This summary makes the novel sound more conventional than it is. Aibagawa without leaving Dejima, the island trading post where foreigners, by order of the Shogun, are quarantined his struggles to do this more or less constitute the novel’s plot. Aibagawa, from the clutches of a villainous abbot the abbot has imprisoned her in a mountain nunnery dedicated to occult, possibly abominable Shinto rituals (“I overheard some strange rumors about Abbott Enomoto’s shrine,” one man tells Jacob). It follows a young Dutch accountant, Jacob de Zoet, as he tries to rescue his love interest, a Japanese midwife named Ms. It’s a strangely gothic, historical action-adventure romance, set on a Dutch trading outpost in Nagasaki at the turn of the 19 th century.
The English novelist David Mitchell is often described as a virtuoso of imaginative storytelling, and his fifth novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is unlike anything you’ve read. August 24th, 2010 Like Proust, David Mitchell examines how the incidents of a person’s life fit together, how the different parts of the world come to form one world.
0 kommentar(er)
