David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet"

It seems like I have said so much about David Mitchell as a cunning writer in my previous entry for his book “Cloud Atlas”. I will not fall into the pit of being redundant so I will make it terse: this is a great book. “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet” is yet another oeuvre that’s an addition to a list of amazing books that I’ve read. Written in the traditional style of a novel the book takes the reader on a quest into 18^th century Japan, a time when it is in its shogun dominated era, in the midst of an inflicted isolation from the rest of the world. Most of the story took place in Dejima – a man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki built to serve as a center for trade and to keep foreigners from setting foot in the island. Though it is mostly centered on Jacob de Zoet, a clerk of the Dutch East Indies Company and his obsession for Orito Aibagawa, a student of science practicing midwifery at the Shirando School,  it is also a disclosure to the to the hostilities that took place in Japan during this era. These cruelties took a claim on “tradition” yet to the eyes of the westerners were sheer murder. We are hurled into the world of merchants, sailors, daimyos, slaves, interpreters, scholars, men of faith but with dark intentions, of crazed sisters at the nunnery and the strange murder that awaits them, of samurais, noble deaths, of love and its high price and of many things that shock, scare. In short: a thick brew of history where fact and fiction converged. It entails a stark dichotomy of the east and west. Another fascinating trait of the book is of how David Mitchell wrote it: it bore the terse poesy of a haiku. 

*

“Cicadas hiss in the pines.

They sound like fat frying in a shallow pan.”

*

“Night insects trill, tick, bore, ring; drill, prick, saw, sting.”

A take on religion added a compelling effect to the book. It held brilliant characters with strong religious convictions.

  “The purest believers, Shiroyama thinks, are the truest monsters”.

“Whoever claimed that history had no sense of humour died too soon.”

Cloud Atlas & The Myth of Eternal Returns

Finishing David Mitchell’s postmodern work of fiction “Cloud Atlas” felt like an accomplishment that must result to a written praise for it (though subpar to it’s already given attention from better minds out there). It was an attachment that took exactly 8 days through countless hours of caffeinated eagerness amidst work related pressure, short attention span, struggles of Shakespearean qualities over levels of love and hate; which resulted from the author’s intention to interrupt the story while it is in its full swing, resuming 100 pages later, color me frustrated. There is, however, so much to love than to hate Mitchell (if being articulate to a fault counts) for writing this oeuvre of multiple genres with sheer genius. It is, honestly, one of the strangest books I’ve read, so far. David Mitchell takes his readers into different worlds of separate times. Stories that serves as a glimpse into the past, a peek into distant future and of course he weaves a story this era has so repeatedly witness in real-life or on silver screens.

There were six different stories in the book. That bowled my head agoogly.. Like the opus Cloud Atlas Sextet each are poles apart in terms of style, characters, setting, plot and conflict but held an idée fixe: a sudden mention of names of certain characters that appeared in the previous story/ies,  a birthmark or a blemish in the shape of a comet, an ubiquitous melody like a hovering leitmotif that tugs on a phantom limb, that tells you they are one and of different strand. 

“My head is a Roman Candle of inventions. Lifetime’s music, arriving all at once. Boundaries between noise and sound are conventions ... Hear the instruments in my head, perfect clarity, anything I wish for. When it’s finished, there’ll be nothing left in me, I know.” 

 “The Pacific Journal of Adam Erwing” was in a form of a memoir circa 1850 authored by Adam, an American Notary leaving Chatham Islands,  “Letters From Zedelghem” an epistolary account of an aspiring musician (addressed to a certain Mr. Sixsmith, his lover) who seeks cultivation in the practice of composition and was therefore taken as an amanuensis by a prolific composer doomed to obscurity, Vyvyn Ayrs, “Half-Lives- The First Luisa Rey Mystery” an action packed narrative about a reporter and her fixed intention to expose a corruption and murder in a nuclear power plant,  “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” was about an aged publisher who finds himself suddenly confined into a nursing home, “An Orison of Sonmi- 451” a sci-fi allegory in the form of a dialogue between Sonmi (a clone) and her executioner (?). It covers her life as a fabricant-waitress at Papa Song’s Diner and her great escape into the world of the purebloods, “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’After” written in an almost incomprehensible and seemingly outdated language and in the perspective of Zachry, a valleysman who befriended a Prescient Woman, Meronym whom he escaped Sloosha’s Crossin’ with after finding his entire tribe completely exterminated.

This book whose characters breathed in an imperfect, chaotic world and who are actually preyed upon by amounts of cruelties and obscenities, rings a certain truth or a myth that one will find indelible all throughout the narrative’s (though dense and utterly exhausting) story-telling. That is: we live, we suffer, we die but we do not remain dead for long, as Frederich Nietzsche philosophized “We exist for an eternity of eternities”. It is true for Adam Ewing, Robert Forbisher, Luisa Rey, Sonmi 451 and Timothy Cavendish. They exist, disappear yet return bearing the burden of the previous life. A strange and deplorable notion that birthed 529 pages work of fiction by author David Mitchell. 

The idea of “eternal returns”, a philosophical notion that has been a subject of curious fascination by other writers (and thus led me to Milan Kundera’s “An Unbearable Lightness of Being”  whose opening lines read “The Idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the reccurence itself recurs ad infinitum! This also led me to another writer whose work “An Abundance of Katherines” was hum drum in comparison but has at least the same implication) has always been something that fascinated and terrified me (too) because if it is so, what a heavy burden life is, noh? Milan Kundera further quotes Nietzsche “But whether it was horrible, beautiful or sublime, it’s horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing” a rather frightening thought but which was echoed by David Mitchell in his final lines of Cloud Atlas “He who do battle with many headed hydras of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean! Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”.   

Cloud Atlas is a full display of David Mitchell’s literary giftedness as it veers away from the traditional novel by shifting genres yet setting each to a boiling point that makes one want to reach its final pages—the sextets final note—in such a rush. Iit took me 8 days, however. I enjoyed this in so many levels (peripatetic boredom?). I especially liked “Letters to Zedelghem“ which was a beehive of musical concepts, like Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus”, it was an analysis of music and man. As a practicing musician this was the story which I find much interest in, made my ears ring and of which I understood the book’s intention explained in musical terms:

“a sextet for overlapping soloists: piano, clarinet, cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in its own language of key, scale and colour, In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the 2^nd, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan’t know until it’s finished and by then it’ll be too late, but it’s the first thing I think of when I wake, and the last I think of before I fall asleep ... the artist lives in two worlds.” – p. 463

 It is true that there are writers that require time, heart, mind, and soul from its readers (as Mira, my best friend and fellow book lover once told me while I was reading Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus”) and I would just like to add – a modicum of tolerance if they tend to bang us with some verbal acrobatics because one will never know to what extent a book will affect him/her after. 

“Echoes of Scriabin’s White Mass, Stravinsky’s lost footprints, chromatics of the more lunar Debussy, but truth is I don’t know where it came from. Waking dream. Will never write anything one hundredth as good. Wish I were being immodest, but I’m not. Cloud Atlas Sextet holds my life, is my life, now I’m a spent firework; but at least I’ve been a firework.” --- Robert Forbisher, Letters to Zedelghem 

“I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o’that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an tho’ a cloud’s chape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the clouds blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’clouds.” --- Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After

“Nietzsche’s gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities. Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead long. Once my Luger lets me go, my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat. In thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter, me resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet. Such elegant certainties comfort me.” --- Letters from Zedelghem