The Last Samurai

by Helen DeWitt

A child prodigy with a talent for languages and an insatiable thirst for knowledge, Ludo shares with his single mother, Sibylla, an obsession with Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, absorbing its lessons in Samurai virtue, and embarks on a quest to find his father, approaching seven men to test their worthiness.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Novels, Historical Fiction, Literature, Book Club

544 pages, Paperback

First published September 20, 2000

About the author

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 Margaret Hall, and then at Brasenose College for her D.Phil.

DeWitt is best known for her acclaimed debut novel, The Last Samurai. She held a variety of jobs while struggling to finish a book, including a dictionary text tagger, a copytaker, and Dunkin' Donuts employee, she also worked in a laundry service. During this time she reportedly attempted to finish many novels, before finally completing The Last Samurai, her 50th manuscript, in 1998.

In 2005 she collaborated with Ingrid Kerma, the London-based painter, writing limit5 for the exhibition Blushing Brides.

In 2004, DeWitt went missing from her home in Staten Island. She was found unharmed a few days later at Niagara Falls.

DeWitt lives in Berlin where she has recently finished a second novel, Your Name Here, in collaboration with the Australian journalist Ilya Gridneff. DeWitt had met Gridneff in an East London pub shortly before her departure for New York; impressed by the linguistic virtuosity of his e-mails, she suggested a book inspired by Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, or Being John Malkovich, with Gridneff as Malkovich.

Reviews

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 a bit twee.

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.

Re-read after 10 years after really enjoying DeWitt's very different second novel, Lightning Rods, right after it came out. In the decade between first and second read I've crammed in a few hundred novels, a few hundred pages of my own writing, an MFA etc, and it's probably still my favorite contemporary novel, up there with Infinite Jest, 2666, and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.

Very sheepishly I asked Ms. DeWitt to sign my first-edition hardback after a New Directions 75th Anniversary reading event thing in NYC in October 2011. 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 I'm pretty sure it's inappropriate to embrace women like that. 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" after re-reading 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: A favorite. 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.

[Nataliya · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a lot thrown into the mix. Intelligence and genius; immense curiosity; terrible loneliness; depression fueled by all of the above, plunging the lucky genius - or maybe unlucky sufferer - into stagnation and suicidality, active or passive. Education by free-range curiosity or standardized norms. Obsessive behaviors (I think if I come across anyone ever mentioning rewatching Seven Samurai I may actually break out in hives) and some judgment towards the rest of the people not equally endowed with above average intelligence and refined tastes.

And it’s a book that is made initially of endless overly smart interruptions, leaving me tottering on the boundary of annoyed and entertained. A book that seems to derive pleasure from quoting mathematical formulas and numbers and multiplications, and endless declensions (or whatever the hell one calls such things) of words in languages I don’t know.

(A character in this book once recalls sitting down to write a “See ya” note after a disappointing sex and turns it into a well thought-out multi-page treatise on Greek that took a few obsessive hours to compose — and we learn later that the note in question after twelve years remains unread. Yeah, I’m not even ashamed to say that had I been the recipient of that note, I wouldn’t have read it either. And I’m ok with that.)

And it has a child genius in it, too (no, I refuse to believe that Ludo is not a genius; he’s curious and diligent — but the vast majority of people would not have reached his levels when left to free-range education by a very intelligent parent). And that again led to alternating desire to strangle the kid (just let your mother do her job; you’re simply exhausting) and give him a bear hug (oh Ludo, you are adorable and sweet and so weirdly mature for your age — and school that panders to the lowest common denominator is indeed a terrible choice for you).

One day it occurred to him that there were quite a lot of other books on the shelves. He selected a book with pictures, and he came to my side, perturbed.

—The face on the gutta percha inkstand has a tale to tell —

I explained gutta percha, inkstand and tale

— it is believed to be that of Neptune, moulded to commemorate the successful use of the material to insulate the world’s first submarine telegraph cable from England to France in 1850. —

& I said NO.

Paragraphs like that made me laugh and adore this book. The litany of beauty of numbers and Icelandic/Japanese/Arabic grammar and aerodynamics and such made me frustratingly yawn. And it went on and on like that.

