Reviews
The Independent
Boyd Tonkin
“However densely charted and richly sketched, this sumptuous imbroglio never drags. Its author often risks high-level pastiche but writes with such invigorating edge and dash that scarcely a sentence stands idle. From the taste of a persimmon's "threaded flesh" ("fermented jasmine, oily cinnamon, perfumed melon, melted damson") to a Joyce-like panorama of the city from above ("Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch..."), Mitchell flexes his prose virtuosity.”
07/05/2010
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The Independent on Sunday
Katy Guest
“His fans will open the novel feeling nervous of disappointment, yes. But then they will close it in tears and turn immediately back to page one to begin again. To them, I say: don't worry, dive in and lose yourself in a world of incredible scope, originality and imaginative brilliance. David Mitchell has done it again.”
16/05/2010
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The Observer
Alexander Linklater
“This may not, quite, be a masterpiece, but it is unquestionably a marvel – entirely original among contemporary British novels, revealing its author as, surely, the most impressive fictional mind of his generation.”
09/05/2010
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The Scotsman
Stuart Kelly
“The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is far more subtle than just a tale of culture clashes, forbidden love and unexpected bravery. For a tour de force, it's surprisingly nimble, emotionally complex and simply unforgettable.”
11/05/2010
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The Sunday Telegraph
Holly Kyte
“Every sentence yields glorious surprises that no one else could think up... In a novel where the challenge of communication is paramount, dialogue dominates, shifting masterfully between bawdy dialects, halting translations and secret inner thoughts. What authorial direction there is is unobtrusive yet meticulously precise, achieving perfect clarity in just a few, exquisite words... It will doubtless earn Mitchell his fourth Man Booker nomination and, if there’s any justice, his first win.”
02/05/2010
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The Times
Neel Mukherjee
“How on earth does he do it? He can write as thrillingly about large-scale events (such as naval warfare or maritime trade in the 18th century) as he can about the tiny details of the private world. Such fluent and masterful command of both domains seems the stuff of a true artist’s gifts, not the laborious work of craft and toil. Not the least astonishing facet of Mitchell’s art is the supple effortlessness he brings to creating worlds entire: worlds so credible and fully formed that one is compelled to allow to pass through one’s mind the absurd thought that he was, perhaps, an inhabitant of Japan in 1799.”
22/04/2010
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The Sunday Times
Peter Kemp
“Spectacularly accomplished and thrillingly suspenseful... Prodigiously researched, it resurrects place and period with riveting immediacy. Imagining, with corresponding fullness, not just its characters’ present predicaments but their pasts and futures, it brims with rich, involving and affecting humanity.”
02/05/2010
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The New York Times
Michiko Kakutani
“He’s meticulously reconstructed the lost world of Edo-era Japan, and in doing so he’s created his most conventional but most emotionally engaging novel yet: it’s as if an acrobatic but show-offy performance artist, adept at mimicry, ventriloquism and cerebral literary gymnastics, had decided to do an old-fashioned play and, in the process, proved his chops as an actor.”
28/06/2010
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The New York Times
Dave Eggers
“There are no easy answers or facile connections in “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.” In fact, it’s not an easy book, period. Its pacing can be challenging, and its idiosyncrasies are many. But it offers innumerable rewards for the patient reader and confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearlesswriters alive.”
24/06/2010
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The New Yorker
James Wood
“By any standards, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” is a formidable marvel, and it would be perverse to hold Mitchell’s natural facility against him. Yet the book is still a conventional historical novel, and drags with it some of the fake heirlooms of the genre... There is a perceptible staginess to many of the perfectly turned scenes, reminiscent at times of such movies as “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “A Man for All Seasons,” and even “Zulu” or “The Man Who Would Be King.””
05/07/2010
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The Literary Review
Lesley Downer
“Hugely enjoyable… The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet crackles along, holding us in suspense from the beginning. Mitchell’s supercharged language is flavoured with a salty eighteenth century tone and idiom as he builds the atmosphere of this extraordinary place.”
01/05/2010
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Times Literary Supplement
Patrick Denman Flanery
“Mitchell is clearly still most at home in the first person, and Jacob de Zoet is at its best when a single character is allowed to recount his or her particular story. Here, though, as in Mitchell’s first three books, there is also a problem with language... As compelling as it is strange, the novel is testament to the originality of Mitchell’s vision and his great craftiness as a storyteller.”
14/05/2010
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The Washington Post
Ron Charles
“Initially, the great cast of characters on the man-made island has just barely enough to do to keep the story moving forward, particularly one that rests on the ever-fascinating subject of accounting. But Mitchell is an author who deserves your trust... Just in time, the threads of this dilatory plot begin to pull tight ... [and] the administrative fussiness of the novel's first section gives way to a fantastic and eerily told adventure that reads like an Asian version of Margaret Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale."”
30/06/2010
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The Spectator
Philip Hensher
“It is undoubtedly an exciting book, but in any number of ways an unsophisticated one, with a technique that in some aspects borders on the rudimentary. In the past, I’ve greatly enjoyed and admired Mitchell’s books. This one seems exactly calculated to demonstrate his weaknesses as a writer, and the writerly temptations he too easily yields to.”
28/04/2010
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The Financial Times
Henry Hitchings
“The laboratory of Mitchell’s imagination is palatial, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet exhibits his familiar bravura. But here, for all the moments of brilliance, the chemistry doesn’t quite work.”
01/05/2010
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The Guardian
Christopher Tayler
“The main problem seems to be that Mitchell hasn't decided if he's writing a straight historical novel, a grandly themed fable or a cheerfully trashy romp. Or rather that he's decided to write all three, but without a structure robust and flexible enough to keep the different elements in balance... All the same, it's hard not to warm to the fluency and copiousness of Mitchell's yarn-spinning.”
15/05/2010
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The Economist
The Economist
“When the hero and heroine are separated, the book still has 300 pages to go. Mr Mitchell fills the gap with a number of clever, if somewhat disconnected set pieces. The result is uneasy. As so often happens with his writing, the reader is left feeling more seduced than satisfied.”
06/05/2010
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The Daily Telegraph
Kasia Boddy
“Different as they were, Mitchell’s earlier novels were all bravura displays of voice. Here, however, he has chosen to incorporate the earthy brogues he clearly relishes into a floating third-person narrative or camera eye. The novel’s insistence on immediacy – even speech is interrupted mid-sentence to describe what else is happening – and its strategic rapid cuts from romance to cliffhanger to comedy also resemble a movie treatment. “A story must move,” says one character, “and misfortune is motion”, but in the end it’s all a bit like Pirates of the Caribbean on speed.”
03/07/2010
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The New Statesman
Leo Robson
“A disappointment… In his previous work, Mitchell has proved himself a virtuoso of voice, but this novel is conducted in a third-person plod. The juggling of divergent perspectives in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, the adolescent solipsism of number9dream and Black Swan Green, have ill-equipped him for the challenges of the multi-character set-piece novel.”
02/05/2010
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