![]() ![]() This book’s fault, if it has one, is its exuberant excess. Throughout it all, Mitchell employs the conventions of the genre while avoiding most of its clichés. ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. ![]()
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