed on so many levels I am somewhat at a loss on how to explain my disappointment. First, the language was annoying at best, the author has a writing style that in many parts simply turned me off. It isn't lyrical in any way, sometimes it was gimmicky and pretentious. There are multiple pages of secondary scenes meant to create colorful side characters that quite literally put me to sleep. Was it an attempt to be a modern day Dickens? This was no Tale of Two cities (or any other CD book). I found the story strange at best. There were passages that would grip my attention and I would say to myself that this is where things finally start to get good, but then we'd return to the strange story telling style and finally I resigned myself to be disappointed. The characters seem shallow, and uninteresting, and that seems almost impossible to accomplish given the time period and setting. It still gets 3 stars only for the degree of research that obviously went into writing this book, but I think this is a matter of taste..this is just not my cup of tea.

If your looking for a book that's a good read, look no further. This book combines a historical background with an amazing story [from what i have read, it is based on actual events, though certain aspects of the book are embellished for entertainment]. Like others have said, the first chapter may be a hard one, but it sets the backdrop for the continuing story. Not wanting to give to much away--because others already have--the story deals with a certain Dutchman and a Japanese physician [odd, i know, but it works] the characters are very-well developed, and the story is plot will keep you guessing. A 5-Star book.

David Mitchell is an extremely talented writer and this epic tale is fantastic. Set mostly on the island of Dejima, the sole port for western entry into the Japanese empire and an outpost for the Dutch East Indies Company, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet traces the time in Japan of Jacob de Zoet, a young clerk who sets out for Dejima to earn his fortune so that he can marry his beloved Anna back home. Dejima is a world full of corruption, and first part of the story centers around its inhabitants and Jacob's attempts to acclimate himself to the treachery around him and survive as he tries to straighten the accounting of the East Indies Company, his original mission in Dejima. He meets and falls in love with Orito, a Japanese midwife who has been allowed to study medicine with a Dutch doctor in Dejima after she saves the life of a Japanese nobleman's baby during his wife's difficult labor. The rest of the story centers around Jacob's journey as he sets out to save Orito from a fate engineered by her stepmother involving a nunnery and monastery with questionable practices. Mitchell's writing is lyrical and just incredible, as is his storytelling. The characters came alive off the pages for me, and Jacob de Zoet made a wonderful unlikely hero. I will definitely be reading more of Mitchell's writing.

My first time reading this author - I hardly ever read new fiction - and overall a quite enjoyable and even engrossing novel, with strong characters and a fine evocation of how two major cultures (European and Japanese) engage each other at a single point of limited contact. He clearly paints the many impacts of Japan's self-imposed isolation, and foreshadows the opening of Japan to the outside world 50 years after the events in this book.

The plotting was subpar, however - certain key events that turn the plot are not properly in keeping with the characters as we've come to know them. And the ending was unsatisfying: I wanted the "boy-finally-gets-girl" ending that the main character deserves.

This did not have the breadth and complexity of Cloud Atlas, but I enjoyed it more. Mitchell again shows his genius and his gift for painting images is at its best. I feel as though I'm there. His knowledge of historical subject matters provides a great backdrop to what is strange love story. If a book can make you laugh and cry and teach you a little history, what more could you ask for? 11-2013

I'm going to be honest with you. I almost put this book down and didn't finish it - which is just NOT something I do. If I start a book, I finish it. Period. But the first 150 pages or so of this book were just PAINFUL for me to read. This book takes a look at what it was like in the late 1700s, early 1800s, on Dejima, a small Japanese island right off the coast of Nagasaki, where Dutch traders lived. It should be noted that this was a very xenophobic time for Japan, in which the Japanese traded with the Dutch and ONLY the Dutch (no other foreigners allowed), and the Dutch traders were RARELY allowed off Dejima and onto mainland Japan.

The book starts off on a positive note, when a female Japanese midwife manages to successfully deliver the baby of the magistrates concubine. The story then immediately turns to the Dutch living on Dejima. The lying, cheating, gambling, whoring Dutch who speak in such harsh, perverse slang that it took extreme effort to actually understand what they were saying and even more effort to actually want to understand what they were saying. I couldn't care less about these Dutch men and what happened to them, and if I had thought it was going to be about them, I would have put the book down.

Luckily (for me), though, there was the decent, virtuous Jacob de Zoet who stood out amoungst a group of repulsive slum. David Mitchell breathed such life in this character from the debut that, despite how awful I was finding the book (which, in retrospect, was sheer genius on the part of Mitchell, as it allowed the reader to get a real feel for what life must have been like then and what de Zoet must have been suffering with life on Dejima), I found that I kept reading just to figure out where things were going for him. And for Ogaewa, Aibagawa, Lord Enomoto, Dr. Marinus, and all of the rest of the large cast of characters that Mitchell put together (for a book with so many characters, he sure managed to breathe life into all of them).

And I am SO glad I did, because I sped through the last 400 pages of the book at record speed. The Japan of 1799 came alive for me, the customs, the characters, the way of living - everything was beautiful and brilliant, and I felt as if I was actually there. As the story progressed, de Zoet became more and more the good guy that the island of Dejima needed, and it became more and more evident that the villain wasn't Dejima itself, but a certain Japanese (whose name I will not mention for fear of spoiler).

As usual, David Mitchell has given us not just a compelling protagonist, but a compelling villain in a compelling setting complete with a rich plot that will leave you page-turning with desire up until the very end.

Aside from the usual David Mitchell brilliance, I thought one of these things that ultimately made this book so great was the way he dealt with the issues - the racism, the sexism, the religious differences, the blasphemy, etc. Today, we look at all of these things, and we think: moral issue. Back then, though, things were different, and they were even more different in Japan. And he dealt with these issues as they may have been dealt with back then, going into just the right amount of depth, while still managing to throw a modern day twist by actually acknowledging that these things are moral issues. It really brought to home the impossibility of life back then for a woman or a slave. Or, in Japan, even a person with thoughts of their own.

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" is full of laughs, it will make you think, make you cry, make you question, and leave you ultimately forgetting the you read about the characters in books (instead thinking that they were people you might have known in a previous life). Jacob de Zoet is a masterful storyteller with a masterful writing style and a creative mind to boot.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet has slow boiling intrigue and deviousness that has you wolfing down the book as David Mitchell adds layer after layer. In other words, the story is good. (I won't go into the story's particulars because others can describe its intricacies much better.) And the characters are complex and interesting people. Plus, they haven't been just plopped down into the novel's workings. They have backgrounds that, while perhaps slowing down the major plotline, add to the richness of the book in its entirety. Like other David Mitchell books, the language is superb and the writing fantastic. The only thing that I didn't like about this book was that it didn't keep going. I wanted more details, more living through the daily lives of the very real characters. Given that, there are loose ends that don't get tied up until the very end. But, of course, that is part of what adds to the tension of the plot. It is done well and well worth the wait. I wholly recommend reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet!

A wonderful engaging novel filled with memorable characters.
At first you may be overwhelmed with the names but all are characters of interest.
The vocabulary is dynamite
The contrasting themes of East & West, science and superstition, European corruption & enlightment & Japanese insularity told within the history of the Dutch and Japanese is compelling.
The novel is best read at a modest speed to absorb the time, characters and place.

`Once, Shiroyama's father taught him, nobility and samurai ruled Japan ... but now it is Deception, Greed, Corruption and Lust who govern.' notice how the four sins are capitalized in triumph over the lower cased `nobility' and `samurai' and become personalized as proper names bestowed by the royal `who'.

when dutch merchant ships dock at dejima, an island in the nagasaki harbor, before going aboard all hands are removed of christian relics, chained crosses and bibles, the objects put into a barrel and the barrel sealed until the ship embarks years later. jacob de zoet, in service as a clerk to the dutch east indies trading company, has a higher calling: to his fiancé, anna. anna's father, pretty much like rachel's father in the old testament, before granting his daughter's hand to the eponymous jacob, sets a similar task of patience -- and anxiety, a five year separation as captain's clerk to prove his moral value, and increase his financial value. jacob carries overseas a psaltery, the Psalms of david, a book he surreptitiously chooses not to consign to the barrel, so he stashes his treasure at the bottom of his chest with his other books. when an inspector rummages through jacob's books he finds, what is wanted by a japanese scholar and interpreter, a copy of adam smith's Wealth of Nations, a book of more value in the trading factory than david's Psalms.

the first third of this novel is a man's story. david mitchell freights his sentences with a cargo of measured phrases. rough men from a christian land speak with high wit, startling to hear on the tongues of the lowly, the uneducated. and the race of yellow heathens with whom they do business are capable of translating adam smith from dutch to japanese. with preconceived notions shattered, the dutch and japanese are suited for each other, with their different forms of intelligence and their shared affinity for the four capitalized sins.

on the island is a dutch physician, amateur botanist and player of the harpsichord, dr marinus who also uses the aid of the japanese translators for his seminarians and in turn hones their skill by answering their questions on grammar and vocabulary.

one of the doctor's seminary students is an accomplished midwife, orito aibagawa -- her intellectual curiosity encouraged early by her father, and later a fortuitous delivery of the magistrate's son earned her the special privilege of studying with dr marinus. however she's not permitted into the shirando, the bourse for rangakusha scholars of european sciences and arts, to exchange ideas. jacob, like the david of the psalms he hides, is intrigued (dare not call it love), by orito, the racial other, a woman of a different caste than of prostitutes and courtesans. though he is forbidden from socializing with her, there is a way he can have her, even as a foreigner.

the story gets exciting, when dutch intelligence and christianity and trading are jettisoned for what seems like an interlude. for some readers the second part of the book will be welcomed. as excellent as the first part of the book is, the average reader is less engaged by the limits of intelligence as a theme, however superbly handled, and more married to a story of romance and rollicking adventure.

part three brings about a sea change as a ship pulls into port carrying a preacher who sermonizes from the new testament on the apostle paul. with so much new cargo in the third part, mr mitchell uses a literary device of describing two incidents simultaneously in alternating sentences, occasionally adding a scenic description or character reflection as a third incident. in the third part of the book he makes the reader work hard for the lapse into the easy entertainment of exciting adventure of the second part. but, be of good cheer, as a reader you will be rewarded for your efforts. this is good storytelling (with stories within the story) and intelligent writing about intelligence and other themes. this is writing at its finest.

David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet" is an historical fiction that takes a modern view of the era of Japanese-Dutch trade on the edge of Nagasaki. Mitchell draws out his characters through a counterpoint of imagery and dialogue that challenges the reader to keep up. His expressiveness and control of the language are daring and often astounding; at more than one point in the book, Mitchell gave me new eyes.

