“Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike-topped walls, and triple-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas, and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule drivers, mules, and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunchbacked makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed from kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries’ vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bathhouse adulterers; heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackeral on slabs; woodcutters’ sons sharpening axes; candlemakers rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottled-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars..”
From page 451 of the hardback edition of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell, who is so damned good that if he wants to describe 18th century Japan in beautiful verse, right in the middle of a rip-roaring novel, he does. “Over kites unthreading corpses of cats” in particular is a line that is at once, amazing and a little disheartening to someone like me, who’s been writing fiction for more than twenty years. I think for most any of us writing books, reading a David Mitchell novel is simultaneously a breathtaking experience and a reminder that there is at least one person out there who is a hell of a lot better at writing books than we are.
David Mitchell’s latest novel, The Bone Clocks, is the most highly praised novel of 2014. It’s on my TBR pile. I’m sure I’ll be saying something about it here when I get to it.
Happy weekend everyone!
