"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" [.]

[fiefoe]

After the high spirited start, there were long stretches where I didn't take notes, like Orito's imprisonment and Ogawa's rescue attempt, maybe because the story got too tense. To my surprised satisfaction, the last hundred pages delivered a really strong ending -- a great twist on 'the butler did it' resolution.

The author offers a master class on how to do historical fiction: one needs to be good at dropping historical details, like the best SF. His world building skills also come through with those Decameron like tales.

• The frisker speaks to Jacob and the chorus, "Arms rise! Open pockets!"
• "You study the Japanese tongue, Mr van Cleef?" "There are rules against it, but I pick up a little from my wives."
• Gerritszoon places the precious nails in his jerkin pocket.
• (Japanese copper:) "The world's reddest, its richest in gold, and for a hundred years, the bride for whom we Dutch have danced in Nagasaki."
• "Batavia succumbs to anarchy, rapine, slaughter, and John Bull."
• "The Japanese have not been informed of the revolution, sir." "Then let us be 'the United Provinces of the Netherlands' for now."
• "Bricks are not in wide usage here, sir. 'Board up'?"
• "Remind me," says the chief, "why one magistracy has two magistrates." "When Magistrate Shiroyama is on duty in Nagasaki, Magistrate Omatsu resides in Edo, and vice versa. They rotate annually."
• "An' a right crew o' Frenchmen we'd look then."
• We had no food but the maggots breeding in our wounds.
• Celibacy is for vegetarians.
• 'Then why not create a precedent?' He stared at me as if I'd claimed paternity of his children."
• I devised 'shinkei' for the Dutch 'nerve," over a dinner of oysters. We were, to quote the proverb, 'The one dog who barks at nothing answered by a thousand dogs barking at something...'"
• Raijin, the thunder god, who steals navels during thunderstorms.
• What would happen, he wonders, to a Chinaman in Middelburg who sought to prosecute the duke of Zeeland for immorality and infanticide?
• "So the English name their warships after falsehoods?" "The truth of a myth, Your Honor, is not its words but its patterns."
• "Surrender with honor." Shiroyama frowns. "We are in Japan, Acting Chief."
• "How I hate a man," says Wren, "who farts in French and expects applause."

Ever so clever:

• For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more.
• "'Every arrival is a particular death.'"
• Bibliophiles made wise by reading are as rare there as anywhere.
• Preserved from decay by alcohol, pig bladder, and lead, (the glass demijohns) warn not so much that all flesh perishes - what sane adult forgets this truth for long? - but that immortality comes at a steep price. { 回头才领会到的铺垫!!!!!}
• A story must move," Master Chimei opines, "and misfortune is motion."
• Storytellers are not priests who commune with an ethereal realm but artisans, like dumpling makers, if somewhat slower.
• Power is man's means, thinks the captain, of composing the future.. but the composition - he removes his hat - has a way of composing itself.

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