Marinus and becomes infatuated with Miss Aibagawa, a scar-faced young Japanese woman who, most unusually, has received training as a midwife. Dejima is full of schemers and scoundrels, not all of whom are Dutch.
Jacob, a parson’s son, believes that it is possible to be both honest and profitable, but his naïvete doesn’t last long.
It’s as much a prison as a warehouse, and staffed with a variety of unsavory characters, whose varied stories are told as the novel progresses.Įnter Jacob de Zoet, a young clerk whose five-year contract will leave him, he hopes, with enough cash and standing to return to Holland and marry his fiancee. To work around this awkward injunction, the Dutch have built Dejima, an artificial island a hundred yards long, in which Dutch sailors and traders representing the company are housed. The port of Nagasaki is an important gateway to both Japan’s markets and its natural resources, but the emperor of this intensely private land has forbidden foreigners from touching native soil. The year is 1799, and the Dutch East India Company is engaged in trade with the Far East. No matter which side of the debate you land on, this is an extraordinarily powerful book, a triumph of the storyteller’s ability to create a world and place the reader in it. In fact, some might argue that the lack of attention-grabbing authorial cleverness is, in fact, the work of a more accomplished writer. There are few such literary pyrotechnics on display in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but this makes it no less of a success. In the first half of the book, the reader begins the stories in serial fashion in the second half of the book, the disparate plots resolve themselves one after another. That book, which received much-deserved praise from all quarters, featured a structure that some found gimmicky but I, at least, thought brilliant: a series of interconnected stories told over a huge span of historical eras, with each story broken into two halves and interrupted midway through by the next. David Mitchell is one of the UK’s most outstanding writers, leavening his literary prowess with a dazzling, self-conscious structure in Ghostwritten, crime fiction and thriller tropes in Number9Dream, historical drama and sci-fi dystopia in Cloud Atlas.
0 kommentar(er)
