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The Last Samurai

by Helen DeWitt

4.16 · Rating Details · 3,037 Ratings · 430 Reviews

Helen DeWitt's extraordinary debut, The Last Samurai, centers on the relationship between Sibylla, a single mother of precocious and rigorous intelligence, and her son, who, owing to his mother's singular attitude to education, develops into a prodigy of learning. Ludo reads Homer in the original Greek at 4 before moving on to Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse, and Inuit; studyi Helen DeWitt's extraordinary debut, The Last Samurai, centers on the relationship between Sibylla, a single mother of precocious and rigorous intelligence, and her son, who, owing to his mother's singular attitude to education, develops into a prodigy of learning. Ludo reads Homer in the original Greek at 4 before moving on to Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse, and Inuit; studying advanced mathematical techniques (Fourier analysis and Laplace transformations); and, as the title hints, endlessly watching and analyzing Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, The Seven Samurai. But the one question that eludes an answer is that of the name of his father: Sibylla believes the film obliquely provides the male role models that Ludo's genetic father cannot, and refuses to be drawn on the question of paternal identity. The child thinks differently, however, and eventually sets out on a search, one that leads him beyond the certainties of acquired knowledge into the complex and messy world of adults.The novel draws on themes topical and perennial--the hothousing of children, the familiar literary trope of the quest for the (absent) father--and as such, divides itself into two halves: the first describes Ludo's education, the second follows him in his search for his father and father figures. The first stresses a sacred, Apollonian pursuit of logic, precise (if wayward) erudition, and the erratic and endlessly fascinating architecture of languages, while the second moves this knowledge into the world of emotion, human ambitions, and their attendant frustrations and failures.

The Last Samurai is about the pleasure of ideas, the rich varieties of human thought, the possibilities that life offers us, and, ultimately, the balance between the structures we make of the world and the chaos that it proffers in return. Stylistically, the novel mirrors this ambivalence: DeWitt's remarkable prose follows the shifts and breaks of human consciousness and memory, capturing the intrusions of unspoken thought that punctuate conversation while providing tantalizing disquisitions on, for example, Japanese grammar or the physics of aerodynamics. It is remarkable, profound, and often very funny. Arigato DeWitt-sensei. --Burhan Tufail ...more

Paperback, 530 pages

Published April 3rd 2002 by Miramax Books (first published January 1st 2000)

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Community Reviews

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Sep 19, 2011 Matt rated it it was amazing

[no spoilers]

One of my favorite books ever. I don't know is how time will affect my opinion of it, but I think it could last.

It's a novel about the normal and the eccentric, about learning, about languages, music, art, and Kurosawa. It's about the shape of brilliance. It doesn't sacrifice philosophy or intellectualism for narrative power or vice versa. Each smaller narrative wound into the whole is like story-candy. There is nothing to dislike: the style, the form, the content, the mood, the cha ...more

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May 22, 2007 Rebecca rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: people into murakami

If you like Haruki Murakami, you will like this book more. It's smarter, with the same pornographic interest in Information and obscurity. (Without all the weird adolescent girls there to lolita the author's life in fiction, cleanly.

I make it a rule not to read my book jackets until I'm done with the book. I only read books based on whim or recommendation and this one came from a dear friend and another mega-reader. Upon finishing the book, I read the jacket and there were two words that pretty ...more

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Oct 30, 2011 Lee rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, re-read

Especially recommended to cold cerebral dudes with liberal arts degrees in English Lit who rarely read fiction by living women. Would also recommend it to those who loved The Elegance of the Hedgehog but thought it might have been a bit twee.

Just re-read after 10 years after really enjoying DeWitt's very different second novel, Lightning Rods, which just came out. In the past decade I've crammed in a few hundred novels, a few hundred pages of my own writing, and an MFA etc. And it's still one of Especially recommended to cold cerebral dudes with liberal arts degrees in English Lit who rarely read fiction by living women. Would also recommend it to those who loved The Elegance of the Hedgehog but thought it might have been a bit twee.

Just re-read after 10 years after really enjoying DeWitt's very different second novel, Lightning Rods, which just came out. In the past decade I've crammed in a few hundred novels, a few hundred pages of my own writing, and an MFA etc. And it's still one of my all-time faves, maybe my favorite contemporary novel, up there with Infinite Jest, 2666, and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.

It's 530 pages but it feels more like 325 since there are tons of blank pages and pages without much text in English on them and spare dialogue throughout that flies down the page.

It's a virtuosic performance about the limits of virtuosity. An explicitly intelligent, skillful novel about the necessity of something more than intelligence and skill. Structurally, it has two parts, one narrated by the mother and the other narrated by the son. The first part narrated by the mother is joyous as the main characters emerge, especially as the six-year-old genius son goes to school for the first time. Ludo, age six, knows Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and is learning Japanese, etc, etc, but mostly wants to learn who his biological father is. The second half of the book is narrated by Ludo, age 11, who hunts down seven potential fathers, all of them geniuses/ heroes, some more vividly described by the author than others, but all of them making the end sadder and more "poignant" than the opening.

