The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet/Mattherhorn

I had to write some book reviews for a couple of titles that I contributed to an auction. Despite the pervasive use of blurb-speak here, I thought it might be worthwhile to preserve these reviews here for posterity ....

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell

David Mitchell is known for delivering intricate and very clever tales rendered in sometimes dizzying postmodern fashion. His novels turn themselves inside out, move forwards and backwards at the same time, and at the end you are likely left wondering exactly what happened. With his most recent novel, however, Mitchell opts for a more straightforward narrative style—but without losing his masterful command of technique. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is Mitchell’s most accessible novel yet and perhaps his strongest. The story Mitchell tells here is that of Jacob de Zoet, a young clerk in the Dutch East India Company circa 1799. De Zoet finds himself stationed on the artificial island of Dejima, built in Nagasaki harbor as a trading center because the Japanese Shogunate does not allow Westerners to set foot on Japanese soil. Mitchell has chosen an utterly fascinating historical time and place in which to set de Zoet’s story.

The Westerners bring with them new developments in science and medicine, as well as a rapidly emerging capitalist ethos, but the gate remains quite literally closed to them. Stranded in the harbor, de Zoet finds himself involved in a struggle for power and wealth as different factions among the Dutch spar for advantage with the reluctant and very cautious Japanese. Things get more complicated when de Zoet finds himself falling in love with a Japanese woman eager to learn more about Western medicine. Though the global hotspots may have changed, the clash of cultures that ensues seems eerily relevant today, and readers are reminded that the origins of globalism go back centuries. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet offers a love story as well as a study of culture and character, and as the plot evolves you will find this novel to offer as compelling a story of adventure and intrigue as you are likely to find anywhere.

Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes

Matterhorn is, quite simply, the best war novel I have ever read. It certainly ranks favorably beside such classics as A Farewell to Arms, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Things They Carried. Matterhorn takes place in Vietnam during what is known there as the American War, and from the very first page the reader is thrust into a military, political, and personal quagmire that is reflected in nearly every aspect of the experiences of the novel’s protagonist, Lt. Waino Mellas, an Ivy League graduate who finds himself in Vietnam without truly knowing why he is there. Matterhorn is gripping, compelling, gritty, and sometimes grisly, and there is hardly a wasted syllable in the novel’s 690 pages. The narrative style is sharp, taut, and yet richly detailed. There is no lack of realism here, and the themes that emerge related to the camaraderie of warriors resonate as utterly genuine, never jingoistic or merely sentimental. Mellas and his fellow Marines battle hunger, thirst, leeches, and malaria, not to mention the North Vietnamese Army; they live and die in the muck of the jungle and even somehow ultimately find their humanity in the midst of its twisted vines and its promises of death. Matterhorn is not a political novel; this is a novel worth reading regardless of your perspective on the war, and it is told in such a way that only a combat veteran could tell it. Published in 2010, Mattherhorn is, in fact, Marlantes’ first novel, and he has literally been working on it ever since he was discharged from the Marine Corps after his stint in Vietnam. For the readers of this novel, it is well worth every moment of that nearly forty-year wait. Marlantes has delivered a true classic of the genre, and though it sounds like hyperbole, it would not be out of place in a spot next to Homer on the bookshelf.