And then under that show-offish veneer you see cracks in which there’s vulnerability and loneliness and the feeling of being completely trapped by unhappiness (Sibylla and a few of prospective “fathers”) and the contrast of innocent striving for knowledge and answers (Ludo, aged 4 or 6 or 11), and I’d want to see more of that and less of the surface protective layer — and in the end it broke through, it did — but sadly just not soon enough. (What can I say — I’m a very average person, and this book seems aimed at someone who’s not.)

I think the further up you are from the mean, the more you’ll enjoy it. Me — I’ll give it a 3.5, being pretty much at that mean myself. It’s good but not quite a “Nataliya book”.

(And please oh please, never mention Seven Samurai in my company; I may weep).

—————
Buddy read with Nastya and Justin, who have better tastes and likely more smarts than me — and I’m glad they are allowing me into their book company :)

——————

Also posted on my blog.

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

High Intensity Motherhood

Am I alone in thinking that Helen DeWitt writes like the Alabama 3 play their music - a sort of Country/Acid House fusion with a surprising British flavor? She drives through her fictional life with a relentlessly hard beat of ‘this is it/me; deal with it/me’ with riffs and shouts from whatever’s around - bits of ancient language, unsuspecting academics, cultural connections no one else has ever clocked. She tolerates anything but boredom and whatever might get in between her and her son. She’s the perfect polymath mother for her genius offspring. Mama Don’t Dans 2 Tekno no mo’. She’s too busy feeding the little tyro his daily doses of number theory and archaic Hebrew tense forms. It’s he not she who sets the pace. She’s no intellectual slouch but he breaks the rate. Impossible to slow down much less get to rest. Her wit fits nicely into Bourgeoisie Blues lyrics: “his unswerving fidelity to the precept that ought implies cant and I just couldn’t.” The duet mind-melds like Spock: “An idea has only to be something you have not thought of before to take over the mind.” And ideas sure do, lots of ‘em: ‘How do proteins work? What do I look like, a Citizens Advice Bureau? Oh yeah, I meant to ask about what the Greeks thought about citizenship.’ They spark off each other on whatever the Adrenaline-equivalent of brain stimulant is. Can’t stop. No Peace in the Valley for sure. The world is deteriorating, but because of a sort of linguistic entropy not global warming: “it was depressing in a literature to see all the languages fading into English which in America was the language of forgetfulness.” Maternal love is a kick. Ain’t no man needed in that dynamic duo. No time anyhow. What a ride. What a pair. Sibylla and Ludo.

[Guille · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es este un libro que me ha interesado más de lo que me ha gustado, me ha divertido más que de lo que me ha interesado, me ha sorprendido más de lo que me ha divertido, he llegado a admirar más de lo que me ha sorprendido… y me ha gustado mucho.

Y me ha gustado mucho en esta primera lectura (habrá más, la repetición es una actividad muy ponderada por DeWitt) que, como todas las primeras lecturas, ha sido inevitablemente superficial. Uno de los personajes, un pianista algo excéntrico (y que vivamos en un mundo en el que este pianista es excéntrico es uno de los reproches que a este mundo hace la novela), dice:

"Cuando tocas una obra musical, hay muchos modos distintos de hacerlo. Uno no hace más que preguntarse: Y si. Pruebas una cosa y dices: Pero y si, y pruebas otra. Cuando compras un CD solo tienes una respuesta a la pregunta, nunca escuchas los «Y si»”

Pues bien, tengo la esperanza de alcanzar alguno de esos «Y si» en mis lecturas venideras (y no resignarse a no conseguirlo es otra de las cosas a las que nos anima DeWitt), pero ahora tendrán que conformarse con lo que hay, y tengo que advertirles, aunque si me han leído anteriormente ya se habrán dado cuenta sobradamente, de que no soy lo que se dice un genio, estoy a mil años luz del niño que, junto a su madre Sibylla, protagoniza esta novela y que a muy corta edad ya sabe griego, francés, hebreo, árabe, japonés, español, ruso y algo de latín, además de tener conocimientos básicos de otros 17 o 18 idiomas, un niño que encuentra trivial la diferencia entre la ley de la relatividad especial y la general, un niño capaz de aprenderse de memoria la «Ilíada» por si algún día le meten en la cárcel.