In creating Jacob De Zoet, Mitchell has clearly drawn upon stereotypes of the foreigner in Japan. For those with some familiarity with the place and its people, it is easy to see Jacob's piety, seriousness and bumbling as the trope of foreigner as clown. Thankfully, Mitchell rescues De Zoet from this stereotype by infusing him with real humanity, and, in doing so, crafts a book that leaves a lasting impression.

The first novel I finished in 2011 is one of the best I have read in years. I look forward to getting more of Michell's works.

The story itself unfolded painfully slowly, but it's mostly because each page is packed with details that had me continually cracking open Wikipedia (yes, this was also my first kindle book and I'm
hooked on reading this way from now on). Once the story and characters are mapped out, the story takes off at breakneck pace and it's difficult to stop reading until the end.

A love triangle. Samurais. Crazy baby-killers. Imperialism. A sneaky monkey with a human name. Class division. Discrimination. The synopsis on the back of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet truly does not do this novel justice.

Examples of Excellence:
- It is impossible to write a review of Mitchell's text without applauding his prose. The man can write. Every word is carefully selected, none are wasted, and each tightens the bond between the reader and plot. While the story is quite serious, Mitchell does offer some lightheartedness by using subtle humor as the mortar between his bricks of scholarly, historical text.
- Speaking of expertise, Mitchell has obviously done his homework. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a historical novel that embeds the facts into the story, preventing the preachy, detached feeling that many books take on when attempting this. I did Google the island Dejima and a few of the terms associated with the Japanese hierarchy in order to make sure I was understanding everything correctly.
- The characters are deep, interesting, and connected to each other on many different levels. The microcosmic island Dejima, where most of the novel occurs, even takes on a character-like status, Mitchell spending a great deal of time describing its significance and role in the characters' lives. Mitchell does an excellent job both mirroring certain characters and creating foils.
- The text definitely carries some thematic heft; it takes on love, family, religion, class, race, trade, imperialism, and ethics. Mitchell's skills as a writer, combined with the space of almost 500 pages, allow these elements to become carefully intertwined.

This is not for everyone:
- It's long, dense, a little slow off the line, and has complicated foreign names.

There's so much more to say about this novel, but I don't want to give anything away. It is definitely not a "beach read," and isn't something you'll necessarily get through on a weekend. It's a novel that requires time and intellectualy energy- and it absolutely deserves both.

I really can't decide. So unlike his other three I've read (CA, N9D, G). A true love story, set at a very interesting time in world history. If you love Japanese history, you'll love this book. If you love "love at first sight" love stories, you'll love this book. If you've loved any of his other books, you'll love this book.

I am a David Mitchell fan -- I bought Ghostwritten on its first release, and have picked up his next three books as soon as I can get ahold of them. Imagine my joy at finding his latest in Vine.

Of his previous books, I particularly love Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, and Number9dream is the only one I haven't read multiple times (it left me cold, but not so much so that I didn't try his next book).

This is Mitchell's masterpiece. It is more like Black Swan Green in that it tells a reasonably straightforward story, albeit split in three parts. Unlike Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas, all three parts are very closely linked. In tone and style it is most like the section in Ghostwritten with the old woman on the mountain, and the story in Cloud Atlas of the missionary and the con-man.

The book is incredibly detailed, and at first rather overwhelming. The level of research must have made it bewildering to write. The three sections cover the early life of a Dutch trader in Japan, then the fate of a woman sold into a religious harem, and finally the events which occur when the British attempt to muscle in on the Dutch/Japanese trade situation.

Despite the level of detail and historical nature of the novel, Mitchell still manages, once he hits his stride in parts two and three, to make it a thrilling and exciting journey. Highly recommended for fans of his previous work, but newcomers might prefer to start with Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas before they attempt this.

(One aside -- the UK version of this book has a great cover, and his last two had beautiful artwork by Kai and Sunny. This US edition has the most godawful, talentless Photoshop-circa-1994 cover I have seen on a book in years. Luckily, the story contained within it is worth looking past the cover, and hopefully people will do that... if it hadn't been David Mitchell, I never would have picked up such an ugly book!)

Fair warning: I am a huge David Mitchell fan. That said, it is an admiration that has been fairly won by the author. With his elliptical plot lines and superb writing, I have eagerly awaited the novel that became "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" since devouring the superb "Black Swan Green" four years ago. Gladly, it did not disappoint, although it certainly represented something of a departure for Mitchell, as it is more traditionally plotted and more focused on character development. That said, the author refuses to be pinned down as he shifts narrative focus from a Dutch Clerk to a Japanese interpreter to a scarred midwife and so on. Moreover, he plays with genre, drifting from historical romance to action adventure (that borders on "Indiana Jones" type villainy) and on, all while presenting a coherent whole, all while staying true to the time and place (turn of the 19th century Japan) , and all while telling a story that is above all eminently readable.

This novel could prove problematic for Mitchell professionally as I am sure there are those who will argue that it is too straightforward (i.e. not highbrow, or literary enough) and those will say that it is too challenging to be considered mainstream. I, on the other hand, would argue that it is precisely this crossover appeal that makes "Thousand Autumns" so laudable. It displays style and nuance that should allow Mitchell to finally break through and win the Booker Prize, but at the same time isn't so self conscious that it subvert story for presentation. This is true of all of Mitchell's novels, which is what has made him such a darling of the literary scene, but it is particularly true of this novel.

I cannot recommend "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" enough, for both its masterful prose and fascinating, engaging story line. This is a novel that will stay with you long after its completion.

Jake Mohlman

David Mitchell has given us a gift. It is not just a story, but an escape into past history - a view of the world that is long gone by. And it's not just a view, but a window into which the readers press their faces against and peer into the vividly unfolding events portrayed only inches away by means of the printed word. But the readers are not really aware that they are reading words at all; they are spectators witnessing the action and hearing the conversations. When an author can use his magic to translocate the reader to this position against that window, something very special is taking place. The time continuum is blown away as time stands perfectly still; because we are not reading, we are living the story with the characters.

Jacob de Zoet is probably the most decent and credible employee of the Dutch East Indies Company. However, he is alone in that category and in the world of cheaters, liars, back-stabbers and outright thieves. His attempts at making a name for himself are met by one dishonorable individual after another. Love is fleeting, fame is short-lived, and a job well done is both his alpha and his omega.

Although de Zoet takes most of the stage in Part I of the drama, his is but a bit player in Part II as he woman of his dreams and thoughts takes control of Part II. Just how dastardly people can be is fully displayed in this section. This reader was even more engrossed in Part II than Part I. De Zoet is quickly moved to the back of my mind as more information is pulled from the minor characters in Part I and moved into the forefront in this Section. How the characters are intertwined and fleshed out is a remarkable piece of writing. Part III is the climax of climaxes even if it starts a little slowly with a variety of new characters. The ending is as satisfying as any I've read.

This is not a book to be read quickly, but instead, allow the time it takes to read it to involve you in the story. Put away anything that your mind is pressing you to understand before the author unfurls it and let the story unfold in its own meandering way . It is necessary that that the reader does not assume anything; for much is hidden from your eyes. Enjoy. My highest rating - 5 stars.

This was my first exposure to David Mitchell and he is quite a novelist. I came to it from and interest in historical fiction and its study of an obscure historical era and place. It is certainly well-written with intriquing characters and subject matter. I would have enjoyed more elaborations on political context, but the intersections of societies was enough to make it an engaging and worthwhile read.

David Mitchell's latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is this versatile and ambitious author's first foray into the historical novel. The novel is set at the turn of the nineteenth century on the Dutch trading post of Deijima, a man-made island off the Japanese city of Nagasaki. What makes Deijima a great setting for Mitchell is that the small number of Dutch (and sometimes other Europeans) who lived on the island were not allowed to step foot on Japanese soil, making the island something of a prison for the traders, and a perfect location for Mitchell to explore one of his pet themes: cultural dislocation.

And into this setting Mitchell places Jacob de Zoet, an honest young clerk who has come to Deijima to make a fortune to impress the father of the girl he wants to marry back home. Arriving with Jacob is the new chief of Deijima, Unico Vostenbosch, who is tasked with rooting out the corruption that has become rampant at the post. Jacob is his able lieutenant in the endeavor, which invites all manner of conflict for him with the others on Deijima who have had ties with the previous corrupt chief.

Then, to complicate matters, he also falls in love with a Japanese mid-wife. A relationship with her is, of course, impossible given the safeguards keeping visitors and locals apart: only Japanese merchants, translators, and prostitutes are allowed on Deijima. Yet Jacob tries many ploys to let her know his feelings.

The second section follows this mid-wife, Orito Aibagawa, who is sent to a nunnery to pay off her father's debts after his death. This shrine, Mt. Shiranui, is run by a powerful abbot named Lord Enomoto, who seems to have mystical powers. No visitors are allowed in the shrine, and it doesn't take long for us to understand that there is something sinister going on, something that requires the help of a skilled mid-wife. Taken against her own will from her studies on Deijima (she had been given an exemption to study under esteemed Dr. Marinus because she saved the life of the local magistrate's child during a stillbirth.), Orito tries to find a way out of the shrine. Meanwhile, we learn that Ogawa Uzaemon, one of Deijima's junior translators, has his own complex feelings for Orito. When a scroll with the secrets of the shrine comes into his possession, they are so horrible he decides to give up his comfortable life to break her out.

As with virtually any work set in Japan of that time, cultural isolation also plays a large role in this novel. The trading post/artificial island/virtual prison of Deijima serves as a brilliant metaphor for the isolated and hermetically sealed state of Japan at that point in history. With limited traffic back and forth through the gate barricading the island, cultural infection was largely controlled. But not entirely. There was enough flow of information to start the transformation we know would eventually happen in Japan. We see in the novel how the Japanese elite begin to agitate against the Shogun's isolationist practices. Deijima was something of a keyhole for Japanese to look out of to see what they were missing, and what they saw outside made them want to open the door.

Language then becomes powerful as the two cultures interact. The Dutch are not allowed to learn Japanese, so they are dependent on the translators who are often placed in their positions more out of patronage than skill. Confusion is an almost normal state of communication. And that confusion can be purposely played by some to achieve their own corrupt ends, as Jacob learns when he catches a translator's attempt to steal from the Dutch with a mistranslated document.

So Thousand Autumns is a deep and intelligent novel, as we've come to expect from Mitchell. And, as usual, his writing is a veritable writer's workshop. The first two scenes especially are awesome in their ability to draw the reader into his rich and absorbing world. In the first, we see Orito perform the delivery that will earn her access to Deijima. In the second, we are introduced to Jacob as he observes Vorstenbosch dress down the previous corrupt chief. Both are templates for the rest of the book: crisp, clean writing; evocative description; and vivid characterization. And Mitchell's ability to use fine detail to render Japan as both a decrepit, corrupt society and a gorgeous culture is amazing.

