Continuous Vivid Dream

The New Yorker featured an article entitled “What Can’t the novelist David Mitchell do?” in July.  I consider Mitchell one of my all-time favorite authors with Paul Auster and Richard Russo.  From his first novel I read in Ghostwritten to Cloud Atlas, which I believe I abandoned a little halfway through (before I learned it’s considered a masterpiece of the last decade), I acknowledged his skills as an excellent storyteller.

There is no doubting Mitchell’s ability to write compelling stories and use language as a master craftsman.  There are certainly moments when I have to sit back and acknowledge the genius in certain passages or accounts within one of his texts.  Even his least popular novel, Number9Dream was a pleasurable reading experience.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet was difficult reading at first.  I questioned my fortitude whether I could get through after fifty to seventy pages because it takes place in a foreign land at the turn of the eighteenth century. I persevered and I was rewarded for my efforts.

David Mitchell’s novel focuses on a bookkeeper in the failing Dutch East Indies company in Dejima, the only trading port of Japan.  The story revolves around Jacob de Zoet and his relationships with Orito, a disfigured Japanese intern and his colleagues in the company and in the secluded locale.  The initial portion revolves around Jacob’s belief in the practice of moral record-keeping amidst gross corruption and fraud throughout the post and his initial meetings and advances on Orito.  The pace of the second half of the novel heightens with Orito’s abduction and her long-standing lover’s attempts to risk everything to free her.  The plight of Orito and the other girls resembles the horror found in the Handsmaid’s Tale.

The final chapters of the story return to the story of Jacob and his valiant stand against the British, who seek to take control of the post from the Dutch.  It is impressive what Mitchell is able to accomplish with a character as powerless and simple as a bookkeeper like Jacob de Zoet, transforming him into a hero without the need to lift a weapon.  There is certainly something quite tragic about Jacob’s years spent working and living in Dejima and his later return to his home country.

The style of David Mitchell’s novel is unique in its short one sentence bursts scattered throughout its breath.  Reading any of his novels aloud is a worthwhile exercise because of his command of the language.  For a novel so far from my reality, the Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a success in storytelling.  There is also a remarkable humor in the novel that should not be discounted.

There is one passage later in the novel descriptive of the flight of birds over the activity of Dejima and its inhabitants that shows the thought and poetry in Mitchell’s writing:

“Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike-topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunch-backed makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed from kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges.”