first Twelve in 12 entry

Can I keep it up all year?? We’ll see! Check out the Twelve in 12 diary– it’s been around for years but has been a little neglected the last year or so. Now it’s back and I’m going to try to be an active participant. You can too — there’s still a couple of days left in January!

So here’s my January book:

Title: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Author: David Mitchell
Length: 496 pages

I became a rabid David Mitchell fan five or six years ago, when I read a review of Black Swan Green, which had just come out and sounded really interesting. Our weird little local bookshop didn’t have it yet, but they did have Cloud Atlas. So I bought Cloud Atlas, and that got me hooked. David Mitchell is a hard author to pin down. Cloud Atlas is made up of six slightly related stories, set in radically different times and places (including The Far Future), which proceed in chronological order, each breaking off at a crucial point, then after the "center" story they all go backwards again until each one is finished. Which, oddly, is much less confusing than it sounds. His books have a tendency to twist up time, space, reality, and genre, yet they are all amazingly readable. And addictive.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is not as immediately complicated as some of his other books. Time is straightforward and linear. It begins in 1799, with the arrival of Jacob de Zoet to the manmade island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbor. Jacob is a clerk for the Dutch East Indies Company, and Dejima is the sole port and point of contact between Japan and the outside world. Jacob has taken this job as a way to make enough money to marry his rich fiancée in Holland. Things get complicated when he falls for Orito Aibagawa, a Japanese midwife with a burned face who is a the daughter of a high-ranking local doctor.

The novel entwines Jacob’s story with a whole bunch of other people’s stories: Orito, a Japanese interpreter, a magistrate, a creepy Lord Abbot with a sinister monastery, and a British sea captain who is intent on taking over Dejima for England and tossing out the Dutch. Just for starters. It’s historical, romance, intrigue, suspense, and a thriller all in one. He’s a fantastic writer and pulls you right into that place and time. And it is not a feel-good book. Not at all.

When you’re done with it, you have to read all the rest of his novels. He’s a genius.