"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet"

[fiefoe]

The opening breech birth scene is a stunner, and hooked me at once. David Mitchell is wonderful with short sentences, and doesn't shy away from word play in English just because he's writing about Dutch people in Japan.

• not heirless, but hairless / a unholy mess of a Holy Mass / lawful wedlock, awful bedlock
• Maples shed leaves like women tearing up letters.
• An autumn breeze drags its invisible robes around the fine room.
• printed garden /  priceless coin of time  / starling fly in nebulae / moral bookkeeping
• persimmon: a dribbling gobbet of threaded flesh
• .. and the shuddering newborn boiled-pink despot howls at Life.
• Nagasaki.. looks oozed from between the verdant mountains' splayed toes.
• Jacob jumps up and bangs his knee. The pain is prismatic.
• Glass panes melt moonlight; paper panes filter it, to dust. {地上霜!}
• The notes of the luminous sonatas hang like grapes from the staves.
• Small cogs of time meet and mesh. The flintmen cry, "Clear!"
  

My favorite character is of course Dr Marinus.

• "Domburger.. shall loan his gluteus maximus to medical science, that I may demonstrate the passage of smoke 'through caverns measureless to man' from anus to esophagus, whence smoke trickles through his nostrils like incense from a stone dragon, though not, alas, so sweet-scented, given its malodorous voyage."
• Linnaean..taught that Hottentots are monorchids, possessing but a single testicle. They have two. I looked.
• Goethe: 'Our friends show us what we can do; our enemies teach us what we must do.'
• So little is actually worthy of either belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disprove.
• Knowledge exists only when it is given...

Delicate moments:

• Why scarecrow is 'Robespierre'?" "Because his head falls off when the wind changes. It's a dark joke." "Joke is secret language" - she frowns - "inside words."
• Rosmarinus is 'dew of the ocean.' Old people say that rosemary thrives-grow well- only when it can hear the ocean.
• Damned fool, groans the Demon of Present Regret. What have you done?
• Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us, and through us, at the speed of days and nights, and we like to call it "love."