Este niño se llama Ludo y es la tercera generación de genios precoces de su familia. Las dos anteriores, por diversas circunstancias, no consiguieron llevar a buen término sus brillantes posibilidades. Sibylla, por ejemplo, dejó una prometedora carrera en Oxford cuando descubrió que no era el mundo inspirador que ella buscaba tras huir de EEUU para no repetir la existencia a la que sus padres se habían resignado (“Cuando tienes un motel siempre puedes conseguir otro… Y si puedes conseguir otro, no es cosa de dejar pasar esa oportunidad”). Sibylla cogió un trabajo precario y nada estimulante en una pequeña editorial para obtener el permiso de residencia que le permitiera quedarse en el país (aunque muchas veces tenga que bajar al metro y pasarse horas en la línea de circunvalación para no morir de frío en su destartalado apartamento). También tuvo un hijo producto de una noche equivocada con un afamado escritor con el que folló, sin encontrar un motivo mejor, por educación, una casualidad más de las muchas que dieron origen a la existencia de Ludo.

Qué padre no ha fantaseado con la idea de que su hijo fuera uno de esos genios que aparecen cada cien o doscientos años, aunque nadie introduce en esa fantasía el trabajo que ello conlleva, la responsabilidad que un hijo-genio supone, las dificultades que su educación comporta, y todo ello sin contar con la inteligencia de Sibylla. Ella sí pudo estar siempre a la altura del talento y la voraz curiosidad de su hijo, aunque para ello tuviera que renunciar a todo lo que había ambicionado al llegar al país.

Sibylla decidió no contar nada al padre de Ludo (no se lo merecía) y no quiso contar nada de su padre a Ludo (tampoco Ludo se merecía saber de un padre así). Pero Ludo tenía mucha curiosidad por conocerle y en la segunda parte de la novela toma el relevo de la voz narrativa para contar su búsqueda, en la confianza de encontrar algo así como el Samurai que, estando a su altura, pudiera ayudarle en el camino de la vida y, sobre todo, salvar a su madre.

“Cualquier cosa sería mejor que esto. ¿Se supone que es por mi bien? ¿Cómo puede ser por mi bien, si yo lo detesto? Sería mejor que fuera alocada, atrevida y que se jugara todo lo que tenemos”

Sibylla está obsesionada con la película «Los siete Samurais», de Kurosawa, a la que acude cada vez que su alienante trabajo la hunde en la miseria, una película que, según ella, muestra modelos masculinos que Ludo requiere.

"… en esencia la película trata sobre la importancia del pensamiento racional. Deberíamos extraer nuestras conclusiones de las pruebas de que disponemos en lugar de lo que hemos oído, y procurar no dejarnos influir por ideas preconcebidas. Deberíamos esforzarnos en ver lo que nosotros seamos capaces de ver en lugar de lo que nos gustaría… solo porque alguien sonríe no quiere decir que no estaría mejor muerto"

Sibylla es de esas personas “que cree que el aburrimiento es un destino peor que la muerte”, que se desespera con la falta de lógica con la que se conduce el 99% de la gente, que se entristece cuando su mente se percata de su propia debilidad. Sibylla no cree ser especialmente brillante, tampoco cree que su hijo lo sea, simplemente, piensa, son el producto de una estimulación conveniente desde los primeros años de vida (lo cual indica hasta qué punto pueden equivocarse hasta los genios. Otra enseñanza de la novela, como que su genialidad no les impide tampoco ser unos capullos ¿verdad, Ludo?). Sibylla salta de una cosa a otra continuamente, hace un relato fragmentado repleto de anécdotas, historias de personas excepcionales y referencias a otras lenguas y a sus especiales e interesantes particularidades gramaticales (adopte una lengua y no la abandone, ella nunca lo haría, parece venir a decir la autora). Sibylla, y después Ludo, nos sorprende con el funcionamiento de su mente genial, haciéndonos reflexionar sobre qué pensarían de nosotros y de nuestra cultura seres aún más inteligentes.