The one fault I found with the novel is that much of the third section, which introduces a slew of new characters we care nothing about, slows the book a bit too much. But this can be forgiven for reasons of utility: the section is necessary to move the plot forward so Jacob's story can resolve. Also, the thrilling econd section is a difficult act to follow; and, after the astonishing climax and moving conclusion, most readers will have forgotten any of the book's faults anyhow.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet shows Mitchell to be a one of the top-flight literary novelists in the world. And he's only forty-one! Thankfully, we have many more novels to come from this young master.

This is easily the most enjoyable book I have read in years. For me, it has all the elements of great story-telling; thorough character development, suspenseful plot and efficient writing. I have read so many books in the past two years where I didn't really care if I even ready the final 100 pages, it was refreshing to be engaged until the final page. Bravo.

David Mitchell is in the class of writers such as John Banville, Ian McEwan, Peter Cameron and Margaret Atwood that write with such proficiency and seemingly innate style that one is interested in whatever they produce. If the work is not as good as a previous production it almost doesn't matter because it is so much better than that which anyone else is turning out. This novel is no exception. If it is not as wonderfully unique and startling as CLOUD ATLAS (and what other book is?) it is still beautifully written and has a propulsive plot. The weakness, if there be one, is that the plot is rather scattered and the book tries to be too many things at once without holding together as well as it might: historical novel, mystery, love story, with melodramatic elements tied to only half-realistic characters. This perhaps is the fault of ambition and would that more novels had that fault. But that does not negate the many pleasures to be had in reading a writer who can compose thrilling set pieces along with elegant sentences. By his own high standard, Mr. Mitchell may have faltered but it is a detour I happily made as the scenery along the way was not to be missed.

A 600-year old abbot who can snuff out a living thing with a wave of his hand, who has monks impregnate imprisoned women on a mountaintop so that he can murder their children to somehow ensure his own longevity -- really?? The historical part of this, the facts surrounding the quarantined Dutch trading island off Nagasaki in the 18th century, was interesting, but both the Dutch and the Japanese characters think and express themselves too much like 20th century Americans, and the beauty of the writing just doesn't redeem the silly Dan Brown-ish plot points.

I will be honest. I had to reread every paragraph and just decided not to finish it. I bought it because my book club picked it. I didn't enjoy it all. It was over my head and I just could not get interested in the main character or the subject matter at all. I decided instead to read "Water for Elephants" which I enjoyed greatly!

Interesting and very well written. Follows the life of a young man who's joined the Dutch East India Company in the late 18th century and who goes to Japan to trade with them when Japan is still a closed nation. The historical detail is fascinating.

In David Mitchell's earlier book - Black Swan Green - he writes, "If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, "When you're ready."

To which I say: David Mitchell, joyfully arise! His latest opus, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is a veritable masterpiece, and confirms his place as one of the most versatile and dazzling and inventive novelists of our era.

The novel is set right at the turn of the 18th century in Japan, where the Dutch East India company has requisitioned the man-made trading island of Dejima. The eponymous copper-haired Jacob de Zoet is an unimpeachable clerk who hopes to earn a reputation here, thus earning the right to marry his fiancée back in the Netherlands. In some of the most descriptive writing I've ever encountered, Mitchell describes an insular Japan in self-imposed exile, where Christianity is banned, thieves, liars, and culprits run rampant, and culture and law are yoked to a far more primitive standard.

Jacob De Zoet ends up meeting a skilled midwife, Orito Aibagawa, whose face has been marked by the splattering of hot oil, and fancies himself falling for her. It is only in section II that her story is revealed; upon her bankrupt's father's death, she is spirited away to a secluded convent where ghastly and unholy crimes occur. One can almost visualize this section - which reads somewhat like a literary adventure story - on the big screen.

The third and final section - a fictionalized reimaging of the fall of the Dutch East India Company -- focuses on the arrival of a British warship captained by the gout-inflicted John Penhaligon. Determined to usurp the Dutch and set up a trading post in Dejima, the British attempt to make an uneasy truce with the Dutch and the Japanese. This is in my opinion the least satisfying of the sections (except for those who love history, who will revel in it), but even so, Mitchell's prose remains beautiful and compelling.

The Japanese gave florid names to their kingdom, calling it A Land of A Thousand Autumns; hence, the title. This book took my breath away. It's a true original, a mélange of sumptuous historical fiction, adventurous quest, love story, and fable (with a nod to another master, Haruki Murakami, in a few instances.) I have racked my brain to come up with another author today who can take such bold imaginative leaps and serve as a reliable interpreter of emotions and facts, and come up blank.

In spite of this book's audacious scope, every sentence shimmers. In the end, it rises above Jacob de Zoet and the other individual players and focuses on the masterpiece that is the entire world. I'd give a thousand stars to The Thousand Autumns if I could.

David Mitchell's CLOUD ATLAS is probably my favorite book, and so I was ecstatic to get my hands on an advanced copy of this novel. While it lacks the same giddy scale, it's lovely, and Mitchell remains one of the finest stylists I've ever read.

Set in early 19th-century Japan, mostly on a Dutch-controlled trading port in Nagasaki Harbor, the novel gracefully evokes a lost world both innocent and brutal. Part love story, part historical epic, it's a meditation on colliding cultures at the brink of a new era.

A history lesson well disguised, but I found it difficult to relate to the characters. Part of the problem was absorbing the necessary mind set for the time and place. I can't blame the author for failures here because Mitchell provided intricate, researched, convincing details. The problem was for someone in the 21st C. to believe what had to be true. The effort tired me before I finished. Perhaps the story should have been finished before its protagonist had come to the end of his thousand autumns.

I won't spoil the plot by revealing what exactly is indigestible but the author has included something that is as silly as UFO's landing in Edo in 1799 to seize the Shogun and set up Howdy Doody in his place. Why? I dunno. It isn't needed. It doesn't advance the story. It's really a terrible flaw.

That said, the rest of the book is pretty darn good -- 98 out of 100; then take 45 penalty points for 1 MAJOR flaw.

So buy the book and enjoy what is good. You'll know of what I speak when you get there. Just ignore the absurdity of the one problem and soak up the rest of the goodness therein. It'll butter your artichokes.

Beautiful writing that captures dual levels of immediate and mystical, highest level of story craft, amazing characters, stately sinuous plot unfolding like a garden, a entrancing immersion to another time place & culture. A gem of a book!

Read "Cloud Atlas" and loved it, so very willing to have another go at his latest novel. This one is vastly different, a story with one narrative arc, transporting, intelligent, compelling and deeply satisfying on many levels. There is much to linger over after the book is finished, as it now is, sniff.

Mr Mitchell has sufficient notoriety from fantastic creative abstracts. Here though, he imbues a tale of unusual life, in an exotic setting, with the pathos of the ordinary, and bridges that gulf to the exotic. A satisfying work, it credits the author.

A lot of information, requiring mental acuity to really appreciate the research and the high literary quality of this historical fiction. The characters, the plot, and the historical background are so intriguing that I never lost interest despite the challenges. This is a kind of contemporary fiction that is not always easy to find these days, that is to say it offers so much--fun with knowlege, integrity and depth.

I really don't give five stars all that often, but this book really knocked me out. In a series of vignettes, the author describes events in the Dutch trading colony at Nagasaki as the eighteenth century flips over to the nineteenth and the Dutch trading empire is disintegrating, giving way to English primacy on the seas. We see the events of the novel from the perspective of its protagonist, Jacob de Zoet, his love interest, Aibagawa Orito, and a mutual friend of theirs, Ogawa Uzaemon, but occasionally from the perspective of other participants in its actions. It's a story of love that can't be fulfilled, idealisms that are shattered, and a world that is changing for everyone involved. The best parts are lyrical reflections on the nature of love, perception and knowledge. This is going to stay with me for a long time and I will probably give it as a gift. It's also a fantastically researched historical novel; my one quibble is that the puns the author makes in English with his Dutch characters don't usually work in actual Dutch. But I loved it.

Set in closed-off Japan the late 1700s, as the Dutch global trade and imperial influence was about to be taken over by British Imperials, this richly evocative book follows an earnest young clerk from the Dutch East India Company as he encounters the bawdy and corrupt world of shipping and the seas, the exotic, forbidden and sometimes dangerous world of Japan, and his conflicting desires. It is so beautifully rendered that you taste, smell and hear the world as Mr. de Zoet experiences it, and it's pace moves along quite nicely as well. Luscious and intelligent. I fully recommend this to anyone who enjoys a great tale of adventure or romance.

One caveat: The rendering of the conversations, details and dialects of the Dutch characters' experiences is so spot-on as to feel you are in the moment exactly. This doesn't carry over to some of the Japanese exchanges, especially as to the "bad guys," whose conversations can sometimes seem a bit "scooby-doo."

Mr Mitchell is an elegant writer. He also is able to set both time and place in his book with uncanny ease. I didn't notice any anachronisms, yet he never seems pedantic of distancing. This is my favorite book of the year, so far, and I expect to carry it with me for some time. Read it.

With its large cast, this book can be tricky to follow. The excellent reading, principally by Jonathan Aris, brings the novel to life wonderfully. It bears listening to more than once, both for the peerless writing by David Mitchell and for the riveting performance.

Very visual, excellent dialogue and keen attention to small details make this story a wonderful journey to another time and place. There are many secondary characters and I did find myself confusing them from time to time. There are also a number of tangents that have little to do with moving the main plot forward, but at its core, it's a great old fashioned novel told well which is a rare commodity in this day and age.

I thought that The Cloud Atlas by Mitchell was one of the best modern works of fiction that I have read since Sophie's Choice. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, however might have been the slowest, most boring book I ever actually finished during my sixty years. It was a slog. If you are young, still idealistic, want to feel like you are smarter than the average bear, love artsy poetry, and fall in love with your anima every time you see her shadow, you might like this book. . For you, I say, give it a try. When I was 33, I probably would have loved it. But if you want to be entertained instead, better stick with Janet Evanovich.

Many better reviewers here have detailed the book's setting and its plot better than I could, so I won't repeat them. Read the earlier reviews. Most of them are very good.

For me, I am just surprised that so many people actually liked this work. I realize that all of us are at different stages of our lives and that we will respond differently to different novels, but where Mitchell tries to evoke, he mainly emotes. He literally chews the scenery. Compared to this book, the parts of Anna Karenina where the character Levin muses about 19th-century Russian politics are a power-driven hoot. Middlemarch reads like Batman compared to this. If didn't respect Mitchell so much for his previous works, I never would have finished this one.

