The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

21 hrs. 27 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author David Mitchell

Narrator Igor Knyazev

Description

The end of the 18th century. A young Dutchman, Jacob de Zout, sails to Deshima—a Dutch colony in Japan. He needs to earn money—his beloved Anna’s father won’t consent to his marrying a poor man.

Jakob is sure that he will soon return to his homeland, become Anna’s husband, and the years spent in Japan will be remembered as a small adventure. But fate decides otherwise—he will have to spend almost his entire life in a foreign land, experience many things, meet love and lose it.

Mitchell skillfully weaves together a multitude of destinies, filling the world he has created with mysterious symbols and colorful details, inviting the reader to experience all the trials that fall to the hero’s lot.

From the performer

This is a very beautiful book. I couldn’t manage the famous “Cloud Atlas”—probably the mood wasn’t right: I peeked in and closed it, thinking it was another Pavich. So, “Thousand Autumns” is completely different. As someone wrote, in essence it’s a book about the clash of two alien cultures in a closed space. That’s an accurate description, but it absolutely doesn’t reflect the literary side. From that perspective, we see a magnificent set of highly vivid characters, fascinating details, and a slow, yet sufficiently tense plot with a kind of detective-mystical framework. The peculiar style of narration—something like a fugue, where two complex sentences intertwine and create, as it were, a double angle of observation—this manner, very interesting on paper, cost me as a performer quite a lot of blood ) Another thing that catches the eye is the alternation of Japanese watercolor-like descriptions with blatant naturalism (or, quoting another review, “pleasantly stinky”). The point is clear: the effect of presence in a place and time we have never seen and never will. And it is done masterfully. I’ll add that Mitchell knows how to write great endings—tension keeps rising and in the end it is released through a set of striking psychological scenes. Everything becomes clear and nothing needs to be guessed, although many authors now love open endings. That’s not the case here: the writer has enough talent to express things with maximum clarity and power. By the setting, I also thought of Akunin’s “Diamond Chariot,” though, of course, de Zout is much more realistic.

In short: one of the best books lately—thank you to those of you who pointed me to it ) And, of course, thanks to Sveta for proofreading, to Igor Mal’tsev for cleaning up the text, to Dima for adapting the book cover design, and to Viktor Weber and the EXMO publishing house for a good translation.