Quizás el desarrollo de la IA, si no vienen antes los extraterrestres, nos descubrirá que no somos más que niños construyendo juguetes no demasiado interesantes. No sé si uno de esos juguetes poco interesantes sería esta novela, pero como yo no soy un genio, ni siquiera con nuestros infantiles parámetros, debo decir que la novela me ha parecido distinta, ambiciosa, divertida, sugerente, excepcional.

[Fionnuala]

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 which is a great pity.
On the other hand, reading The Last Samurai has exercised my brain so much that maybe it is a good thing that there aren’t too many like it out there.
Imagine if I became obsessed with this book and reread it as often as the narrators watch Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai? Would I then have rudimentary Japanese plus a smattering of Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, be able to understand complex maths and physics and aerodynamics, play excellent chess, bridge and picquet as well as the XXV variations of Alkan’s Festin d’Aesope on the piano and appreciate every last twist and turn of the plot of Seven Samurai?
I’m tempted...

[nastya · Rating 4 out of 5]

2023 Update: This is not a book to read just because one saw it on some list of Best ofs... It's a book to read because it's immensely fun, inspiring, full of heart. It's a book to then reread for pure pleasure.

What is happiness, what is genius? Do they even go together?

I remember reading an interview with Andre Agassi where he was saying how much he hated tennis and every second of playing it. How even now, years after retiring, he can very rarely play one game with his famous tennis player wife Steffi Graf. And about his zealot father regretting pushing him into tennis and not into golf because the shelf-life is longer there.

I also recall the story about Yuja Wang, a child prodigy and genius piano player and very lonely woman, always touring, bored out of her mind by planning the same thing every night.

Oh and there’s of course Mozart who was mentioned in this book. See, when people mention him I always want to ask him - was it worth it, for this immortality? What do you think about your father? You lived a very short life, and spent your childhood being paraded as an exotic monkey.

But Ludo, the hero of this novel, is a different kind of genius. There was never any rigidity in his approach, he’s just an infinitely curious boy. And he is the heart and soul of the novel. And his quest for the father is my favorite part.

Also this is a novel about depression, with three people struggling. First one has given up, the second one is in a stagnation and barely hanging by a thread. And the third one is at the beginning of it. And what should a person who loves the one who struggles do? Fight or let them go?

And of course it’s about what it means to be a genius. About standardized education, about limits society puts on everyone. When you finish this novel and if it really worked for you, I’m positive you’ll become even more curious and decide to open that one book that looks so complex and intimidating on your bookshelf and you thought you’ll never have a time for it.

Inspiring. Creative. Full of energy.

I don’t think it’s a perfect book, but it is a rare one I’ve read three times and I guess this makes it one of my favorites.

[Skip · Rating 1 out of 5]

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, skittering over endless senseless topics; it is cloaked as an “intellectual, tour de force, playful, multi-layered, but wonderfully readable” (according to the jacket flap so it must be true.) She interrupts her vignettes, with even less meaningful interludes. If there was a central theme, it was lost on me. I love one reviewer’s comment: “No wonder she never finished college. She can’t seem to think in a straight line.” Her disdain for traditional education, especially for the gifted, is repeated ad nauseum, which I am quite sure was her own personal experience. And why does she think “&’s” are so cool? An utterly unnecessary affectation. Do yourself a humongous favor, skip this one.

[Left Coast Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

There used to be consensus on what the word 'intelligence' meant, back when the Western world was run by crew-cut men with black-framed glasses. There was another characteristic entirely called 'wisdom,' which allowed you to make your way in the world while tamping down misery to manageable levels. The experts in these domains were Grandpa and Grandma, respectively.

With time, the distinctions between these different sorts of brainpower have blurred, and I venture to say the expert on both is now Helen DeWitt. This book could be taken as a PhD thesis on the evolution of our ideas about intelligence, and how meaningless pure cranial capacity is in the absence of wisdom.

(This book is much, much bigger than what I'm describing, but I have to start somewhere. Part of LCJ's wisdom is the realization that I'll never finish this damn review if I don't sit down and start typing something).

Little Ludo, an infant at this book's beginning and an adult by the end (never mind that he was only eleven), was deprived of a grandma and grandpa, and had to figure this out for himself. His quest was aided or hindered by a mother who was either brilliant or incompetent, depending on whether you asked Grandpa or Grandma, and that's the plot. In the earlier books of DeWitt's that I've read, the plot wasn't really the point, but she surprised me by actually making me care about this little family, though she's never clumsy enough to actually let you catch her at it.