It's set in London in the mid-'90s, not 16th Century Japan. It has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie of the same name, although it's thematically perfect that this book, which constantly refers to Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai" and is about parrying the blow brought down on the head by worldwide cultural idiocy ("Sesame Street seems about the right level") is confused with a Tom Cruise movie.

On second read, I thought some of the potential fathers were rushed a little bit, that the last 100 pages got a bit thin at times, but not enough to undermine my love.

A few days ago, very sheepishly asked Ms. DeWitt to sign my first edition hardback after a New Directions 75th Anniversary reading event thing in NYC. Very awkward to approach someone you know and love who has no clue who you are, of course. I wanted to give her a hug but she's sort of birdlike compared to this bearlike reader, plus it could have been misconstrued as assault. Above her signature, she wrote "A good samurai will parry the blow" -- and I think that's why folks love this book. Not only is it explicitly intelligent and original, with text appearing in Japanese, Greek, and Icelandic, but it has such a heart, is more about how one survives when caught out in the storm of shit (see the last line of By Night in Chile).

Also re-watched all 200 minutes of "The Seven Samurai" last night after finishing the novel. Really a wonderful afternoon and night, especially on a cold snowy/sleety Saturday in October.

Review of first read, sometime in 2002 or so: One of my fave books. Totally amazing literary fun. Totally underhyped. Watch The 7 Samurai and read this and have a damn fine high-art aesthetic experience. Please, dear friends, read this fucker and help raise Helen Dewitt to her proper status as Queen of England, even if she lives in Connecticut or wherever and was reported missing for a while two years ago. Really a can't miss, wonderfully fast, intelligent, funny novel.
...more

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Nov 27, 2007 Max rated it it was amazing

Woah. Amazing book - flashy, but with a chewy center. The author spends most of the novel being so awesome it's almost over the top, but fortunately she never goes too far. The characters are all profound and compelling, and deeply tragic in their own individual ways; the themes of connection between geniuses, and of self-isolation, really hit home, and Ludo turned from an excellent plot device in the early chapters to an excellent character in the later ones. And, surprisingly, a blazingly fast ...more

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Sep 17, 2008 Erik rated it liked it

Not a 3 star book, but a 1 star book and a 5 star book.

1 star because her prose is clunky ("He said:... I said:... He said:...") and banal ("The wind is howling. A cold rain is falling.") Because her experiments with form are juvenile and obnoxious. Above all, because it's the type of book that wants to entrench itself against criticism (well of course the prose and form are that way because that's the type of people these characters are!), rather than simply being a better book.

5 star because o ...more

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Oct 30, 2008 Rob rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: people who like DFW, gaddis, pynchon, and borges

Shelves: fiction

a great book. or, at least the first 400 pages were amazingly wonderfully perfect, and the last 100 pages were good enough. but endings always suck ass, so five stars anyway.

plus, it's the first fiction by a woman since ayn rand that i loved (don't hold that against me. it's like mandatory for nerdy teenage boys, isn't it?). that's a 14-year drought! and lord knows i tried.

i don't understand why some novels about ordinary people struggling with ordinary crap are considered worthwhile. what do i a great book. or, at least the first 400 pages were amazingly wonderfully perfect, and the last 100 pages were good enough. but endings always suck ass, so five stars anyway.

plus, it's the first fiction by a woman since ayn rand that i loved (don't hold that against me. it's like mandatory for nerdy teenage boys, isn't it?). that's a 14-year drought! and lord knows i tried.

i don't understand why some novels about ordinary people struggling with ordinary crap are considered worthwhile. what do i learn from that? conversely, this novel is about a brilliant young single mother and her incredibly precocious son struggling through a stupid world of crap. infinitely more interesting (i am not being sarcastic). the kid is a prodigy who learns 20 languages by the time he's 11, plus advanced calculus, etc. but mostly it's about language and art. kurosawa's Seven Samurai is central. the mother and son start learning japanese just so they can understand the film directly.

but there's not really much of a story until the last part when the boy, Ludo, starts the Search For His Father, which is precisely where the book stops being amazingly wonderful. the dialogue zings like william gaddis, with people throwing quotes from the illiad or samuel johnson back and forth as a matter of course, combined with wit, satire, and insight. there are exuberant frame stories a la borges, twisting and turning and intersecting back with the main narrative a la pynchon.

