(Current fiction and quality fiction of the past.)
“The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (Random House) by David Mitchell has garnered lavish praise from many quarters. The novel is available at Albuquerque bookstores and the Albuquerque public library system has 11 copies to lend.
The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, and costly courtesans comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout 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 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 of which will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings.
Wrote The New York Times: "If any readers have doubted that David Mitchell is phenomenally talented and capable of vaulting wonders on the page, they have been heretofore silent. Mitchell is almost universally acknowledged as the real deal. His best-known book ‘Cloud Atlas’ is one of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it? modern classics that no doubt is -- and should be -- read by any student of contemporary fiction...[The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet] confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive."
And The New Yorker: "By any standards, ‘The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet’ is a formidable marvel."
And Publishers Weekly: "Mitchell's rightly been hailed as a virtuoso genius for his genre-bending, fiercely intelligent novels ... ‘The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet’ is a dense and satisfying historical with literary brawn and stylistic panache."
None the less, Examiner hesitates to recommend this novel to a broad-based audience for fear its occasionally rough details may be off-putting. But for those with hardy tastes, here’s an example, a brief excerpt of some detail:
“If the transverse lie is convex, recalls Orito, where the foetus’s spine is arched backwards so acutely that its head appears between its shins like a Chinese acrobat, I must amputate the foetus’s arm, dismember its corpse with toothed forceps, and extract it, piece by grisly piece. Dr Smellie warns that any remnant left in the womb will fester and may kill the mother. If the transverse lie is concave, however, Orito has read, where the foetus’s knees are pressed against its chest, I may saw off the arm, rotate the foetus, insert crotchets into the eye-sockets, and extract the whole body, head first. The midwife’s index finger locates the child’s knobbly spine, traces its midriff between its lowest rib and its pelvic bone, and encounters a minute ear; a nostril; a mouth; the umbilical cord; and a prawn-sized penis. ‘Breech is concave,’ Orito reports to Dr Maeno, ‘but cord is around neck.’”
Then, of course, comes the gruesome unraveling of that cord . . . Read at your own risk.
__________________________________________________________________________
EXAMINER’S BEST: How to write your 1st novel
EXAMINER’S NOVELS: Splat! A Light in Polanco
___________________________________________________________________________
Comments