For example, after 240 pages in the paperback, during which a story takes place that Hemingway would powerfully written in 24 pages without any diminishment in atmosphere or plot, we read this:

"Rain hisses like swinging snakes and gutters gurgle. Orito watches a vein pulsating in Yayoi's throat."

At this point in the story, no one cares about gurgling rain or pulsating veins. What we want to know is, "Why did you write this novel?" I gave him 240 pages of my time up to then, and 479 when I finished. In return I got back almost nothing.

It almost reads as if Mitchell wrote this entire book as an epically long prose poem, all broken down in stanzas like Fagles' Odyssey, ready to submit to the Atlantic Monthly, and then he changed his mind and made it a novel instead.

And, finally, the plot, where you can find one, is sophomoric. As in Dances With Wolves and Avatar, our heroic white guy is fated to come to Japan and save the day. Like in Romeo and Juliet, our solace and sweet pain come in the knowledge that life sucks, all things must pass, I'm out of college, money spent, see no future, pay no rent, and I'm tied to the whipping post. The reader doesn't even get the satisfaction of a happy ending. Imagine the second movie Twilight where, after Edward dumps Bella, she goes to the University of Washington, becomes an investment banker, and marries an overweight divorced podiatrist from New Jersey. That is kind of how this story turns out.

The author's writing is superlative. The story rests on the foundations of a real place and historical condition. A more engaging yarn could not be desired. I eagerly anticipate a long and enjoyable relationship with this developing master's evolving work.

This is a slow paced sprawling novel. It contains many strands that interact in various ways. There are many things to like about it, but also some things against it. I have a suspicion that this story may well make a better film than a book, which I say carefully, as I usually much prefer the book to any subsequent film.

The start of the book is slow and complex, introducing various characters and the tensions between them. The fears and insecurities within the Dutch and Japanese camps is increased further by the slow and stilted negotiations they make with each other. The first part of the book feels almost suffocating, but I suspect this is the atmosphere the author means to create- and that it may well be historically accurate. I can imagine that being sent to work at the other side of the world in a very foreign country and being confined to one small island, and to working for one company would actually quickly come to feel a confined existence.

The second part of the book deals with the main female character and the fate that befalls her as she is taken up to a shrine by Enomoto to be "engifted" This section is quicker paced, and has the feel of a good detective novel as the bits of information start to connect together. The atmosphere of menace and control is well captured. Abbot Enomoto could easily be updated to make a superb James Bond Oriental villain with his secret mountain monastery fortress and his network of spies! The events on the Japanese side of the gate are much more interesting than those on the Dutch side where a humdrum life continues, and the characters fill out a bit more of each other's life histories. Every character in the book, except De Zoet himself has their background history described at some point or other, and Mitchell's ability to place his character's actions in the context of world history and their personal histories is superb. I do wonder whether in this novel he has too may characters in play at once.

The third part of the book ties off some of the threads from the first two parts of the book, and the arrival of a British frigate enlivens the plot and the action. The British are disappointed to find that there is no well laden Dutch Merchant ship for them to plunder. (The Dutch themselves seem to be quite good at robbing their own ships before they get back to Amsterdam!)

This is a well crafted novel, slowly paced, but always with some interest. Its great selling point is its ability to show how people from different backgrounds with all their hopes, fears and expectations interact with each other. If it were music it would be a Mahler symphony at lento or andante pace, with great swells at times, but with slow patient development of other movements. Personally I prefer the breezy allegro of stories such as Conn Igulden's Wolf of the Plains (Conqueror 1).

This novel is a good story, and worth the effort of reading it.

What it lacks is any clear point to the story. It catches a time and an atmosphere well, but I am not sure why Mitchell has created this book. It is more like a soap opera where the point is to keep the action rolling, rather than to reach a conclusion.

Wonderful writer - just a comment - I love the way, if you have read other books by Mitchell, you have inside information or secret knowledge. You know cwetain thing happened without actually being told. I liked 'The Bone Clocks' better, but enjoyed this one too.

With its large cast, this book can be tricky to follow. The excellent reading, principally by Jonathan Aris, brings the novel to life wonderfully. It bears listening to more than once, both for the peerless writing by David Mitchell and for the riveting performance.

Very visual, excellent dialogue and keen attention to small details make this story a wonderful journey to another time and place. There are many secondary characters and I did find myself confusing them from time to time. There are also a number of tangents that have little to do with moving the main plot forward, but at its core, it's a great old fashioned novel told well which is a rare commodity in this day and age.

I thought that The Cloud Atlas by Mitchell was one of the best modern works of fiction that I have read since Sophie's Choice. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, however might have been the slowest, most boring book I ever actually finished during my sixty years. It was a slog. If you are young, still idealistic, want to feel like you are smarter than the average bear, love artsy poetry, and fall in love with your anima every time you see her shadow, you might like this book. . For you, I say, give it a try. When I was 33, I probably would have loved it. But if you want to be entertained instead, better stick with Janet Evanovich.

Many better reviewers here have detailed the book's setting and its plot better than I could, so I won't repeat them. Read the earlier reviews. Most of them are very good.

For me, I am just surprised that so many people actually liked this work. I realize that all of us are at different stages of our lives and that we will respond differently to different novels, but where Mitchell tries to evoke, he mainly emotes. He literally chews the scenery. Compared to this book, the parts of Anna Karenina where the character Levin muses about 19th-century Russian politics are a power-driven hoot. Middlemarch reads like Batman compared to this. If didn't respect Mitchell so much for his previous works, I never would have finished this one.

For example, after 240 pages in the paperback, during which a story takes place that Hemingway would powerfully written in 24 pages without any diminishment in atmosphere or plot, we read this:

"Rain hisses like swinging snakes and gutters gurgle. Orito watches a vein pulsating in Yayoi's throat."

At this point in the story, no one cares about gurgling rain or pulsating veins. What we want to know is, "Why did you write this novel?" I gave him 240 pages of my time up to then, and 479 when I finished. In return I got back almost nothing.

It almost reads as if Mitchell wrote this entire book as an epically long prose poem, all broken down in stanzas like Fagles' Odyssey, ready to submit to the Atlantic Monthly, and then he changed his mind and made it a novel instead.

And, finally, the plot, where you can find one, is sophomoric. As in Dances With Wolves and Avatar, our heroic white guy is fated to come to Japan and save the day. Like in Romeo and Juliet, our solace and sweet pain come in the knowledge that life sucks, all things must pass, I'm out of college, money spent, see no future, pay no rent, and I'm tied to the whipping post. The reader doesn't even get the satisfaction of a happy ending. Imagine the second movie Twilight where, after Edward dumps Bella, she goes to the University of Washington, becomes an investment banker, and marries an overweight divorced podiatrist from New Jersey. That is kind of how this story turns out.

The author's writing is superlative. The story rests on the foundations of a real place and historical condition. A more engaging yarn could not be desired. I eagerly anticipate a long and enjoyable relationship with this developing master's evolving work.

This is a slow paced sprawling novel. It contains many strands that interact in various ways. There are many things to like about it, but also some things against it. I have a suspicion that this story may well make a better film than a book, which I say carefully, as I usually much prefer the book to any subsequent film.

The start of the book is slow and complex, introducing various characters and the tensions between them. The fears and insecurities within the Dutch and Japanese camps is increased further by the slow and stilted negotiations they make with each other. The first part of the book feels almost suffocating, but I suspect this is the atmosphere the author means to create- and that it may well be historically accurate. I can imagine that being sent to work at the other side of the world in a very foreign country and being confined to one small island, and to working for one company would actually quickly come to feel a confined existence.

The second part of the book deals with the main female character and the fate that befalls her as she is taken up to a shrine by Enomoto to be "engifted" This section is quicker paced, and has the feel of a good detective novel as the bits of information start to connect together. The atmosphere of menace and control is well captured. Abbot Enomoto could easily be updated to make a superb James Bond Oriental villain with his secret mountain monastery fortress and his network of spies! The events on the Japanese side of the gate are much more interesting than those on the Dutch side where a humdrum life continues, and the characters fill out a bit more of each other's life histories. Every character in the book, except De Zoet himself has their background history described at some point or other, and Mitchell's ability to place his character's actions in the context of world history and their personal histories is superb. I do wonder whether in this novel he has too may characters in play at once.

The third part of the book ties off some of the threads from the first two parts of the book, and the arrival of a British frigate enlivens the plot and the action. The British are disappointed to find that there is no well laden Dutch Merchant ship for them to plunder. (The Dutch themselves seem to be quite good at robbing their own ships before they get back to Amsterdam!)

This is a well crafted novel, slowly paced, but always with some interest. Its great selling point is its ability to show how people from different backgrounds with all their hopes, fears and expectations interact with each other. If it were music it would be a Mahler symphony at lento or andante pace, with great swells at times, but with slow patient development of other movements. Personally I prefer the breezy allegro of stories such as Conn Igulden's Wolf of the Plains (Conqueror 1).

This novel is a good story, and worth the effort of reading it.

What it lacks is any clear point to the story. It catches a time and an atmosphere well, but I am not sure why Mitchell has created this book. It is more like a soap opera where the point is to keep the action rolling, rather than to reach a conclusion.

Wonderful writer - just a comment - I love the way, if you have read other books by Mitchell, you have inside information or secret knowledge. You know cwetain thing happened without actually being told. I liked 'The Bone Clocks' better, but enjoyed this one too.

David Mitchell creates living, breathing characters--each one of whom matters--who live in a world that is almost wholly foreign and also absorbingly real and significant.
The narrators of the Audible.com recording could not be bettered--they become invisible.

Warning: Don't start the last 150 or so pages so late in the day that you can't finish before you need to sleep.

Will Jacob de Zoet ever get the girl? To answer that, Mitchell leads us through the day-to-day routine of a little-known 18th century Dutch trading post, a bizarre Japanese cult where women are "engifted" and their "gifts" confiscated, and a naval battle with huge geopolitical implications. Still, whether or not the nice guy won't finish last remains the central question in David Mitchell's fascinating new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

Mitchell's story is, in a word, vivid. The novel has a cinematic feel. The sentences sparkle and the plot, told in the present tense, continuously veers off unexpectedly. It's not hard to follow (keep a list of characters, though; there are many), but sometimes it is hard to stay engaged.