every character is so god damn brilliant and charming and musical and literary and witty, you get depressed when you close the book and realize you're going to have to re-enter the real world, full of boring, average people. the young mother, Sib, feels that same depression, and is actually suicidal because the real, stupid world is so full of such boring drudgery -- she supports the two of them by typing stupid old magazines like Carpworld and Practical Caravanning into a computer database for menial wages. she would rather die than spend hours a day transcribing brainless drivel, but she keeps going for her son.

lots of great stuff about language and learning and life and death and the courage it takes to give a child freedom and ultimately the whole purpose, or lack thereof, of a human existence. ...more

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Dec 29, 2008 Robert rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: general-fiction

DeWitt's debut novel demonstrates excellent stylistic control and adventurousness often using a lack of punctuation to create a breathless pace that when sustained for long periods tends to leave one breathless and nursing an incipient headache before

interruption by another character
reply
repeated interruption
reply

continuing where it left of in mid sentence or even mid wor

interruption
interruption
INTERRUPTION

d which can get a bit irritating actually. It is also funny particularly in the first half ...more

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Sep 08, 2009 J. Dunn rated it it was amazing

Recommended to J. by: Alison

Shelves: american, owned, find-etext, favorite, fiction, novels, contemporary, bildungsroman, childhood, adventure, quest, relationships, identity, family, adolescence, film, language, 21st-century, japan, favorites

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I re-read this partly to figure out if I really love it as much as I thought I did(I do.) and also to sort of figure out why, since it seems to be greater than the sum of its parts somehow. I'm still not exactly sure what the secret is, but I'll take a circuitous stab at it.

It incorporates a lot of elements that I love in other books: It's a bildungsroman and frame narrative(tons of other things I love.) It teaches me stuff and incorporates info-dumpy type elements, but not in a Neal Stephenson I re-read this partly to figure out if I really love it as much as I thought I did(I do.) and also to sort of figure out why, since it seems to be greater than the sum of its parts somehow. I'm still not exactly sure what the secret is, but I'll take a circuitous stab at it.

It incorporates a lot of elements that I love in other books: It's a bildungsroman and frame narrative(tons of other things I love.) It teaches me stuff and incorporates info-dumpy type elements, but not in a Neal Stephenson overbearingly expository sort of way... in a way that's integral to the characters and who they are(see Richard Powers.) It uses other cultural touchstones as sort of frameworks on which to hang shared meaning and around which to form identity, but not in a tossed-off and lazily referential sort of way(The difference between say, Murakami and Coupland, or Ghost World and Garden State is what I'm getting at here.) It's got a cracked and rather dry sense of humor. It employs a conversational style and a really distinctive voice(Vonnegut, but that's a double-edged sword because it also becomes what annoys me about him, and I was afraid that would be the case the second time through on this, but it wasn't). It's tangential and jumps around and weaves together narratives, but not to the point of it being ticcy and distracting about it.

I think where it really excels is in characterization and in short set-piece storytelling, and most of all in the intersection of those two. The various juvenile-adventure-style tales she tells to introduce and flesh out Ludo's surrogate-father candidates are just wonderful; they work both as character sketches and as adventures and are sad and hopeful and beautiful and true. And the way she skates right on the edge of suspension of disbelief when it comes to drawing out Ludo's character is impressive too. Somehow she manages to make him believable as both an intellectual prodigy and a moral and experiential adolescent, and his constant confused and fumbling attempts to apply the rules of one sphere to the other are touching and ring true to anyone who read dictionaries and did math well before they figured out how to deal with other people.

In that vein, it also has a real moral center and moral sense, even if a rather stoic and resigned one. The evolution of Ludo's relationship with his mother(also a well-drawn and unique character and mind), to the point where he's the one who has the capacity to care for her in the end, is well done. Maybe a little cliched in this day and age, but I didn't mind that at all, and perhaps the contrast even works in its favor.

So, yeah, this has lots of pieces that aren't particularly amazing on their own, but combined in an artful and unusual way. It takes lots of the best tricks and elements of postmodern writing and combines them with older-fashioned bildungsroman-y notions of character and moral development and sense of childhood wonder and adventure. It combines a lot of themes, styles, references, and so on that I'm a sucker for, but without pandering or playing connect-the-dots. A masterful job of self-confident-but-not-arrogant authorial restraint and range and imagination. ...more

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Jun 08, 2010 Jimmy rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction

Kitano Takeshi's recent film, Achilles and the Tortoise (Akiresu to Kame) manipulates Zeno's paradox as moral allegory in order to make a point about the impossible progess of artistic creation in a linear, rational way. In other words, Machisu's character - in early childhood portrayed as a spoiled, overprivileged brat who's artistic inclinations are encouraged to an almost absurd degree - eventually comes to believe that by merely mimicking artistic styles of past masters he can attain artisti Kitano Takeshi's recent film, Achilles and the Tortoise (Akiresu to Kame) manipulates Zeno's paradox as moral allegory in order to make a point about the impossible progess of artistic creation in a linear, rational way. In other words, Machisu's character - in early childhood portrayed as a spoiled, overprivileged brat who's artistic inclinations are encouraged to an almost absurd degree - eventually comes to believe that by merely mimicking artistic styles of past masters he can attain artistic acclaim and prominence. Of course his rationalization here is intended to reveal how askew this approach to any type of human accomplishment is. It's a way of thinking that patronizes the meaning behind motivation, thus turning human accomplishment into a sterile, formalized excercise. Really no wonder that toward the end of the film, Machisu's adult character, played by Kitano himself, meets such a tragically psychopathic fate, only redeemed by the tolerant goodwill of others. Basically, Kitano is trying to suggest that Machisu has the wrong idea about what it means to be artistically driven or competitive; he is Achilles.

It isn't far-fetched to think that Dewitt had Zeno's paradox in mind while shaping the character of Ludo in her debut novel The Last Samurai. And had Kitano released his film before it was written, then she would likely have made an allusion to it in the book. But hey, Seven Samurai isn't a bad point of reference either.

The story follows Sibylla (undoubtedly a play on words, refering to syllabary alphabets such as the hiragana, katakana, or kanji used together to create the complex system of the Japanese language) as she raises her three year old, Ludo, to become an erudite child prodigy of sorts. Initially, she models her instruction after that of Yo Yo Ma's father by systematically teaching him little tidbits of information, gradually increasing the frequency and intensity of the information. Sibylla's confidently pedantic tone eventually gives way to the monster of intellectual force that Ludo becomes. He then searches for his estranged father, taking Kurosawa's Seven Samurai as a sort of code of ethics for his search. He finds him at first, and after realizing that he is incapable of directly telling the man that he is his son, he continues on to four more men, lying to each one about his identity as their estranged son.

To some readers, Ludo might seem similar to Toph in Heartbreaking work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. The difference is that Ludo's precosity is clearly intended as a moral lesson about the limits of knowledge, whereas Eggers uses such an advanced developmental tone of language in a young character merely as a hollow, quirky schtick. It's a brilliant storytelling device on Dewitt's behalf. Just reading the dialogues between Sibylla and Ludo alone, make for such an engaging read, not to mention an amusing intellectual spectacle oriented around language. This all might sound dense, but Dewitt is such a capable storyteller that her characters obsessions never overwhelm what is essentially a damn good yarn.

...more

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Apr 27, 2012 Jeff Jackson rated it really liked it · review of another edition

4.5 stars. Many others have written passionately and eloquently about this wonderful book, so just a few quick observations:
-Contains one of the great piano recital scenes in all literature (alongside Berthe Trepat's concert in 'Hopscotch')
-Doesn't go as deep into Kurosawa's 'The Seven Samurai' as I expected, but still makes a great double bill after reading the novel
-Doesn't feel nearly as long as its daunting 500+ page count due to numerous short sections, blank spaces, and of course engaging ...more

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Sep 20, 2011 Mike Puma rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, 2011

Six stars! Seven stars! Hell, a herd of stars. We’re givin’ em away (liberated and reworked from The Tubes’ White Punks on Dope).

Finding exactly the right book at exactly the right time doesn’t happen very often. Finding exactly the right book at all doesn’t happen often enough. This one found its way to me through the oddest of circumstances—via Lee (his review), clumsy fingers, and time at the deathbed of my mother—it is what it is.

I follow Lee’s reviews and checked out the one for The Last Sa

Six stars! Seven stars! Hell, a herd of stars. We’re givin’ em away (liberated and reworked from The Tubes’ White Punks on Dope).

I follow Lee’s reviews and checked out the one for The Last Samurai when it hit my updates. Any time someone whose reviews I follow says ‘one of my fave books’ I pay attention. I went to amazon, checked out the used copies, and instead of hitting Add to Wishlist, I clicked Add to Cart. Things were in the works, a copy headed my way. All’s good.

By the time the book arrived, my mother had been hospitalized, lost consciousness, and the word ‘immanent’ was being heard frequently. While my sister and I sat vigil, The Last Samurai arrived, and I grabbed it on my way back to the hospital thinking a whopper would absorb large amounts of time otherwise spent simply waiting. I picked it up, not knowing what to expect, dreading what might have been James Clavell, and started to read.

Whoa! WTF is this? I zipped through the first fifth of the book in what seemed like no time at all, entirely caught up, thoroughly amused, stunned by the find that had found me. I was as excited by the novel as I was uncomfortable with idea of being entertained at that particular time. Catharsis is a lovely, dreadful thing.