There's a section in the first third where we meet a Japanese pianist, who's introduced this way:

His agent had to remind him of various clauses in his contract and he had reminded him of his obligations of a professional musician.

Yamanoto said: My agent always like to say that you could count on a Japanese to act like a true professional...What does that mean, to be a true professional? What's so Japanese about that?

Well, as you probably know the exchange of gifts is quite a big thing in Japan and part of it is that the gift has to be wrapped up in the right way. People go there and they miss the point. They think the thing the Japanese are really worried about is wrapping it up to look right it doesn't matter if what's inside is a piece of shit. I thought: that's what I'm supposed to do, they've already bought the wrapping paper and now I'm expected to give them a piece of shit that will fit the paper, I'm supposed to be a true professional and feel good about it because I gave them something that would fit the paper.

How Yamanoto deals with this was, for me, one of the most breathtaking parts of the book, and a true illustration of why geniuses are simply not like you or me. (Unless you're really a genius. I've met exactly one of those on GR so far.) They're off on another level that normal folks simply cannot comprehend, and it's lonely out there.

This book is really funny, in parts, but DeWitt's humor is mostly situational and can't be excerpted easily. She also flattered me by expressing appreciation for Colin Thubron, one of my favorite writers as well.

The final two sentences of this book hit me like a fist, and it was the preceding hundred thousand sentences that allowed this to happen. This is another sui generis book from the inimitable DeWitt, but I think it needs to be read several times to appreciate all it has to offer.

Buddy read with Nastya and Nataliya

==========================
Initial thoughts, captured a few hours after finishing the book: This isn't a book to be reviewed. This is a book to invite your friends over, uncork a nice bottle and have at it. There's just too much here, and shouting into the void (the essence reviewing) just doesn't cut it.

But this is a book reviewing site, so review it I must.

But, honestly, I don't know where to begin. I like the other two books of hers I've read recently even more than this one, but, big as those books were, this one was way way bigger.

It seemed to be a book of the mind, but in the final pages it became a book of the heart as well.

Sorry, I just can't get into specifics here. I'll let it settle a while and try again.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this novel, but I’m at a loss as to how to review it. I suppose it’s best if you’ve seen the movie Seven Samurai beforehand (I have, though it was a long time ago); but it’s not necessary. The movie is explained quite a bit (not the ending) through Sibylla’s (unhealthy?) obsession, and her son Ludo’s memorization and semi-reenactment. My (art) heart was touched by Ludo, and I felt admiration for his creator.

Sibylla’s background—how her parents met; how life, and her parents’ parents, changed the course of their maybe brilliant futures, causing limitations for their subsequent children—and then Ludo’s early interactions with his mother and those outside his home when he’s older are entertaining, if sometimes also appalling. As she does boring data-entry at home, Sibylla can come across as snobby and defensive, and her life as bleak; but those passages are told with humor, including sarcasm, and that’s even though Sibylla’s moods veer into darkness.

The actions and reputations of the potential substitute-fathers (“samurai”) are so over-the-top, they read like a movie, or like fiction, which of course this book is. Come to think of it, all of Ludo’s activities are (a different degree of) OTT as well. And it all leads to a satisfying last “samurai.”

I don’t know that I would’ve ever read this without the incentive of a group read. I’d heard it was difficult: It wasn’t. The reading was easy. Of course, I didn’t “get” everything—you’re not expected to—and I’m far from an expert on the Classics, languages, math, sciences, etc. anyway—but I never mind the not-knowing if there are other engaging elements to focus on.

And there's a lot to focus on, which is why though I started this review thinking I’d give the novel four stars, now that I’ve sat with the review for a while, I’m rating my experience five. I may not agree with all DeWitt believes, but her novel is a thought-provoking exercise on exceptional learning being due to access and curiosity, and not cleverness, or genes, or even genius; as well as on what the gaps in our learning might mean, and what we can teach each other instead.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Infatuation
The Last Samurai is a book where you’re never quite sure where you’re going next and at what speed, you just realise it’s going to be unconventional. To make sure you remain connected to the short snappy pointed tone of the main characters the writing adopts a similar style.