Here's why: Mitchell constantly interrupts himself to provide detail. He stuffs bits of narration into dialogue mid-sentence (see below for an example) and describes in several one-line sentences in a row that read at times like poetry (see below for an example of this, too). These tricks in themselves aren't annoying, but you never quite get used to them, and they tend to distract from the flow of the story. And when you're telling a story about something as abstruse as Dutch-Japanese-British relations in 1799 at an obscure trading post, doing whatever you can to keep your reader with you seems to be the tack to take.

Basically what that all means is that Mitchell's snappy, crackling writing was both a blessing and a curse; both a hindrance to me totally investing myself in the story, but also the way by which I was able to find my way in and derive the enjoyment I did. That said, there are parts -- a daring rescue attempt, the aforementioned naval battle -- that speed along with thriller-like speed. But the scene-setting -- and there's quite a bit to recreate the 18th-19th century world as vividly as Mitchell is able to -- and jumps in story (Mitchell basically re-starts the story at the beginning of each of the three "acts" of the novel) cause a few lags in reading enjoyment, at least for me.

But back to Mr. de Zoet, the mild-mannered, honest-to-a-fault young clerk who is employed by the Dutch East India Company. Charged with cleaning up the company's ledgers and clamping down on the blatant profiteering and corruption, Jacob has quite a challenge on his hands, especially given that his superiors are as corrupt as anyone. A chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, a Japanese midwife who has the rare opportunity to study under the Dutch Dr. Marinus on Dejima -- the Dutch East India's trading post off the coast of Nagasaki -- causes Jacob to all but forget his betrothed back home in the Netherlands. Jacob is fascinated with Miss Aibagawa, and is heartbroken when she is essentially kidnapped and forced to take up residence at a bizarre nunnery atop a mountain. Will the two ever be reunited? And if so, will she requite his love? If not, will Jacob ever get back home?

This was my first foray into Mitchell, and I am in awe. Thousand Autumns isn't my favorite book of the year by any stretch, but it's easy to see the genius behind it. The imagination and research that must've been required to tell this tale is simply stunning. There's always two ways to evaluate a book -- the way that's objective as possible, putting yourself in the shoes of other readers, and the "it was/wasn't my cup 'o' tea" way. Objectively, it's a stunning book, but one I wish I would've liked more than I did.

Example of in-dialogue narration:
"So," Vorstenbasch settles himself, "after three days ashore, how are you finding life on the company's farthest-flung outposts?"
"More salubrious"--Jacob's chair creaks--"than a posting on Halmahera, sir."

Example of several one-line sentences in a row that read like poetry:
Steam rises from a bowl of water; light is sliced on the bright razor.
On the floor, a toucan pecks beans from a pewter saucer.
Plums are piled in a terra-cotta dish, blue-dusted indigo.

I know other people give wonderful reviews, but personally, I hate spoilers, so I try to give my impressions without giving away the full plot line.

I loved "Cloud Atlas" and thought it was the best book I've listened to in years. I could not wait to listen to Thousand Autumns...but perhaps this book is best read in hardcopy. I could not keep the names and characters straight. All of the names, of course, were very foreign to me - Japanese and Dutch, pronounced with an accent. I had to start over once I realized that Yakob Dessert was the title character. Duh! :-P

There were not many likable characters in this book. Likable characters are not a necessity, of course, but they improve my enjoyment.

While I felt that Mitchell set up a very scary scenario, it fell flat after that. I was happy and relieved when the British showed up! Names I understood and could keep track of! I felt the book came alive when the British were on stage, in ways it didn't earlier. There was some evidence of humor, for instance.

At the end, chunks of time passes without plot or narrative. Uh.. What happened? Nothing worthy of mentioning in 11 years? Or more?

I was disappointed. Not Mitchell's best effort or the best book to listen to, either.

David Mitchell is well known for his mind bending piece of fiction, Cloud Atlas, a book in which Mitchell proves that he is both a great story teller and craftsman. In his new novel, Mitchell, who is on record as saying that he wants to continually evolve as a writer, reinvents himself as a historical novelist, setting tale in Japan during the turn of the 19th century. In James Woods' review of Mitchell's new novel, featured in the New Yorker, he asks why a writer of Mitchell's considerable talents is spending time writing a good historical novel. While I think Woods entirely misses the boat on Cloud Atlas in his review, his point actually seems well taken when it comes to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. The book gets off to a bit of a clunky start as the reader is introduced to a virtual monkey bin of characters both Dutch and Japanese without enough time spent on their development as characters for the reader to get a firm foothold. In fact, the first portion of the book labors in much the same way as Cloud Atlas' opening section does but without the payoff at the end.

Once Mitchell settles in to the story, Jacob De Zoet becomes an interesting character, and his sudden infatuation with a Japanese woman, and encounters with the rough Dr. Marinus are the stuff of fine writing. However, I think it's fair to say that Mitchell could have cut a good portion of this sprawling 479 paged book without losing any of the important threads. Unlike many historical novels, which seem bogged down in research, Mitchell's story gets bogged down by a whirlwind of double dealings that leave the reader feeling unmoored.

By the conclusion of the first section the plot elements are fully in play and the book begins to take off. However, the second section, which includes the story of Japanese interpreter, is occasionally held back by lackluster writing. Certainly Mitchell is a brilliant word smith, but at times, (and here I think Mitchell struggles a bit operating in the third person for the first time in his fifth novel) the feelings implied by the characters seem artificial.

It is in the third section that Mitchell's narrative gifts start to pay off, and the reader is swept up in the story coming together in a way not quite reminiscent of Dumas, but it certainly shares elements with the epics of the past. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky would be offering too much credit. Would that Mitchell could have gotten to this character building action a hundred pages sooner.

The fourth and fifth sections take place twelve and eighteen years after the main action. And it is in these two extraordinarily short sections, under ten pages total, the reader gets a glimpse at the sort of magic that Mitchell dispenses freely in the latter half of Cloud Atlas as Jacob De Zoet reflects on an old friend dying, and a lost love returned briefly. It is in these more human moments that Mitchell really makes his mark as a writer. For all the evident pyrotechnics of his story-telling method, he is, at heart, a very good recorder of human nature. If The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet falls short it is only in forgetting the memorable characters that he crafts so well for the machinations of plot and revealing parts of the ancient Japanese culture. I have no doubt that Mr. Mitchell will continue writing wonderful books for years to come, and though I cannot highly recommend this book, I would recommend it to readers, though I rate it his fourth best behind Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green and Ghostwritten. All in all, I can think of worse ways that one might spend an afternoon than wrapped up in a world of love, loss, intrigue and regret, with David Mitchell captaining the ship.

A glimpse of Japan that is both mysterious and entrancing. Mitchell's love for Japan shines brightly on this brutal tale of love, predjudice and intrigue. Get through the first part and be rewarded with a very rich tale that captivated my attention and delivered a story worthy of my time.

There's much to admire and enjoy in David Mitchell's writing. The historic and cultural detail is meticulous In the end though, I experienced some disappointment, as Jacob, the lead character felt static, his steadfast virtue is emphasized on every page where he appears and leaves him looking two-dimensional.

I was really looking forward to reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet but the book didn't turn out to be what I was expecting. The first chapter is engaging and if the book had carried on in the same style it would have been fabulous. The second chapter to roughly 100-odd pages in was laborious and very slow reading. There are multiple Dutch and Japanese characters and these characters are called different things depending on who is talking to who. Several paragraphs needed re-reading to get some understanding. It all makes for a very confusing read and the experience only improves as the number of new characters introduced becomes less.

The middle section of the book focuses on the character Orito and is much more enjoyable with the story engaging and compelling. I wish the book was the The Thousand Autumns of Orito Abigawa; it would have been much better! The story is much more focussed and interesting. The ending section goes back to Jacob de Zoet but I didn't find it particularly compelling. More characters are introduced while the story of Orito takes a backseat and is only included very briefly towards the end.

The cultural setting of Japan and the unusual trade 'island' of Dejima was an interesting back-drop. Mitchell has obviously researched the detail of the setting meticulously but I did feel he was trying to achieve too much. Jacob is a prominent character in the first and last third (or so) of the book but much less so in the large middle section. Some threads of the story were not completed. I felt that a large portion of Jacob's life in Dejima was not fully explored and wondered what his experiences were.

This book does need to come with an advisory warning - it probably should not be read by pregnant women or women with young babies. Parts of the book refers to childbirth and could be upsetting.

I can't describe this very well (perhaps I need to read it again, which I probably will do very soon). It's a magical novel that's both intellectually stimulating and really fun. To me, it seemed too perfect to have even been written at all: as if it had always existed and will always exist. I don't think I will forget any of these characters or any of the rich details that made their world so real to me.

This book was nominated for my book club and I eagerly anticipated reading it. I have a huge interest in Japanese culture and history, as well as a background in art history and renaissance prints. However, despite all my interests in this time period and people, the book was an utter disappointment and a slow and tedious read. David Mitchell did his research and of that I'm not complaining. However, his writing style suffers from dryness and his plot suffers from inaction. Every single protagonist, of whose perspective we see, is powerless; terrible things happen around them and they can do nothing, so much of the narration is a helpless sort of pondering about what they should try to do. This in and of itself isn't terrible, but when characters finally do gain a little bit of agency or decide to take action, the result is very anti-climatic. For example, when Orito decides to escape from the Shrine at Mount Shiranui and successfully does, she turns around and goes back!! Also, when Ogawa goes to rescue Orito, he is betrayed and turned over to the enemy; there's no struggle, just drugged and killed. This book is not entertaining or fun in the least. If you're curious about this topic or time period I would recommend reading a straight history book with first person narratives over this; it would be more entertaining.

Did you ever love someone who was THE love of your life? Have you fulfilled THE one true purpose of your life? Mitchell's novel is so much more than a retelling of Clavell's Asian sagas. It is the story of Jacob de Zoet's quest to make his life as a Dutch clerk in imperial Japan account for something--to live and love so rightly that its meaning will last for a thousand autumns, for eternity.

A superb creation of 17th century Japan and the cultural clash between European and Japanese cultures at the early stages of their interaction. Not as complex or innovative as Cloud Atlas but a good read all the way.

this book is terrible and cant help but think that the people rating this book highly havent read a well plotted book in a long while. mitchell covers up an absolutely mundane story with flowery speech and nothing more.

I like this book a lot but it just was long to read. I began to feel I was Jacob trapped in Dejima. That said, the writer is good, the story was fine and it was a good read. I have ordered other books by this writer who is new to me. And Japan!! I haven't read much about it but will. What fascinated me most was the description of the East India Company and the interaction with Japanese.

This is such rewarding novel on so many levels. It's certainly a departure of sorts for Mitchell from his prior 'translit' work (which I'm still a big fan of).
Jacob's trips through 18th-century gated Japan are some of the most memorable pages I've read in a long time. There's genuine subtlety, there's the unexpected and there're certainly larger-than-life characters, as if taken straight out of Tolstoy.