Sibylla, a single mother, is an American living in London, raising a precocious child, while slavishly transcribing back issues of journals such as British Ostrichkeeper and The Poodle Breeder for a very modest wage. Ludo, her son and a reader from about age three, spends his time reading, learning multiple languages and science, and doggedly trying to coax the name of his father from his reluctant mother. Their story is literate and funny, heartwarming and joyous. Their story yields to his story—a bildungsroman and a quest novel. The author’s knowledge is dazzling. I want more—whatever story she chooses to tell.

Thanks, Lee, for the tip. Thanks, Mom, you always were part of what’s best.

...more

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Dec 29, 2011 Jpmist rated it did not like it

Shelves: abandoned

Yikes, boy this book put me in my place pretty fast, I guess I'm not an intellectual as is Helen DeWitt who spent 10 years in academia and puts it all to as much use as possible in this book.

The book is simply incoherent and thereby unreadable as any type of narrative.

I went to the party. As so often it was much easier to come with the plan of leaving after 10 minutes than to leave after 10 minutes, for instead of making a polite excuse to leave after 10 minutes I found myself describing now t ...more

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Jan 25, 2015 Fionnuala rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 21st-century-favourites

Imagine the written version of an orchestral suite, different instruments taking their turns cutting in and out, challenging, responding, developing themes, repeating themes, breaking off for a little bit of opera here, a little pas-de-deux there with a couple of guest solos thrown in, while nevertheless returning continually to the main theme and finally leading into a very fitting coda. That’s what reading this book was like for me.

Books like The Last Samurai don’t come my way very often whic ...more

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Dec 24, 2012 El rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 21st-centurylit

I borrowed this book from my brother an embarrassingly long time ago, and I'm not even sure now why I've waited so long to read this. It was one of those "Oh, I'll be able to breeze through this and return it to you so you can read it" kinds of things. Considering that was years ago, clearly I didn't do breeze through it or return it. Hey, it's part of my charm.

This wasn't an easy book to get into. I started it during a particularly busy time - moving to a new place, working longer hours at work I borrowed this book from my brother an embarrassingly long time ago, and I'm not even sure now why I've waited so long to read this. It was one of those "Oh, I'll be able to breeze through this and return it to you so you can read it" kinds of things. Considering that was years ago, clearly I didn't do breeze through it or return it. Hey, it's part of my charm.

This wasn't an easy book to get into. I started it during a particularly busy time - moving to a new place, working longer hours at work, etc. It wasn't especially easy to pick this up and read it in spurts, so for a while there I didn't think I was going to care much for this. It requires some attention, in the same way something like Infinite Jest requires some attention. (But, okay, let's be fair - nothing needs quite that much attention.) There are some similarities here to David Foster Wallace's popular tome - is it post-post-modernism or something? Sure, let's call it that.

Wonky story-line, interesting choice of writing style, sentences that sort of end, don't go anywhere, thoughts that collide into one another. Did I require this book requires some attention? It does. It requires some work.

It's the story of Sibylla and her young genius son, Ludo. The backdrop to their lives is the film Seven Samurai which Sibylla plays over and over and over again. Genius Ludo reads all the great Classics (the Odyssey, the Iliad, etc. in the original language) at an age when most kids are eating the boogers they pull out of their noses. A particularly favorite scene occurs when Sibylla tries to enroll Ludo in public school.

Look, I don't normally like precocious children in literature. Sometimes it's so obnoxious I can't even handle it. Ludo is obnoxious. But he's also incredibly sweet and squeezable and I just want to sit down and talk with him. Correction: I just want to sit down and be corrected by him. Here I'd be talking about my favorite brand of burritos and he'd be rattling off something in Greek to me.

This is also a coming-of-age novel of a sort. Ludo grows up a bit and just as he's starting to learn Japanese, he sets off to find his real father, or at least his ideal father.

This is a clever story, sometimes too clever for its own good. DeWitt is a highly intelligent writer - she has an extensive education in language and a gaggle of other things, and she uses this book to show some of that off. It's tedious at times. But it's mostly fun. It just requires one to sit down and read large parts in one sitting in order to not ruin the flow.

I've often asked why women don't tend to write books that are as popular as DFW or Pynchon or those other heavy-hitters in the "big pretentious, post-modern book world". Maybe I just wasn't looking. This isn't as big (page count-wise), but she could be in the same ranks as some of those other guys. (I'm saying that having not even read Pynchon's larger, more pretentious post-modern books. That's how I roll.)

I can now return this to my brother. I'm looking forward to his thoughts on it. ...more

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Aug 09, 2014 Phil rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

This book is too short.

This book is too short, and I need to digest it.

This book is too short, and the time needed to digest it is long.

This short book is too good, and I will digest it a long time.

