I am blown away.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

by David Mitchell

What a scope! A tapestry of threads of human lives, loosely woven together by their contact with the Dutchman Jacob de Zoet. He travels as head clerk with the Dutch East India Company to Dejima, a man-made Island in the Bay of Nagasaki. Apparently the Island was constructed to keep foreign traders off the mainland. I don't think the author, David Mitchell, mentioned that, but her did a masterful job of balancing details of daily life in the early 1800s with total plot immersion--for a spell of time covering several years, I was there. Right there.

An interview with the author about the difficulty of creating such a work:

Small details, such as if people used shaving cream or not, could use up lots of time so that a single sentence could take half a day to write. "It was tough," Mitchell said. "It almost finished me off before I finished it off.

I didn't know this as I was reading it, but it's loosely based on known history and the memoir of Hendrik Doeff, who became chief of the Dejima post and wrote a famous Japanese-Dutch dictionary. I doubt if the irascible Doctor Marinus, the brilliant midwife Orito Aibagawa, or the evil Abbot of Mount Shiranui Shrine existed, but they're told so well you think they might have.

So many characters, all a mixture of good, evil, greed, pain and desire--it made my head spin. At times he went off on long tangents, such as the details of a game of whist or billiards or a life history of one of Jacob's fellow travelers, and I wanted to be bored but I had to pay attention--sometimes they were sneakily the plot lines. Other times they were just curious. Just stories.