The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell.✔✔✔✔✔

This was not an easy read, but a very rewarding one, so much so that I will re-read it soon. There's just so much in it- a reviewer has named it "dense" in details, plot, dialogue, although you never get the feeling the author is exploiting your understanding by lengthy descriptions, etc. David Mitchell, the author, manages to dispense as much information as is necessary fairly efficiently, but in such a colorful, richly-detailed way that you marvel at what kind of mind can even hold all that knowledge, let alone share it so well with the reader. To be sure, this novel will be around for a very long time- I would call it a classic of contemporary literature. Even though all the events in the novel take place between 1799 and 1817, and there are times when you think of Charles Dickens or Herman Melville, it is very much a contemporary novel in its outlook and writing. At one point I remember thinking: This is Star Wars, or Avatar even, only two centuries ago and in Japan!

I borrowed this short summary from the New York Times Book Review :

As the novel opens, it’s 1799, and the Land of the Rising Sun is closed to the West, save for one trading post on the island of Dejima near Nagasaki that is run by the Dutch. Young Jacob de Zoet has arrived there to make his fortune and to win the hand of his beloved, Anna, back home in Rotterdam: her father has promised they can wed after Jacob has served a five-year posting in the Far East as a clerk.

The fastidious Jacob is both fascinated and repelled by the teeming street life he sees around him: “gnarled old women, pocked monks, unmarried girls with blackened teeth,” chanting street urchins, unscrupulous merchants, expensive courtesans, the smells of “steamed rice, sewage, incense, lemons, sawdust, yeast and rotting seaweed.”

Jacob also finds himself magnetically drawn to Orito Aibagawa, a young Japanese midwife with a scarred face, who is studying medicine on Dejima, under the tutelage of a Dutch doctor, Marinus. Orito has earned this unheard-of privilege for a woman by successfully delivering the seemingly stillborn son of Shiroyama, a powerful magistrate. Though Jacob soon becomes obsessed with Orito, his love for her is forbidden — as a Westerner, he is persona non grata in Japan, and Orito is prohibited from ever leaving her homeland. What’s more, Jacob has an equally unlucky competitor for Orito’s affections: a translator named Uzaemon, whose wish to marry her has been denied by his father, who is concerned about her family’s many debts.....( end quote)

So there's forbidden love, daring adventures, corruption, stealing, global trade, sea battles, good and evil, longing, a contrast between faith and science, plus, and - charmingly humorous for me - the difficulties of trying to explain English words to Japanese interpreters, not to mention the skewed sense of English that the Japanese use without any trace of hesitation or embarrassment.

Now I never once wanted to put this novel down because I had to concentrate too hard, or because I couldn't understand what was going on - although I experienced both those things while reading it. I just seemed to realize that this was literature at its very best and I'd really miss something if I didn't perservere with it.

My favorite character? Dr. Marinus, who is training young Japanese to be doctors, and who uses the clerks and hands like Jacob de Zoet to teach human anatomy to his students, cleverly trapping them into service.

David Mitchell is Irish. I have heard of another of his novels entitled "Cloud Atlas", which was mentioned by someone in book club last June when we chose our books for this year. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was longlisted for the Booker this year, but did not make the shortlist. Too bad.