- - - - -

I suppose the most basic reason for liking this book is that it's full of intelligent heart and charm. I was consumed. The fictive became real, and I inhabited this world. It is not the arduous challenge it is made out to be. It is a pleasure to read and think about. Dewitt is marvelous--cry ...more

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Oct 30, 2013 Anittah rated it it was amazing

The Internet is seductive to me because it enables mediated relationships, mano not quite a mano since online all manos are filtered through interfaces which are driven by carefully designed databases whose fields are finite in a way that life is not. Which is to say: the Internet is a life bounded, and that interactions need not be copresent or synchronized results in ... a curated self, a grooming of one's chaos, an optimizing of life events so that they are framed in a square Instagram pic or ...more

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Jun 08, 2015 Alexander Patino rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Enjoyment level was a 4 but the content is so impressive it's bumped to a 5. Helen DeWitt is quite obviously a genius in her own right. I've definitely never read anything like this before and I have a feeling certain parts about this book will stay with me for a long time. Sometimes it can be a slog, a real chore, but you know that you're making your way through something really special.

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Feb 28, 2014 Diane rated it it was ok

Helen Dewitt is clearly an extremely intelligent (genius?) woman, who wants to remind us of that fact with every sentence she writes. Although she has included a number of beautifully executed short stories in her novel...generally to introduce minor characters who are, nevertheless, central to the overall theme...her general writing style alternates between annoying sputters of words written in staccato--as if sent via telegram to the reader--and long, drawn out passages of sometimes obscure wr ...more

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Nov 21, 2014 Sentimental Surrealist rated it it was amazing

I had this at a four for a while, but I've found my thoughts wandering over to certain scenes quite frequently in the two or so months since I've read it, so I think an extra star is due.

It's easy to get off of "death of this-or-that" re fiction, or really any art form, because art of course moves quickly. After writing that screed I just wrote about Palahniuk, I for a moment felt disillusioned with the state of the contemporary novel. It was my belief that, because of the immense acclaim the E ...more

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Nov 02, 2014 Josh Friedlander rated it it was ok

Shelves: depressive-realism, contemporary

I had high expectations for this, and my disappointment was commensurately great. Think a highbrow Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It is funny and fast-paced, although with diminishing returns as it plods towards its end, with the wan energy of an author tired of her subject but committed to finishing the damn book. But what put me off were the constant moments of showboating - two Oxford degrees in Classics are constantly thrust in your face, with the author's use of Greek, Icelandic or Ar ...more

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Dec 09, 2014 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis added it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: cf Lee's review....

Recommended to Nathan "N.R." by: aidan w-m

Shelves: encyclopedic, 2014-gelesen

in this case, and for no special reason, I’d really like to write the kind of thing which is frequently called a real review. For this book, The Last Samurai. Rather than be :; a) clever (succeed or fail, no matter) b) auto-bio-graphical (in however obtuse a manner) c) pretentiously name=dropping or d) just generally tapping dancing and bowing. I doubt it’ll happen. But just in case I’m going to start reviewing The Last Samurai right now while I’ve still got a third of the novel to read, remaini ...more

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Dec 26, 2014 Hadrian rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: american, fiction

The Last Samurai is a Babel of a book, a clamor of languages and sounds and symbols. Yet it speaks like the Christian story of the Apostles at Pentecost with tongues of fire over them and and they speak all the languages of the world to each other with equal understanding.

The story begins with a mother, Sibylla. She lives a life burdened with high expectations and doubly burdened when she cannot reach up to them. Her father was an atheist who went to a ninth-rate seminary to please his father a The Last Samurai is a Babel of a book, a clamor of languages and sounds and symbols. Yet it speaks like the Christian story of the Apostles at Pentecost with tongues of fire over them and and they speak all the languages of the world to each other with equal understanding.

The story begins with a mother, Sibylla. She lives a life burdened with high expectations and doubly burdened when she cannot reach up to them. Her father was an atheist who went to a ninth-rate seminary to please his father and became a failed business man. Her mother was a musician repressed into accounting by her neurotic father who would not be satisfied even by genius. She went into Oxford and buried herself deep in into intellectual specificity and obscurity, and now writes for pet magazines. After a one-night stand with a writer she calls 'Liberace' for his vainglory, she gives birth to a son. She names him Ludo.

He learns quickly, too quickly. He takes in vector calculus, ancient Greek, French, classical Chinese, Arabic, Icelandic, French and colloquial Japanese like water. It is thus fitting that his name comes from the Latin ludus, meaning game. All of it is a game to him. He plays with Greek verb declensions and original Icelandic sagas and counting Chinese and Japanese numbers and marks up The Odyssey with fat colored markers. When he is introduced to primary school, he argues with the teacher about John Stuart Mill and concludes, without a hint of arrogance, that schooling would be a disaster.

