the thousand autumns of jacob de zoet by david mitchell

If this were the only David Mitchell novel I'd read, maybe I would view things differently.

Mind you, I'm basing that judgment more on my knowledge of Mitchell's previous books than from what I've read of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. And if ever a novelist was going to use reality to provoke thought about fiction it's him. If it's ever permissible to describe a novelist as 'ludic' it's David Mitchell. Thus, despite the frigates and the kidney stones, despite Chef Grote and Admiral Penhaligon, the novel has a whiff of the formalist although the book contains no literary games, it is itself a kind of long game.' Happily, Wood partially eases his anxiety by suggesting that for Mitchell the setting offers similar intellectual rewards to his more obviously postmodern and structurally playful books like Cloud Atlas: 'Its very historical distance – its self-enclosed quality – represents an assertion of pure fictionality. If you haven't been thrown into conniptions by the thought that Mantel may be commercial and traditional, I'd also recommend the rest of the article, which is excellent. What such novelists are looking for in those oldfangled laboratories is sometimes mysterious to me and how these daring writers differ from a very gifted but frankly traditional and more commercial historical novelist like Hilary Mantel is an anxiously unanswered question.' Wood went on, even more provocatively: 'I am thinking not just of Mitchell but of Thomas Pynchon, Susan Sontag, Steven Millhauser, AS Byatt, Peter Carey.

The thousand autumns of jacob de zoet by david mitchell