Finished "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet" two weeks ago, around 2:30 am, policing a sleepover party. I read a feature on David Mitchell in the New York Times Magazine last year, and just had to get ahold of some of his novels. So for my birthday I got a NOOK, the Barnes & Noble e-book doohickey, an autographed paperback of "Cloud Atlas" (2004) and an autographed hardcover of "The Many Autumns of Jacob De Zoet" (the most recent). When my husband gets a good idea, he runs with it (but he does wonder wether NOOK will turn out to be the Betamax of e-readers.) I got one of my book clubs to read "Ghostwritten", his first novel (1999), and read it on the NOOK.

The weirdest thing, I find, about reading a book on an electronic thingy, is having NO IDEA how long it is! I can see the total number of pages displayed in the bottom right corner, but it's not the same as the sense of heft and type size you get from handling an actual book. I think other reading devices don't necessarily keep the same pagination as printed copies.

"Cloud Atlas" is one of the most audacious and startling and enthralling books I've ever read. I went into each of Mitchell's books close to completely cold, with no idea of the plot, and am just stunned every time. All I will say about "Cloud Atlas" is that in ranges through time and genre, changing with each chapter, with a symmetrical structure, from the past into the future and back again. The theme that emerges? Man's inhumanity to man throughout the ages, and the undying idealism to fight against it. The first and last chapters are in the form of the journal of a 18th century gentleman on a sea voyage. A debate as to why the... "White races hold dominion over the globe" is put to rest by a cynic thusly: ...of all the world's races, our love - or rather our rapacity - for treasure, gold, spices & dominion, oh most of all, sweet dominion, is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous! The rapacity, yes, powers our Progress: for ends infernal or divine I know not. Nor do you know, sir. Nor do I overly care. I only feel gratitude that my Maker cast me on the winning side.

In the final passages, Adam Ewing defends his idealism in his journal, imagining the words of one who would point out the futility of his drive. 'He who would do battle with the many headed hydra 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!' [and he responds] Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

Throughout the novel are only tiny connections between the stories, just enough to give the careful reader gratifying little payoffs as you move across centuries, dropping in and out of letters, journals, mystery novels, memoirs, and interview transcripts.

"Ghostwritten" I can barely even describe, again, it jumps around through time and location, dropping into the lives of vastly different characters with nothing apparent in common, and only very gradually does the real subject become apparent, which turns out to be...supernatural, in a way. But again, it really pays off. He has an amazing ability to get inside the heads of so many characters who often speak/think in the first person, in a broad range of cultures and time periods, all completely believable and authentic. There's a very brief description of the experience of giving birth, that, when I first read it, I thought, "how the fuck does he know that!" I look back at that passage now, it's only a sentence, but it's stays with me.

I finally made it to his most recent, "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet". It begins with a very graphic description of a difficult birth, sometime before the advent of modern medicine. In very few novels will you encounter the word "vagina" on the first page, but there it is. You have my attention. The setting is an artificial island immediately adjacent to the Japanese city of Nagasaki, where Dutch traders are permitted to stay to import and export goods, but are prohibited from setting foot on Japanese soil, mostly in the years 1699-1700. Only official Japanese interpreters and highly placed bureaucrats are allowed to communicate with the Dutch, who are basically interned on this island. Much to my surprise, this novel is straight-up historical fiction, and a romance, even. For the first few chapters I waited for "something" to happen, or an abrupt shift in tone or setting, but in fact this remains a work of (apparently meticulously researched) historical fiction, about a time and place I knew absolutely nothing about. But in the style of his other books, Mitchell gets inside the heads of a multitude of characters of wildly differing varieties.

Tucked away at the end of this book is one of the funniest sentences I've ever read. "A smoke-dried Dane makes a Finn's cock of a tangled vang." Okay. This takes place on a large sailing vessel, so I found and online dictionary of nautical terms: a "vang" is... well, some particular rope of the, I guess, hundreds on a wooden ship. "Smoke dried Dane" I suppose refers to a grizzled sailor from Denmark. Now, as far as a "Finn's cock" goes (as it were), what I can't figure out is, and I think there are two basic options here, did he take that tangled vang and make it worse, or did he straighten it out? And I really did type "Finn's cock" into Google. Guess what kind of things came up? (And I swear, that REALLY WAS no pun intended.) In my other favorite moment, someone catches or protagonist looking utterly surprised and asks him, "Have you beshatten your breeches?" It's just funny. And I realize I may now be giving the false impression that this book is somehow overall quite bawdy. It is not. It does however get into a very weird area that involves some of the Japanese characters involved in a very demented serial-raping and killing plot. Mitchell does not go into detailed scenes of violence and victimization, but it was not at all what I expected from him. He is however a big softie in the end. He gives the reader the satisfaction of seeing the so-sympathetic main character go gently into that goodnight. (That's not really a spoiler, right?)

Oh gosh, I just wrote a book report/term paper voluntarily, didn't I? I love David Mitchell's writing, and I'm just as prone to nerding out over novels as I am over music, movies, or TV. Please read and enjoy.

And strangely enough, there is another Englishman named David Mitchell, who is one of the funniest comic actors/writers I've ever seen. "That Micthell and Webb Look", his sketch comedy show with Robert Webb was broadcast for a time on BBC America. It was the perfect combination of smart/twee/absurd. But that's another kettle of fish.