Ludo is a lonesome child. By age 11, his only socialization aside from his mother is with the other children in his judo class. His mother withdraws further into herself. His father was never here. Instead, Sibylla plays the Kurosawa movie, Seven Samurai, as a surrogate for Ludo's father and as obsessive emotional distraction for himself. At this point, Ludo concludes that he must find his own father.

Here the narrative shifts entirely. Ludo's mother fades almost entirely from the picture as he searches for his new father. The facts multiply. Facts are not answers.

Experimental novels often shy away from plots and narratives, but there is still 'A Story' here, cloaked in the references to the Seven Samurai and the Odyssey. Genius, as expanding and powerful as it can be, is not always the lone answer to emotional isolation.

This second story is about making peace with these images we have of ourselves, and of attempting to find some value in ourselves if we cannot reach these imagined ideals. Realizing that we are human and thus limited in our capabilities does not mean that every person should kill themselves or despair, it is a push some other emotional grounding.

If the boy's father is lacking or insufficient, then he decides that someone else must be his father - not a genetic father, but symbolic father. The story is then a series of emotional dialogues between a boy searching for a father and a father who is human and therefore deficient in some way. Not just to the artificially high standards of the boy, but because they are all human.

The Last Samurai is somehow a book with both vast learning and feeling - these things are so often portrayed as mutually exclusive, but here they are together. It is an intellectual investigation and a psychological journey, one which retells the old story of mother, father, and son through a new vessel, on to new shores. The samurai has parried the blow. ...more

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Apr 29, 2015 Vipassana rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: female-perspectives, intimate, people-relationships, culture, published-after-my-birth, fiction

There is a LOT in this book. I don't know where to start.What Shall I do? I need to write a review, especially after the last quote I put up which is throughly insufficient to describe The Last Samurai. What shall I DO?

I'm stuck in a rut myself. I've been doing this for too long. I keep telling myself I should bite the bullet... and make a comeback. What's the use of spending my life in this room? What's the use of me sitting in front of this blank screen trying to achieve some undefined ideal ...more

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Jul 12, 2016 Christopher rated it really liked it · review of another edition

There's some heart in this novella after all. I'm skipping the pithy quotations to give it to you straight, no chaser. Here are a few things:

I sometimes feel depressed. Don't we all? In my line of work, I often come across people who feel depressed. And I think, well, I have no degree in psychology. I'm certainly not qualified. But then I also think, what the hell? Sometimes people just simply need to know that someone is listening. So I try to listen. But I'm not always so good at getting peopl There's some heart in this novella after all. I'm skipping the pithy quotations to give it to you straight, no chaser. Here are a few things:

I sometimes feel depressed. Don't we all? In my line of work, I often come across people who feel depressed. And I think, well, I have no degree in psychology. I'm certainly not qualified. But then I also think, what the hell? Sometimes people just simply need to know that someone is listening. So I try to listen. But I'm not always so good at getting people to talk. So I often end up doing more talking than I should be doing and I'm always aware of this while it is happening. But I keep thinking, maybe I'll hit the right combination. And even if I don't see the effect now, even if it looks like a failure, maybe there's some fragment, some leitmotif that will resonate at some point and help. I usually find myself saying that everyone who is paying attention to the world will be depressed some day or other. That if you're NOT depressed, maybe that's when there's something wrong. What matters is how we respond to it and how we can attend to life. How we can observe and create beauty. The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass (Adorno). The key is not to let your own powerlessness stupefy you (Adorno again).

So, I read somewhere that this novella is about the limits of intellectualism. But that's not what I thought it was about. For me, this book is about mental illness. I can't get too much more specific without having to hit the spoilers button. So on in a tangential circle line.

Here's what I can say:

David Foster Wallace once told Kenyon, in a now too famous speechamajig that the things you deify will come to consume you. So, if you enjoy being handsome, you will always feel ugly. If you rely on intelligence as a wellspring of self-worth, you will always worry that someone will expose you as a fraud. And though this is all a bit oversimplified, I think there's something in this.

I admit, I used to think I was quite clever. And it's been quite a relief over the years to finally admit that I'm of average intelligence, at best, with maybe a longer than average attention span (though, it is waning, oh lord is it waning).

So, I'm in the position to be one of this book's most sympathetic readers. Because, yes, this book is concerned with deifying genius. But in the superstructure of this book is where the real meat lies. What I saw here was the pain and necessity of making your own obsessive compulsive notes which create a calming sense of the familiar. What I saw was that mathematical vanishing points can create the simulacra, but they cannot ensoul the flesh.

In sum, I liked the ideas of the book, but the brandishing of the encyclopaediac felt too much like a Wikipedia rabbit-hole. All of the pieces were there but it didn't get up and dance. My only complaint is subtle. I felt dispassion. I felt that the prose was often underwritten and not to oracular effect. But I was occasionally very immersed.