I've read Cloud Atlas (mesmerizing - one of my very favorite books) as well as Black Swan Green and Number 9 Dream. This particular book shares very little with these others. It is slow - downright ponderous - and monotonous. To read it is to experience slugging along as if walking down a trail while waist deep in molasses.

Through my life I've read books in their multiple hundreds. I could count the number I've abandoned while only partially completed on the fingers of one hand. This book is one of them.

I look forward with great anticipation to reading "The Bone Clocks", his latest work. One clunker will not make me give up on David Mitchell!

This book is SO GOOD.

The first third, all from the perspective of Jacob, a Dutch clerk living in Dejima, a Dutch outpost attached to Nagasaki, was a little slow. Good, but a little slow. Then part two, dealing more with Jacob's crush, a female medical student, grabbed me and didn't let go. Part three introduces more characters and more conflict, but still resolves all of the disparate threads from previous sections.

I wrote more about it (and other books) at my blog: [...]

Possibly the best book I have read in two or three years. David Mitchell more than surpasses his previous works with this novel,a complete departure from Cloud Atlas. How can one author write such different novels? His literary style reads almost like poetry to me and his characters are fully real and believable. In addition, his historical research was phenomenal. A fabulous, wonderful book indeed.

David Mitchell is undoubtedly one of the finest writers of our time.

His command of the English language is something every reader should experience. So why not give JdZa perfect score? Despite Mitchell's skill as a writer, I found this particular book to be a chore to finish. There was no overarching story to keep me turning the page, and too many characters to care about.

It's a pity that Mitchell's storytelling abilities aren't equal to his skill as a writer.

I looked forward to engaging in this novel of historical fiction, to enter a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century world, particularly that of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Japan. The first chapter was fascinating; the delivery of an anticipated stillborn baby of a concubine...then the language shifts in chapter two: "gewgaws," "guilders," "cockchafer," peppered vocabulary that in context could be deciphered but begins to summon effort. Flipping through, I focused on dialogue between Japanese interpreters and Dutch officials; finding one where a Japanese interpreter (boldly) asks, "If not like wife, why do not divorce?" Another Japanese following with, "Or even marry in the first place?" How very UN-Japanese.

I read Cloud Atlas and impressed by it's high wire act. This book is also a daring feat but on a different level. I can't imagine how many years of research went into this book, nor how much sweat to get the tone right. The characters are so economically created and are yet so alive. This book is both literary and a page turner. Wonderful!

In a nutshell, think Shogun but very well written, literate, intelligent, philosophical, hilarous at times, terribly tragic at others. He brings the characters to life like no one else I've ever read.

I am about 60 pages in and I think I am giving up. I tried really hard to follow it. Like another poster, I am educated (I have a Literature degree) and I have read and re-read this book trying to figure out what's going on. I feel like there is some kind of disconnect where the author's thoughts are not coming across well enough on paper. The characters get confusing with the naming, and I honestly can hardly follow the dialogue and what they are discussing. I really tried, because I feel like there was potentially a great story there. But I am just too frustrated. I am wondering about all the great reviews? That was one of the reasons I purchased this book...

I positively devoured this long novel, thrilled to be reading historical fiction of a time and place with which i was fairly unfamiliar. The characters are distinct and oh-so-human, and I was happily not prepared for the plot twists or ending.

I really tried---but decided life is too short to struggle through a book. I quit reading after the first 100 pages. Except for Jacob, all the other characters were too hard to distinguish. Maybe I should pick it up again and see what all the raves are about.

This is a long epic tale, but never once did I think: "Where was the editor?" In fact, the tale is often a page turner. The language is wonderful, yet not boring or undecipherable, and has some wonderful bits of dry humor. The real delight for me was the history of the Dutch and Japanese at the turn of the 19th Century.

Mitchell has enormous talent, but it hasn't been on display for a while now. Both this novel and Black Swan Green simply aren't that good-- nowhere near the standard of Cloud Atlas or even his earlier books.

The midwife-as-Madame Butterfly conceit is a cliche with a capital C. The twisted cult of immortality-seeking, nun-impregnating baby killers is, in the context of a historical novel, silly. The struggle for authenticity in period dialogue shows, and is remarkably tedious. With few exceptions the characters are vague and unreal, and there are far too many of them. There is no authentic sense of place. This list goes on, and unfortunately overpowers the strong set pieces (such as the execution of the thieves) that appear from time to time.

Maybe he should take a rest for a while, clear his head, and concentrate on what he is best at-- pyrotechnic imagination, freed from convention instead of limited by it. Here he tries to have his cake and eat it too, and the result is an unconvincing mess rather than a synthetic triumph.

There is some really good material in this book. Some good lines for some of the characters such as Fischer. But there is just too much in total, the plot details are cloudy, the "love" is lifeless for both a Japanese and a European, and... on and on. If this were condensed or abridged it might be a good book. And what is with all the physical/medical/bodily function detail?

What an astounding read. Beautifully written, soulful, I could hardly keep up as the tale took its various twists and turns through several decades of Dutch and Japanese cultural intertwining. A diary, an action novel, a memoir.

With tears as it ended.

I am trying very hard to get through this book and it is killing me. This is my first David Mitchell book. I chose it because it was recommended in Time Magazine. I consider myself to be fairly literate. I am well educated with 2 Masters degrees, but I found the language, grammar, and literary gymnastics to be overwhelming. The list of characters on Google was helpful. However, reading a book should be enjoyable. If I have to spend this much time anticipating a plot-its not worth it. For example, I am on about pg. 200 and de Zoet is still fantasizing about Orito. It is very chaste in a true 1700 sense, but worst of all its inexplicable. She is intriguing. Okay. So? Now, your in in love? This is an obviously "male" writer that is lacking the necessary emotional depth to draw in a reader's feelngs. I should see the beauty in Orito. I don't. I should sympathize with de Zoet or at least find him attractive. Definitely not. I just don't care. I may try to suffer through a few more pages. After that I am on to a new book by Isabel Wilkerson.

Sorry David. I tried.

In this weighing of the rewards of morality vs. the rewards of immorality, the characters are more types than people.
It is often noted that what is too vicious, pointed or sociological to be said about the present is said about the future in science fiction. It seems, too, Mitchell demonstrates, that it also can be said about the past and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
This is distasteful to those who view history as progress. They probably aren't sure why they're so angry, only that they are.
You know there has to be more to this than the early 18th Century resolution of Verlof het aan Bever.

David Mitchell has written some marvellous novels and this novel does not totally disappoint the reader. I found the first half of the book to be very well written and Mitchell manages to paint a vivid portrait of the corruption and politics involved in the trade of the East India company in the far East. Jacob de Zoet arrives at the tiny island of Dejima, the Dutch East India Company's remotest trading post in a Japan that is securely closed to the outside world. A junior clerk to the new Chief resident, his task is to uncover evidence of the previous Chief Resident's corruption. This earns him the contempt and dislike of the other foreign workers on the island since corruption had long been an accepted and widely practiced way of business for them. However, Jacob earns the trust of a local interpreter and becomes intrigued by a a midwife who has permission to study western medicine under the company's physician. A young Jacob's fascination and longing are brilliantly portrayed and one can truly sink into the book.
However the second half of the book was surprisingly unrelated to Jacob. The book is solidly taken over by a mysterious cult, a kidnapping and politics among the Japanese aristocracy. We do return to Jacob sporadically throughout the text but the focus of the attention shifts quite definitely away for his activities. I do not know if the author intended this but the book fizzled out for me and I found myself skimming many of the pages in the last third of the book.

** spoiler alert ** Is it me or does anyone else get exasperated with David Mitchell? His writing craft is, for 99% of his books, better than the best: his ability to paint a complete vivid picture of landscapes, people, flora and fauna has few equals. Not to mention the expert way he can evoke emotion and subtlety of character. His storytelling and plot lines aren't bad either. But just when I'm basking in the marvelous worlds he creates, Mitchell takes a massive step too far, and the fabulous world becomes tawdry and false as two-dimensional, paper cut-out scenery on an amateur stage.
He insists on pushing the English language to ridiculous limits. For example: Mitchell writes an intensely moving passage in this book to describe the unthinkable revelation that babies, new-born to nuns, are being whisked away and killed by the very monks who fathered them. Then Mitchell describes a character, Shuzei, who is at a loss for words at learning of the practice. '"It--it violates Nature: the women, how could ...." Shuzei aborts his sentence.'
Aborts!! What a completely over-the-top and ostentatious use of the word. And in a trice I'm irritated and aware of Mitchell the virtuoso author and couldn't care less about the damn story. But, for the sake of the 99% of sublime writing, I persevere. But it happens over and again, every dozen or so pages. Are Mitchell's editors so intimidated by the twice-nominated Booker winner that they dare not point out these ego-fuelled flashes of exhibitionism, more representative of a novice creative writing student than a published pro.
When I'm brought to tears at the conclusion of 'The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,' I feel petty for getting so hung up on the habitual excesses in Mitchell's writing. But since I'm vowing to give up on his next book the first time I'm confronted with more flashes of glaring author extravagance, there's obviously just so long that a person can put up with even 1% of such mediocre glitz, despite (or maybe because of) 99% brilliance.

You know, I'm having a hard time just trying to figure out why I like this book. The prose was not particularly good, esp. when a character speaks and there is a concurrent background explanation i.e....the wind screamed through like a train....come on Mr. Mitchell let's clean up our metaphors!

But the economy of narrative is also the best thing about this book. When he is not engaging in the above-mentioned explanations about what is going on, one can then sense the action and that is when the book is at its best.

The title was catchy, the first chapter well written and captivating so I bought the book only to find that the rest of the story seemed to be written by a different author than the first chapter I had liked. I find the style annoying: short sentences, too much un-necessary information (for ex: descriptions and names of characters that do not matter), all chopped up, a drag to read. I could not focus and could not get into it. Obviously I am in the minority as this book seems to be a success. Ultimately if I had read the second chapter before buying the book I would have passed. i read more reviews to decide whether I should continue the endeavor but seeing that this is a depressing story I will give it away as a present.

I have had difficulty reading Mitchell's earlier work, where the ingenuity of his writing was more evident than the power of his storytelling. This book displays both. It is a beautiful and profound book that leaves a permanent impression.

What else is there to say. Mitchell is the finest writer in the language today. I always group books into those I feel (mistakenly, I know) that I could have written and those that I could not have conceived, much less researched and much less have written. All of Mitchell's fall in the latter category.

