A Review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel

4.5 out of 5: In 2004, David Mitchell impressed readers and critics alike with Cloud Atlas, his genre-defying (and Booker-Prize-shortlisted) novel with a structure more akin to a set of Russian nesting dolls than a typical novel. In his most recent novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Mitchell skips the literary fireworks in favor of the more conventional form of the historical novel. Mitchell’s protagonist—Jacob de Zoet—travels around the world in 1799 to the trading post maintained by the Dutch East Indies Company off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan. The Dutch traders are confined to the man-made island of Dejima, lying just off the coast of Nagasaki and connected to the mainland by a heavily guarded bridge. Seeking to earn enough distinction and money to wed the sweetheart he left behind in the Netherlands, de Zoet is tasked with investigating Dejima’s notorious corruption. In de Zoet’s time, Nagasaki was a mysterious land ruled by powerful samurais and enigmatic traditions, and the inevitable clash between East and West provides the animating force for most of the novel’s action.

With its large cast of colorful characters and its adventure-laden plot, including a forbidden love affair and a daring rescue attempt from a dangerous sex cult, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet maintains its quick pace for nearly five hundred pages. Throughout it all, Mitchell employs the conventions of the genre while avoiding most of its clichés. This book’s fault, if it has one, is its exuberant excess. The plethora of characters, subplots, and historical details can be challenging to keep up with, particularly in the first hundred pages. This superabundance is also the novel’s greatest strength, however, as it results in a realistic rendering of an entire world with all its messiness and complexity. While not as groundbreaking as Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is an old-fashioned historical adventure tale that also manages to be thrilling and inventive.

A Review of Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolaño (translated by Chris Andrews)

Monsieur Pain

3.5 out of 5: Set in Paris in 1938, Monsieur Pain is the first-person account of a series of strange events in the life of a practitioner of animal magnetism (a mesmerist). With typical élan, Pain, an eccentric bachelor, explains how he became a mesmerist after a bad experience in World War I:

From then on, supported by a modest invalid's pension, and perhaps as a reaction against the society that had imperturbably sent me forth to die, I gave up everything that could be considered beneficial to a young man's career, and took up the occult sciences, which is to say that I let myself sink into poverty, in a manner that was deliberate, rigorous and not altogether devoid of elegance. At some point during that phase in my life I read An Abridged History of Animal Magnetism, by Franz Mesmer, and, within a matter of weeks, became a mesmerist.

Because of his expertise in mesmerism, Pain is asked to treat a friend’s husband, a Peruvian poet suffering from a severe case of hiccups. Before long, the case takes a turn for the surreal when two mysterious Spaniards trail Pain through the city and bribe him not to treat the hiccupping poet. Pain finds himself within ever stranger hallucinatory scenes, calling into question the border between reality and Pain’s own mental labyrinths.

Pain confronts the increasing confusion with a kind of naïveté that is both charming in its innocence and frustrating in its passivity. The novel’s lively dialog and frequent moments of suspense overcome its frustrating fragmentation and occasional self-indulgence. Written in 1981 or 1982, Monsieur Pain is one of Bolaño’s earliest novels, and, at fewer than 150 pages, it is also one of his most concise. Monsieur Pain is a nice introduction to Bolaño’s particular brand of genius for those readers new to Bolaño, while those familiar with his more major works (The Savage Detectives and 2666) will enjoy witnessing Bolaño’s writing at a more formative stage.