Ludo is a 6-year-old language and literary genius and his mother Sibylla is also intellectually gifted. I mean seriously gifted, where they home-study mathematics, science, literature, and multiple languages including Greek, Hebrew, Japanese and Arabic. They ride the London Underground’s Circle line all day with their pushchair filled with books so they can keep warm because they can’t afford to heat their house. I couldn’t rationalise why someone with Sibylla’s intelligence and capability would be struggling to earn money in London. It will be meant as part of her quirky personality but it's still not believable.

Sibylla sees, hears and feels the world differently to other people and the story can shoot off in unsuspecting tangents, just like the mind of Sibylla, and plunge into great detail. There is this obsession from mother and son with the 7 Samurai film in its original Akira Kurosawa version. Ludo wants to know who his father is and Sibylla categorically refuses to tell him. Over the next 6 years, Ludo decides to use a scene from the 7 Samurai film as a blueprint to map out, and identify 7 potential father figures, and determine which it is – the one who can parry the blow, just like a real Samurai could do.

Sibylla’s dilemmas and her analysis of every situation can be quite funny and there is a generally dry and black humour throughout the book. Put intellectual logic into the hands of an innocent 6-year-old boy and his engagements with other adults are really hilarious. Starting school left the teacher exasperated.

The last 40% of the book is mainly told through the eyes of Ludo and his quest to find his father. The narrative falls into a steady pace and it’s at this point you realise, what was a challenge in reading the book at the beginning, is now unfortunately missing.

At times I got frustrated with the book as it seemed to ramble and provide detail I wasn’t interested in, and I didn’t feel added to the story. Other times certain passages were so cleverly written that they were just genius. Overall it didn’t hold my interest enough and being nearly 600 pages, it was an effort.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK, Vintage Publishing, for an ARC version of the book in return for an honest review.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

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, remaining.

Trouble is that this time of year one starts reflecting back over the year and preparing to prepare that kind of Read’in Reading List ; in order to submit it to a big swarm of lists which are already listing on the over-done side. So one thing again that occurs to me is that I’ve read a lot of stuff for the first time. I mean, I’ve read a lot of authors for the first time. For a Completionist Obsessionist (CO) such as myself, this is an oddity. Here’s a few names attached to books which were First Timers for me, best I can recollect ::
Helen DeWitt (thanks to those Fellow Readers who salvaged her from my savaging in my Place/Medusa Review. Thanks!)
Vanessa Place
Christoph Martin Wieland
Grete Weil
Wendy Walker
Paul Verhaeghen
Dubravka Ugrešić
Amos Tutuola
Jonathan Swift (? probably not)
Ronald Sukenick
Ali Smith
Xiaoxiao Lanling Sheng
Philip Roth (probably?)
Maurice Roche
Ishmael Reed
Anne Gédéon LaFitte, Marquis de Pelleport
Gil Orlovitz
Comte de Lautréamont
Lee Klein
Danilo Kiš
Guillermo Cabrrera Infante
Liam Howley
H.D.
Gustave Flaubert
Henry Fielding
Ralph Ellison
Rosalyn Drexler
W. COQ
Kay Boyle
Robert Bolaño
Oh dear that is rather a lot. I promise you I’ll do more of the Competionism stuff next year, same old horse; I’ve got a lot of outstanding stuff and thereto I’ve added a few names you’ll discover in that list I just listed.

One should not neglect to read something from Raymond Federman.

So my intention of writing a proper review here is not going so well. Look, there’s a number of big books I’ve been trying to finally getting around to knock off this time of year and DeWitt’s is the third following the DeLillo and the Bolaño. There’ll be more of those two on my horizon. DeWitt’s got one more which is also on my horizon. And if she has more of her own books on her own horizon, those books too will horizon themselves for me. Thank you. I’d really like to get Darkmans and Where Tigers Are at Home tic’d off by the end of the year. Both look Delisch!