Recommended for the precocious, the eisegetical, and those in need of a quick, cleanse-read. Provisionally, 3.84 stars. ...more

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Aug 27, 2015 Burhan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Uzun süredir bu kadar değişik bir kitap okumamıştım. Gerçekten müthiş bir deneyim oldu. Herkese tavsiye ederim. Konu ve tarz olarak Aşırı Gürültülü ve İnanılmaz Yakın'a çok benzediğini de söyleyebilirim.

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Oct 14, 2015 George rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2015-read

Beautiful in all sense of the word. There was a lot going on in this read. This is one not to miss. I was kind of sad for it to end. I think there is something in here for everyone. Watching the Kurosawa film is a must while reading.

"A good samurai will parry the blow..."

Edit 10/14/2015:

After thinking about it last night and this morning, this was such a magnificent novel. One major topic I can't stop thinking about is Ludo's growth throughout the novel. At first he is just a "robotic" child(did ...more

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Feb 08, 2016 Skip rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Someone’s mother once said “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Well, I was never one to take unsolicited advice. I think many reviewers are afraid of appearing shallow by stating the truth: THIS BOOK IS SIMPLY AWFUL. I quit at page 196. It’s probably been a decade since I haven’t finished a book – I think it was Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. Actually, I am now remembering quitting From Hell by Alan Moore more recently.

Dewitt's book rambles on and on, ski ...more

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Mar 20, 2016 Ronald Morton rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: by-women, read-in-2016

This is the type of book I would have adored a decade ago, back when I was obsessing over Chabon and Foer and Eggers and the other at-the-time literary fiction elite that I was rapidly consuming. And it, today, was still an enjoyable read, but the overall impact is just a bit too precociously twee to really hit the pleasure centers of my brain that it once would have directly impacted. (view spoiler) This is the type of book I would have adored a decade ago, back when I was obsessing over Chabon and Foer and Eggers and the other at-the-time literary fiction elite that I was rapidly consuming. And it, today, was still an enjoyable read, but the overall impact is just a bit too precociously twee to really hit the pleasure centers of my brain that it once would have directly impacted. (view spoiler) (personal digressive bullshit hidden under the spoiler so as not to take away from the review, as brief as it may be)

There is a great deal of talent on display here – it is particularly engaging in its use of language (though even then so much of what it displays feels surface level, almost a “look at me” filling of space), in the development of its two main characters, of its multiple explorations of genius as outlier within society – and there is an engaging, compulsively readable story (I spent three hours at my desk this morning finishing it – though that was at least in part due to my wanting to move on to the other book I brought with me today). I loved the opening structure of the book with its middle-of-paragraph interruptions and kind of Ping-Pong narrative; I loved the journal sections of Ludo in the first half of the book. Once he firmly became the narrator in the second half of the book I felt that a lot of that which I enjoyed from the first half just kind of went away, and was left instead with a fairly standard, though well written, piece of contemporary literary fiction.

It ultimately just wasn’t for me; I remember a time when it would have been, and in that remembrance I recognize why this book is held in as high regard as it is – unlike many books I’m not confused by its reception or praise – so it’s possible (maybe even likely) that you, dear reader, will love this book. I didn’t, but that’s okay. Even all this said I still found the book to be a good read, but it’s not something I’ll revisit or think about again. When I bought this book I recognized it as an outlier when compared to the other books that clog my shelves; ultimately that was correct. (view spoiler) ...more

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Aug 15, 2016 Regan rated it it was amazing

A fantastic, challenging and (perhaps) inspiring book, The Last Samurai was first published in 2001 and re-released this year by Dalkey. Sibylla, an American linguist in London, becomes pregnant after a tedious one-night stand. The resultant child, Ludo, shows all the signs of genius--he knows English and Greek by 3 years old, then picks up Hebrew, Arabic, etc., while advancing in his studies in aerodynamics, complex math, etc. His voraciousness taxes Sibylla, who can barely meet their bills wit ...more

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Aug 14, 2016 zan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

It seems completely pat and trite - especially having just finished this book - to say that this is a book for lovers of language, but I don't know who else I would recommend this book to but to people who love languages, word play, the stuttering beginnings of sentences that don't seem at first to have a conclusion, but then suddenly and magnificently DO.

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About Helen DeWitt

Helen DeWitt (born 1957 in Takoma Park, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C.) is a novelist.

DeWitt grew up primarily in South America (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador), as her parents worked in the United States diplomatic service. After a year at Northfield Mount Hermon School and two short periods at Smith College, DeWitt studied classics at the University of Oxford, first at Lady Margare ...more

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“There is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant-- life, love, a conversation, you name it, the etiquette is that you must begin in ignorance & persevere in the face of knowledge, & though I naturally believe that this is profoundly wrong it's not nice to go around constantly offending people.” — 27 likes

“There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark. There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.” — 21 likes

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