The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

THis author is truly phenomenal--and not only is every book great, every book is wildly different from the other. He is gifted and magnificent--the fact that I did not love Starting with "Ghostwritten" and "Number9Dream," Mitchell fused coincidence and fate, reality and fantasy in nested, refracted stories that could drive M.C. Escher mad. In 2004, his American publisher timidly brought out "Cloud Atlas" only in paperback, but readers in this country were just as enthusiastic as his British fans, and that mind-bending masterpiece was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Then in 2006, as his reputation was starting to coalesce as a writer of super-sophisticated speculative fiction, he repressed his trademark trickery and released "Black Swan Green," a perfectly charming autobiographical novel about a 13-year-old boy.
And now he startles us again with a rich historical romance set in feudal Japan, an epic of sacrificial love, clashing civilizations and enemies who won't rest until whole family lines have been snuffed out. Yes, the novelist who's been showing us the future of fiction has published a classic, old-fashioned tale. It's not too early to suggest that Mitchell can triumph in any genre he chooses.
"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" draws us into the redolent atmosphere of those grand 19th-century epics by Melville, Dumas and Sir Walter Scott. Japan remains a favorite subject for this peripatetic author, who began writing fiction in his 20s while teaching English in Hiroshima. But this time Mitchell sits still in Japan, abandoning his time-traveling, world-spanning, intertextual sorcery for the satisfaction of a single (and singular) time and place.
It's 1799, and the Dutch East Indies Company maintains the West's only trading post in Nagasaki. Or rather, near Nagasaki. Employees of this potentially lucrative monopoly don't live on the mainland or even visit it except on special occasions. Instead, they work and sleep on Dejima, a fan-shaped, man-made island, surrounded by a high wall and connected to Nagasaki by a heavily guarded bridge. This gracious prison is a striking manifestation of Japan's determination to avoid exposure or contamination, a policy set down almost 200 years earlier by the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu. Jacob is an engaging focus for a story about a place and a time, a world view of both a culture and a place--it is wonderful.