37. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. David Mitchell. 2010.

​This book, set circa 1800 in Japan, about a white Dutch man was not my favorite book of the year.  Written from a colonizer perspective, without reflection, it left me  frustrated at the loss of opportunity to provide a richer narrative.  His obsession with a Japanese woman being mistreated by men in her own culture provides an easy backdrop to trash misogynism in Japan with no insight into Dutch colonial treatment of women or communities they attempted to or did colonize. All of this in the context of a protagonist it appears we are supposed to feel sorry for because of his heroism, commitment to truth, and so on.  There is a lot of clever interpretation errors and confusion over various English words, which is both funny and demeaning at the same time since it not once pokes fun at westerns trying to speak Japanese, but focuses on how Japanese characters misuse Dutch/English words--I found this very confusing since the book was written in English, so the miscommunications make sense in English, but since they are supposedly speaking Dutch in the book, I was constantly wondering if the English/Dutch words were similar enough that the Japanese/Dutch confusion translated into English.  This was really distracting.  I say skip it. 

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