I thank the reviewers who informed me what this book is about. Once the beginning was over, I found myself in a jungle of fragmentary dialogues, a wave of foreign characters with difficult names, and a dearth of narrative to show the way. I am looking for a really interesting and deep novel, without gimmicks and unnecessary mazes, but this is not it. I salute the readers who managed to finish it, and even enjoy it, but I cannot do it. Alas.

This novel starts off so beautifully, as a densely claustrophic and sensually imagined portrayal of life in the artificial and isolated Dutch trading settlement of Dejima, the only contact that Tokugawa Japan allowed itself with the outside world for over 200 years. The central character of Jacob is a believable everyman newcomer to the post: an upright and moral pastor's son, who soon becomes involved with what he honestly believes is a genuine attempt to root out corruption on Dejima. Of course, corruption is in Dejima's very essence and he soon finds his efforts are not necessarily all for the good. During this time, he meets a facially-scarred young Japanese woman, Aibagawa Orito, whose inner (and outer) beauty immediately affects Jacob, and he struggles inwardly with this desire and the promises he has made to a fiancee back home.

So far, so brilliant. There are passages of superb writing, believable characterisation, and the way in which Mitchell uses different British dialects and slangs to indicate the various Nederlandse regional idioms verges on the masterful. The love story is reserved and possibly even one-sided and imagined - as such things no doubt would have been in any non-commerical context in Japan at the time. There's no doubt David Mitchell is a writer of some class.

However, the book then collapses in an insane manner. There are already minor issues, for example, the young woman in question is a bit too unrealistically brilliant and pioneeringly feminist (in a very western style) to be entirely believable, but these minor criticisms pale into insignificance against the descent into the most ludicrous some-distance-below-James-Clavell-style orientalist pulp fantasy which follows. Jacob's paramour vanishes, and it turns out she has been sold to a sort of Fu Manchuesque villain who has psychic powers, eats babies to stay young and hides away in a remote mountain HQ where he forces unfortunate young women to breed these babies for he and his cohorts' evil rites. She must be rescued and a plucky translator, Uzaemon (himself in love with Orito), assembles a crack-squad of masterless samurai (ronin) to get her back... and so on into the absurdity of a role-playing game write-up, where even the quality of Mitchell's prose can't hide the stupidity of the plot.

Although the book tries to rescue itself with a gloomy coda back in the Netherlands, this fails to erase the gobsmacking ridiculousness of the excursion into the 'Dangerous and Unknown World of Ninjas and Inscrutable Villains!' or whatever Mitchell thinks he was doing. Maybe it was supposed to have a parodic element but it just doesn't work at all and undermines the whole book as a serious piece of writing. It isn't that you couldn't have a very well-written orientalist parody or a even an entirely well-written fantasy novel along these lines, but it's the disjuncture that fails here: in this context and coming after such a fine and well-imagined first half, the 'grand guignol' seems to be a failed attempt to have several cakes and eat them all. As such, it left me feeling rather sick and disappointed.

I'm approaching this from a writer's viewpoint. The book is disengaging on so many levels, which is a real shame since I had been eagerly looking forward to M's next novel. (The NY Times review is why you should not let friends "review" friend's books -- it was a pathetic piece of back patting.) The plot is shallow, the language is a mix up of longer sentences punctuated by short one line descriptions to give a sense of place. At first I thought this was a joke, or meta, or even short haikus embedded into the text. Nope. Some of the descriptions is very well written but when combined with cardboard characters and events that make little or no sense, well what are we to do. The whole digression to rescue the woman from the convent is hideous, like a bad Harry Potter quest. The, cough, love story, goes nowhere and to have her appear at the very end, suddenly, at his death bed, when the ships only travel back and forth yearly at most, was just the kicker that made me regret buying the book. I've held it, but have not even dared recommend it, that's a shame. Yes we're all entitled to one work that doesn't fly, this is Mitchell's lead balloon for sure. I believe he got stuck and began to over write, without a clear plot or sense of the book as a whole. We've all been there. If you can't find someone to really call you on the carpet for your faults, and you can't figure out a way to drastically begin again with a clearer sense, you end up with a muddle, which his what it seems happened here.

** spoiler alert **

I read this book because of good reviews, I liked "The Cloud Atlas", and it was historical fiction.

In the end, it was a major disappointment, because even though David Mitchell is an undeniably skilled writer, he spends just as much of his time showing off his chops as telling the story. And just to make sure we know this is "literature", he (or an editor with his approval) includes some study questions at the end of the book.

The plot revolves around Jacob de Zoet, a young Dutchman off to Japan to make his fortune in 1799. Once there, he glimpses a Japanese woman and immediately falls in love with her, a passion that sticks with him, we are told, throughout his life despite what appears to be about a day's worth of time spent together. And she doesn't love him back ...

At the same time, de Zoet is betrayed by his superiors, endures the collapse of his company, and eventually the assault of the English. Subplots bring in a Japanese interpreter who has an equally hard time, and a cast of minor characters (whose Mitchell modestly calls "fascinating secondary and tertiary characters" in his study questions) who talk a lot and do little.

So what we have is 479 pages of misery, unenlivened by the slightest ray of sunshine, and at book's end we are thrown a sop about de Zoet's future that is supposed, I assume, to leave us with something positive. But the coda is de Zoet's imagined future, and if his imagination is as accurate about the rest of his life as it was about what was going to happen in Japan, it had no relation to reality.

But if you like depressing works, long depressing works, with frequent displays of writerly mastery ("Hey, look here, I'm really good at this"), that turn on a man's instant, lifelong infatuation with a woman who has an ugly scar on half her face, then "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" is for you.

As for me, I'd rather go to the dentist

After reading all these reviews I couldn't wait to start reading this book. After struggling for 40 pages, I gave up. I just couldn't seem to understand what was going on, keep track of the characters and didn't understand alot of the terms used. I wish I could have "gotten" it because it did get good reviews but I was bogged down in trying to understand the dialect and vocabulary.

The book was really tough to get through. It was difficult to decipher some of the dialects. The book was way too long even though the writing was beautiful -at times. I'm one to stay up til morning light to finish a good book- this one took me almost 2 months- it was just so easy to put down. After giving us incredible amounts of detail throughout much of the book, the ending just kind of happened. Not my style, I guess. If you thought Cutting For Stone was a page turner, you might like this one.

Maybe I've just become a "dolt" and have read too many "self help" books of late. I read some nice reviews on this book, and was really looking for a great work of fiction to read while on vacation. I really struggled to get through this book. I found it difficult to follow at times, and had to really work to finish the book.

Maybe I'm missing something here...........but it was just OK for me.

I got this book because of the high ratings and because I love historical fiction. The first 30 pages or so were rough, I just quit reading; it just wasn't any fun.

Way too many characters introduced, with too much emphasis on trying to reproduce the language of the time and social class, no sense of direction as to where the plot was heading, no ability to discern who the primary characters were going to be. A few cute phrases here and there, but overall, I found the language/tone of the book stilted & unnatural; it just didn't flow, I was actually annoyed by all of this and did not continue reading. I enjoy a good story, well told. I couldn't grasp where the story was headed at all in the initial pages, and while there was the occasional clever turn of phrase, it was all just too much work to read, it seemed to me that the author was just trying too hard to be clever. I simply decided to cut my losses and read something that grabbed me and held my attention. Like another reviewer said, I didn't like having to go back and re-read sentences & paragraphs a second time to figure out what was going on.

Overlong, over complicated plot. Too many characters. Too many names to remember ! Too dry. Too many loose ends - er.. why did the Phaeton turn around... 3 different stories only loosely held together (Fall of de Zoet, fall of the female doctor and her japanese lover, fall of the Penhaligon) Too much of 'honour' in the face of 'corruption' in too simplistic a manner. Not a patch on the odd and delightful Cloud Atlas.

The confrontation between east and west, between xenophobic Japan and anyone from the outside world but especially Christian Europe, has generated many histories and history-based fictions. Among the best known is James Clavell's Shogun, and by far the best overall is Shusaku Endo's Silence. I mention these because the opening chapters of David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet instantly generate expectations based on those two novels, among others. The arrival of the young Jacob, a devout Christian, at the Dutch trading port of Dejima, adjacent to Nagasaki, is tense and threatening because he attempts to bring in a Psalter; if it is identified by the watchful Japanese officials, his least fate would be expulsion from Japan--but he might be subjected to far worse treatment. This begins Jacob's lengthy immersion in the stew of conflicting social and religious and cultural values that swirl in Dejima. In many ways, his worst conflicts are with his own countrymen, a variety of petty and sometimes grand thieves and swindlers whose frauds Jacob--an accountant who is assigned to bring the financial records of the Dutch East India post up to date and to some standard of honesty--inevitably is forced to reveal, with dire consequences because of the anger and hatred he generates when he undercuts the profitmaking schemes of the officers and employees of the shipping and trading companies.
Jacob de Zoet is an appealing character, and David Mitchell moves his story along vividly and energetically, filling in plenty of episodes and encounters that reveal both the traditional culture of Samurai-dominated Japan and the motives, both positive and venal, of the Europeans trying to break the barriers created by the Shoguns in order to develop the rich trading potential, and preferably to gain exclusive rights for those profits for their own nations' business interests. There is an ongoing romance of sorts, since Jacob is first attracted to and then falls deeply in love with a brilliant young Japanese woman, Orito Aibagawa, who is a medical student in the clinic of the expatriate Dr. Marinus, but who is subsequently kidnapped and confined to a nunnery run by what would now be described as a cult leader, a man devoted to a fairly horrific version of Shinto that involves abuse and murder in the name of a perverse religious dogma. De Zoet's encounters with these disparate characters, and his efforts to maintain his love and loyalty for his fiancé back home in Holland, complicate his life in many ways.
The disappointment of this novel, which may not bother most readers, is that none of the great issues it raises--the religious differences, cultural and moral conflicts, racial and ethnic divisions, even the sexual roles hinted at--is ever explored in depth. The narrative spins along, regularly providing excitement or cringing horror, often prompting laughter at various humorous events, and at many points it seems ready to go deeply into the moral dilemmas faced by many of the characters, most notably Jacob de Zoet, only to skip on by. We could say that it is a virtue of the novel that it allows the reader to make judgments and explore dilemmas, but that is merely an excuse, not an adequate defense against the suspicion that this is another novel written with the hope of a movie contract at the back of its mind. It's not bad--not bad at all. It's entertaining, engrossing, enjoyable. In other words, it is far more in the vein of the James Clavell novel mentioned earlier, than in the tradition of Endo's masterpiece.