But it is what you’d call a fast read (don’t you dare say “precocious”, not even one more time!!). As pointed out, and really this kind of thing should count as one of those ubiquitous critiques/complaints, the obverse of the “needs to loose about 500 pages” critique/complaint, The Last Samurai has a lot of blank pages among its 530 pages. I mean a lot of blank pages. Just blank. Simply blank. Nothing printed on them. There’s very little doubt in my mind there’s a purpose to them. And I like book art and book objects and I like the arts & crafts of bookmaking and bookbinding and related arts & crafts. But it is a lot of blank pages. And then a lot of pages with printing on them also have a lot of white space which is not uncommon especially in passages of dialogue or when there is some fine point of Japanese grammar or what have you to be made. It’s also really rather easy to read. And especially if you know some Japanese there might be some fine jokes in there which I didn’t get.

A lot of the white space serves to demarcate various chapters and sections and parts ; the relations among which I’ve not parsed. There could be some value in parsing out those sections. Maybe I should do that next.

I’m just typing here to hear myself type. Self-indulgence. Not at your expense. You can just move on at any time. Don’t worry about hitting that Like button even if you don’t read or if you only skim. I’m never one hundred percent certain what it means when a person hits my buttons.


The Last Samurai

Prologue
i
1 Do Samurai Speak Penguin Japanese?
Odyssey 1. ❖ Odyssey 2. ❖ Odyssey 3. ❖ Odyssey 4. ❖
Odyssey 6. ❖ Odyssey 7. ❖
Odyssey 8. ❖
Od. 10. ❖ Met. 1. ❖ I Sam. I? [Have not read in years.] [not=nr]
I Sam. II-V? [Hell.] [ditto]
Interlude
ii
1 We Never Get Off at Sloane Square for Nebraska Fried Chicken
2 99,98, 97, 96
3 We Never Get Off at Embankment to Go to McDonald’s
4 19, 18, 17
5 We Never Go Anywhere
6 We Never Do Anything
7 End of the Line
iii
1 1, 2, 3
2 a, b, c
My First Week At School
My Second Week At School
My Third Week At School
My Fourth Week At School
3 999999[7] = 999999[....etc....that’s me, nr, not bothering with maths]999
iv
1 Trying to feel sorry for Lord Leighton
2 I know all the words
3 Funeral Games
4 Steven, age 11
5 For David, with best wishes
v
1 A good samurai will parry the blow
2 A good samurai will parry the blow [sic, nr again]
3 A good samurai will parry the blow [sic, ditto]
4 A good samurai will parry the blow [sic, ditto]
5 A good samurai will parry the blow [sic, you know the drill]
6 A good samurai will parry the blow [sic, parry on my wayward son]
7 I’m a genuine samurai [sic, but not credited to this Reviewer]

Those five parts, those delineated with roman numerals i through v, also contain some epigraphical material which I interpreted as epigraphical rather than titular. But you can visit those pages at your leisure. But the thing is that each of those part/title/etc dividers represents on average approximately three pages of blank space. Treat them like you would treat a rest in a musical score. Or just rudely fast forward to the fast and loud parts. We’ll estimate about/approximately (product of three and forty) 120 pages of white with and without part/chapter/section titles (however you call these things). Sounds like a lot, but I’m not counting the white space produced by the occasional subsection dividers (ie, “❖”) which produce a much greater quantity of white space than is the case in the average book formatting strategy.

Here’s the tune “Approximate”, featuring Ruth Underwood on Vibes, by Frank Zappa ::
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89LPV...
Dance you fuckers!!!!


Any chance I can run out my character limit? How many is that? Anyone know off hand?

At any rate, now we’ve gotten a kind of ToC and we’ve produced a rough rough estimate of the blank pages and white spots (disappointed not to see one of those all=black pages made famous in those other books, but, again I repeat, What are you going to do?) in this here book. It’s not a very important thing to do. Unless you are a book designer. Speaking of which, I’m also disappointed not to find an About the Type entry on the final pages. Sometimes you might find those things on the copyright page, but no such luck in this case.

