David Mitchell is a Genius
To call David Mitchell a genius sounds almost hackneyed. For people who read contemporary fiction, Mitchell is so widely respected that it seems, at times, incredulous. It’s not.
Having already been enamored of Mitchell after reading Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green, my expectations for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet were high. Very high. I’m here to tell you now that those expectations were blown out of the water.
Thousand Autumns is a masterpiece.
At times it reads like a captivating memoir of the Dutch East India Company. At other times it reads like a fantasy/horror novel set in Feudal Japan. And at other times it reads like novel of the sea, like Moby Dick, or perhaps Patrick O’Brian (though I confess to having never finished the former and having never read the latter.) But at all times it is gripping — once you’re about 100 pages in, you cannot put this book down –and it is seamless.
I mean this last comment literally. You cannot find the seams. The way in which the various stories are woven together (De Zoet’s love of the disfigured Miss Aibagawa, the horror of the Shiranu Temple, the fate of the Dutch sailors on Dejima); the ease with which the words flow on the page; the absolute and total believability of the historic environs in which the novel is set (this book is an homage to the art of research) is blended into a beautiful whole that is more than the sum of its parts. And the sum of its parts is quite a lot.
There are also important themes and messages in this book about the unfortunate role of race during the Colonial heyday of Europe; about the nature of belief and how it can serve to both bolster and destroy the human spirit; and about the noble ideal of the truth.
As strong as this review is, I’m not sure I can recommend this book to everyone. Much like Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, another brilliant work by a master crafstman, this book might be less accessible than something like Black Swan Green. But once you’re in, I promise, you’ll be hooked.
One final word on David Mitchell: The most astonishing thing about Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, and Thousand Autums, is that all three appear to be written by different authors. The style and substance of each novel are unique. If you were to place these three works before a literary critic from another era, I’m hard pressed to believe he or she would ever deduce that they were written by the same hand. And to me, that is the mark or an incredibly skilled writer.