David Mitchell is a cult author--much like Quentin Tarantino is a cult director--so, if you've already sipped of his kool-aid, then you'll find this book to be yet another of his works of genius. Like Tarantino, Mitchell's not really a cult figure in that he has been embraced by the mainstream (and, I'm guessing, this work will be his break-out novel). Also, like Tarantino, he does not create anything new but rather combines existing genres and styles in an entertaining manner (he and Tarantino are the Princes of the Pastiche). Here, Mitchell has taken the genre of the historical novel--which,currently, is going through something of a renaissance thanks to the likes of Hilary Mantel and her Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall--and has given it at least four twists: (1) it's set in the Dutch trading post of Dejima just off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan in the years around 1800 (Mitchell has chosen wisely here in that this is an obscure bit of history/geography that has not been covered much by other historical novelists so the casual reader will not be able to judge the quality of his research); (2) it's written in a highly ironical, anti-romantic style similar to The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (which, I'll admit, I did not care for--I prefer the source of ironical, anti-romanticism, Anthony Trollope); (3) it's told in the free indirect style from the point of view of a number of major and minor characters, so Mitchell, pace T.S. Eliot, he do the Dutch in different voices (also a wise choice in that it disguises the meandering plot which doesn't really go anywhere--much like the stranded Dutch in Dejima); and (4) it's written in the highly charged, colorful language first pioneered by the likes of Saul Bellow in his Adventures of Augie March (again, an effective tactic for distracting the reader from the lack of "bottom" in the work).

So, what do we have here? Basically, an ideal book for reading out on the beach that will impress the casual acquaintance with your intelligence and discernment without actually requiring either attribute. So, bring lots of suntan lotion (the book's almost 500 pages long)and, when bored, glance out at the distance breakers; you may catch a glimpse of Mitchell frolicking in the waves as he jumps the shark.

Once again, a cast-of-thousands narration has irreparably damaged a major writing effort. As happens in Roxana Ortega's trivializing narration of Jennifer Egan's A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, the narration here of David Mitchell's THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET turns a 19-hour audiobook into an exhausting Babel. Unlike the Egan book, this novel, itself, is a disappointment. C.S. Godshalk's remarkable 1998 KALIMANTAAN (woefully not represented in the Audible library) is a far more compelling tale of Old World travel in the East and devastating cultural clashes in an exotic past. Mitchell's new effort is no CLOUD ATLAS, and nowhere near as good as the superb Dave Eggers' review in the Times might lead you to think. Publisher's Weekly called this Mitchell's "busman's holiday." Exactly. Traditionalism on wheels. Dutch traders in the far-offs. And like Clancy, Mitchell may have sailed into the realms of the monster-maestro whom no one dares approach with a red pencil. Excruciatingly long birth scenes, beheading scenes, other bodily-fluids scenes are flanked by deep descriptions of squalor in early 19th-century Japan. Vivid, sure. So is a stunning sunset. Imagine hearing readers deploy accents and funny voices describing every nook, cranny and hue in the clouds of that sunset. What's the alternative? Check Campbell Scott's reading of Henry Miller's TROPIC OF CANCER. No circus of French accents in Paris, it's a riveting, meditative reading of the book in one voice. Scott serves Miller's art as Jonathan Aris and Paula Wilcox do not serve Mitchell's. We need them to read the book, not perform it. And this trend to cast-of-thousands narrations is a mistake, as when Disney turned Broadway into a show on ice. It's a small, small world between your ears, with room for two minds - yours and your author's. As a reader co-creates a book, so should a listener co-create that literature on headphones. Even if it does take a THOUSAND AUTUMNS to get to the end.The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Unlike the author, I shall be succinct. I found this novel to be overwhelmingly tedious and gross. Accepting that this period in history was truly brutish and crude, I found his microscopic view was too much for me. This author takes you places, literally and figuratively, that would make today's "dumpster-diving" an attractive alternative. Perhaps if I had been able to form an emotional attachment to any of the characters, or sense a glimpse of redemption ahead, I might have been able to finish it, and I don't quit a book easily. Utterly disappointing, especially considering the rave reviews. Back to Dickens for me, at least he had a sense of humor.

I love D-Mitch's books but this is absolutely unpalatable. I gave two stars and not one because he seems to have done thorough research - however, the language is very dense, conversations are endless and characters take forever to develop......I'll just wait for the next one and so should you before attempting to read this convoluted mess.

Sometimes one watches a film based on the coming attraction trailer. It is not a good idea most of the time as the film usually turns out to be lousy. The same is true about this book. I read the first chapter on line and really liked it. I greatly anticipated getting my hands on the book and I was greatly disappointed. This is the first book of David Mitchell's that I ever read and I don't think I will try his others.

Aside from the protagonist, Orito and a couple of other Japanese characters (both of whom unfortunately die) I didn't give a hoot about the rest of the people in this story. I also found the language at times very coarse. The "coup the grace" for me was the shrine. I found it gross. depressing, and gratuitous. I understand that it is not authentic to Japan at that period.

Overall the book felt like it was not one story but several and none of them satisfactorily concluded. I would not waste my money on this one.

I was looking forward to this book so much, but found it beyond disappointing to read. It seems like Mitchell started several stories, but never finished any. He did not develop the characters or relationships enough so that the actions, especially the romantic ones, made any sense at all. Not sure if the happenings at the convent are based on real places and sects or not, but they sure were disgusting, and also seemed to be a distraction from the plot.

What do you get when you combine a little Rudyard Kipling with Akira Kurosawa, some Madame Butterfly, a Saturday matinee serial along the lines of Tarzan, a depraved heathen priest who worships a knock off of the Goddess Kali, the maddening drumbeats of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, throw in a pinch of Patrick O'Brian, a sprig of Robert Louis Stevenson, ("Argh maties, a mug o' grog afore we serve'm a dose o grapeshot.") a Wikileaks-like dump of historical trivia in lieu of a plot, obligatory hari kari, symbolic but ultimately masturbatory fore-shadowing via gazes of crows, pitter-patter of cats and absurdly recollected dream sequences? Oh yes, I can't neglect to mention finely detailed portraits of characters and conflicts that literally disappear into the mists, totally unresolved. (Indeed this novel is a veritable masterpiece of unreasoned, illogical and unexplainable behavior, except in the sense that the uneven prose invites itself as a repository for the author's research, and in that respect, it is unrestrained.) What you get is the recipe for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, that's what.

I know this book has made it to the "Best Seller" lists. But behind it, I sense and author or his editor, who obviously resolved the dispute between writing a work of literary historical fiction and commercial success by tilting toward the latter, deciding to grind Fillet Mignon into hamburger and bulking it up with helper. But make no mistake about it, much of the history is trivia and the extensive research the author obviously engaged in has dictated the plot (if one could be so generous with the term) rather than the other way around. I haven't bothered to do a fact check on much of this, but I do happen to know that even a sensei's mastery of the concept of ki will not kill insects merely by a gesture into thin air. I couldn't help wondering why the evil Abbot didn't decide to abandon his foul obsessions for an obviously more lucrative position as an honest pest exterminator. It would have made for a more interesting story.

I also know that a full captain consigned to a mere frigate alone in the Pacific, commissioned to perform chores customarily relegated to plundering privateers, had no realistic expectation of rising to the rank of commodore, much less admiral, when there were literally dozens of captains commanding hundred-plus gun ships-of-the-line in the Atlantic blockading Napoleon. Nor could the most competent sailing master estimate to the minute the time it would take to turn a frigate from an uncertain location and exit a harbor where he'd never been before, particularly one where he knew absolutely zip about it's currents and eddies. Moreover once having given the order to fire against a sovereign country, a Royal Navy commander would not mysteriously turn tail and disappear --unless his change of heart in the midst of battle involved a decision never to return to England. Even the author knew better than to attempt an explanation, or to show us a credible, exciting sea engagement between a pontoon barrier of fragile fishing boats and a British warship. (Spoiler alert, the Japanese strategy would have involved flaming arrows --a medieval tactic apparently obvious to a landlubber like de Zoet but curiously overlooked Napoleon and the entire French navy at Trafalgar.) Worse still, we never get to find out how the manure-in-incision treatment worked out with our captain's gout.

And it got on my nerves, to say the least, when the British captain scorns the Dutchman, de Zoet, as a mere shopkeeper as the true source of this disparagement was Napoleon and he used it as an epithet to describe the entire English nation.

Upon finally closing this book I felt nothing but frustration at the utter absence of resolution. Most of the old characters simply disappear like the frigate. And new ones, like Jacob's wives and sons, pop up over night like weeds in a garden. The reality of this gaping abyss in the plot was only driven home for me by the author's feeble attempt to fill it with a flimsy final chapter cluttered with such irrelevancies, and a concluding dream sequence that makes one wonder whether the author wasn't dreaming he had an ending.

My recommendation is to save your money by eschewing the read. Wait for the inevitable movie, which even Hollywood could not possibly degrade, and then pass that up too, until you can watch if for free on cable. That's the only way you'll get your money's worth out of this work.

At first I was merely irritated but I slowly grew irate. After reading the Cloud Atlas I expected something great. What those 4 and 5 stars are for, I haven't got a clue. If I hadn't felt so dinked around I might have given 2.

I have read David Mitchell's books before, and I liked most of them. He does have a very vivid imagination, great technique and assured skills in story development. But this one.... What irritates me the most in this book is his grammar skills, and of course the lack of even rudimentary editing by any of his publishers. To write "between you and I" is pathetic. To use "from whence" is inadmissible.
We, mere mortals, are allowed our simple transgressions - we do not publish, we do not get "redacted", we do not aspire to be the language gurus. David Mitchell needs to either learn his grammar anew, or, better yet, hire couple of people who would read the novel to weed out the silliness.

The first chapter was excellent and exciting after that the whole book was just horrid! Every sort of awful descriptions in detail that would turn a person's stomach.

One review said to try to read until you got to Part 2 then you wouldn't be able to put it down. So I struggled on hoping it would get good but was disappointed. It did pick up a little but I just couldn't keep with it and wanted to read a good book so skipped to the end to find out what happened to the disfigured girl and Jacob. Then had to write a review to let anyone else stay clear of this stupid book! ! !

Oh, my goodness. This simply must be a case of "The Emperor's New Clothes" among reviewers. I couldn't even successfully skim the book, as suggested by a four-star reviewer. My time is too valuable and there are plenty of other books that actually ENTERTAIN.

This may....within this magnificently hot summer of 2010 and on the rolling red plains of the Red Man's Oklahoma...be the most tedious--wherewith one would mean tiring and irritating...book I've read in a supremely extravagant time hereto I can recollect.

I...rest my case.