The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Thousand Autumns was getting an insane amount of buzz a while back, so I picked it up, not least because I so enjoyed Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.

Here's what I liked in a Nice Crisp September Day sort of way:

• Prose. Mitchell knows how to construct a clause, a sentence, a paragraph. So much of it is so gorgeous, even when he's describing something as dull as eighteenth-century trading bureaucracy.
• The More Structure Changes the More It Stays the Same. A few reviews I read said that Mitchell jettisoned his earlier works' structural similarities, that here we just get a conventional, single narrative. I'd disagree with those reviewers. Although we don't get a series of narrators or nested stories this time, we do get an English voice relating Dutch merchant interaction with feudal Japan. The collision of culture, language, and people doesn't feel like too far a stretch from the structure of Cloud Atlas. Cloud Atlas is to Canterbury Tales as Thousand Autumns is to Troilus and Criseyde. (That's right: I went there. I also just compared Mitchell to Chaucer, which was totally unexpected.)
• Miss Aibagawa. She's the most interesting character with the most (or possibly only) riveting plot line. She incites the most interesting behavior in others, but she's fully realized in her own right. I severely disliked some of the decisions she made, but I respected that they fit her character.

Here's what I found to be a bit too much in a Rainy Cold November Day sort of way:

• Narrative shape. The pacing is exhausting, especially in the first third of the book. The level of detail is downright cumbersome at times, and although I fully respect that Mitchell researched the crap out of the whole scenario, it feels like he didn't make many choices when it came to deciding which research would go into the book--all of it! and the kitchen sink! 
• Jacob de Zoet. Let's get one thing straight: Jacob de Zoet is a tool, and he never stops being a tool. I kind of wish I knew that going into the book. Because of his toolishness, his specific plot rarely gets very exciting, and I was especially frustrated with his conclusion. 

So can we find a happy medium sometime in October? Mostly. B