David Mitchell
Hardcover | Pages: 479 pages Rating: 4.04 | 49786 Users | 5780 Reviews
Details Containing Books The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
| Title | : | The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet |
| Author | : | David Mitchell |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | U.S. Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 479 pages |
| Published | : | June 29th 2010 by Random House (first published May 13th 2010) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. Cultural. Japan. Literary Fiction |
Ilustration Toward Books The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
In 2007, Time magazine named him one of the most influential novelists in the world. He has twice been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. The New York Times Book Review called him simply “a genius.” Now David Mitchell lends fresh credence to The Guardian’s claim that “each of his books seems entirely different from that which preceded it.” The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a stunning departure for this brilliant, restless, and wildly ambitious author, a giant leap forward by even his own high standards. A bold and epic novel of a rarely visited point in history, it is a work as exquisitely rendered as it is irresistibly readable.The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland.
But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?”
A magnificent mix of luminous writing, prodigious research, and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the most impressive achievement of its eminent author.
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Describe Books To The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
| Original Title: | The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet |
| ISBN: | 1400065453 (ISBN13: 9781400065455) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | Jacob de Zoet |
| Setting: | Dejima,1799(Japan) |
| Literary Awards: | Booker Prize Nominee for Longlist (2010), Locus Award Nominee for Best Fantasy Novel (2011), James Tait Black Memorial Prize Nominee for Fiction (2010), Macavity Award Nominee for Sue Feder Historical Mystery (2011), Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book in South Asia and Europe (2011) Walter Scott Prize Nominee (2011), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fiction and for Favorite Book (2010), Europese Literatuurprijs Nominee (2011) |
Rating Containing Books The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Ratings: 4.04 From 49786 Users | 5780 ReviewsDiscuss Containing Books The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Rating: two headachey stars out of fiveThe Publisher Says: In 1799, Jacob de Zoet disembarks on the tiny island of Dejima, the Dutch East India Companys remotest trading post in a Japan otherwise closed to the outside world. A junior clerk, his task is to uncover evidence of the previous Chief Residents corruption.Cold-shouldered by his compatriots, Jacob earns the trust of a local interpreter and, more dangerously, becomes intrigued by a rare womana midwife permitted to study on Dejima underDespite my great love for Cloud Atlas (also by Mitchell), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet did not quite do it for me. I might even go so far as to say that, at times, it felt like The Thousand Visits to the DMV, if the DMV were staffed by highly literate history professors who accompanied every eye-exam and form signing with an exhaustive digression into various arcane automemorabilia that may or may not be quite interesting, excepting the fact that it's the DMV, a successful attendance of
He's got the precision of Roth, the bigness of Tolstoy, the ventriloquism of Pynchon and the heart of ... Hugo perhaps. IT is rare for me to find a book that hits me as hard as this one did. A near perfect novel.
Right in the testicles. That's where this book kicked my suspension of disbelief, landing a crunching, foetal-position-inducing blow that was all the more painful for being unexpected.I'm a big fan of David Mitchell's work. I love Cloud Atlas and I've given it as a birthday gift to several friends. Ditto for Ghostwritten, a book I greatly respect for it's blend of narratives and voices, and genres. I enjoyed Numberninedream, and thought Black Swan Green was, well, OK. I dig Mitchell's ability to
David Mitchell and I had not been introduced before. I knew he had written something about clouds and dreams and this looked pretty so I took it home with me.It is a book about Jacob de Zoet, who in 1799 arrives as a clerk on Dejima, an artificial island near Nagasaki and the only point of contact between Japan and the outside world. It is also a book about an English ship and a mountain shrine and secret religious cult. It is a book about Orito, Japanese midwife whose face is half burnt but the
Last month I was visiting the MFA in Boston. After an hour or two of wandering through rooms sporting giant, bombastic 19th century American paintings, I came upon a dim hall with small, colorful prints hanging from the wall, like this one: This was my first taste of Utagawa Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, and I was immediately transfixed. Although the Edo referred to in the Hiroshige prints is a place (a city later to be renamed Tokyo), Edo also refers to the period of Japanese
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