19 Oct The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell
Amy, one of the people who often stop by the blog, wrote about an interesting book. Since so many of you love to read and so many of you have, or have had, complicated lives, I thought this book may be of interest to you. Here’s Amy’s take:
I had the pleasure of reading a very good book recently: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell.
Although it is a very well written narrative and an absorbing story, I can’t say I enjoyed the book. I liked reading it, but the story was disturbing. The main character of the title, Jacob De Zoet, is an honest man. He is a kind and honest man and employee, friend and fiancée. He does all the right things all the time and he gets totally, completely screwed.
This isn’t the moral of the story, that the good and honest get totally screwed, although that happens a lot in this novel, as in life. I had to look deeper to find what I think is the moral of this complicated historical novel. The moral, like the character who delivers it, is subtle, noble, intelligent, and indisputable, if unpalatable, and almost missed amidst all the action. . Jacob and Orito, the character who delivers the moral, are reunited 20 years after Orito has been kidnapped and condemned to a horrific fate. Jacob apologies to Orito for not being able to rescue her from her fate. She replies: “Had you give me sanctuary …that day, I would have been spared pain, yes, but [all the other women would still be prisoners]. How can I forgive you when you did nothing wrong?”
This is the powerful moral I took from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. We don’t know what the consequences of our actions will be, but for those among us who have a conscious, we do know what the consequence will be if we do not follow our conscious. The pain of not doing the right thing can be harder to live with then the pain inflicted on us by others.
It’s not a happy ending. It’s not a happy story. And it is certainly not a happy reality. But it’s a reality I can live with.