If I assemble a number of these reviews and Reviews I’ve written on gr (goodreads.com) and have them printed and bound and listed for sale do you think you’d buy one? I wouldn’t. Unless I hired a really groovy book designer. That’s what I’d do. I’d knock on the door of one of these many local design schools and hire some fresh(faced) grad who wants to work for free (for no $$$$, really) to design a nice little thing which would include all of my most popul’airy reviews and Reviews (and I’d throw in some stinkers cuz I just can’t help it (nor do I ever think of my reader!)) and I’d have this fresh(faced) design school grad make some really cool book=art out of it. It’d be so cool, such excellent book-art that you wouldn’t even want to bother reading the words (you’ve already skim’d them on=line already anyway so what’s the point?) but you’d luxuriate in the inexpressively awesome nature of this book=art. And after the fresh(faced) design school grad got done with her work with all the layout and typeface choices and other unfathomable things involved with designing a book I’d have it sent to the printers... no no no wait!.... screw sending it to the printers! We’d get one of these old fashion one-page-at-a-time handcrank type old=school printers, you know, the printing equivalent of a straight-razor, the kind of thing which increases your risk of exsanguination by a factor of seventeen, and we’d pick up a guy from the Home Depot parking lot to do all the cranking and we’d print off those pages one at a time and there’d be a lot of pages because I’ve written (or “Written”) something like 561 reviews (for “Reviews”) plus like 334 ratings (those have really gotten crusty lately!) and so we’d have a lot to select from and we’d probably include more than we should. At any rate, (let me know if you see some grammatical difficulties with these sentences) we’d print those pages and then get them to some like really seriously artful bookbinder guy, the kind of guy like that guy who lives in the basement of that house occupied by that one famous philosophy in Cambridge you met once when you took that huge Oxford Greek dictionary to this guy to get the binding fixed, you’d take it to one of these Artful=Binders who have been to Book Making (non-gambling) type schools and you’d have this guy hand bind these things in like calf and other expensive stuff and probably sewn in silk if silk is good thing for binding books. It’s be out of this world!!!

How many more characters do I have left? Oh hey, listen, I just did some Research and I discovered this fact. gr allows 20,000 characters per Review Box. And apparently spaces like “ “ count as characters which is really queer cuz it means that I could write a review of nothing but twenty thousand (leagues under the sea!!!?) spaces and it would count! At any rate, I’ll just check how many I have left now. Just a sec. ......10,113 characters left after the space following the period following “sec”. 10,025 characters left after the period following ‘“sec”’. So any character now we’ll have used exactly half the characters allot’d us by the Good People at goodreads.com.INC. Can you locate the precise location of the Ten Thousandth character?

Are you still with me? (9749 up to the “?” you just skim’d)

About a year ago there’d be a joke in all this. Something along the lines of “Off-topic much?” We’d have to confess. We’re just noodling. Just listening to ourselves type. Are you entertained? Bored? Would you like to take a survey which would register your satisfaction with this review? We’d have maybe ten questions and you’d answer some with a “Yes” or a “No” or some non-excluded middle term and some you’d answer by circling any one numeral along a range ranging from one to ten. “Would you like to edit this mess?” might be one question. Another question might be, “Would you like to provide this survey with its next question?” Both would be of the first kind, the kind where it’d be appropriate to answer “Yes” or “No” or some non-excluded middle term. Can you think of a question to ask which would require a numerical answer? I’m think of the kind of thing you’d get in the ED (used to be known as the “ER” and there was even a TV show with that title which at first I pronounced like the german word it looked like to me) where they’d say like “How much pain are you in?” or “How intense is the pain you are experiencing?” or something like that and they’d say that zero (or one, however it’s arranged) is the total absence of pain or utter bliss (however the specific scale is scaled) and ten would be like mortifying, howling, Oh My Fucking God IT HURTS, kill me now! kind of pain -- and if you’re not in such agony that you can’t understand what the fuck they’re asking you try to come up with a reasonable guess as to how best to turn your fucking awful pain into some kind of meaningful numerical-rhetorical schema. So maybe perhaps we’d ask something like “On a scale of one to ten, one being something like utter=”meh” and ten being like Best Thing After Finnegans Wake, how Great, how Fantastic would you say this review written this day the Eighth of December in the year of 2014 by Nathan “N.R.” Gaddis of Helen DeWitt’s massively awesome 2000 novel, The Last Samurai (that’s a big “N.R.” to that Cruise movie of like title) is?” And you’d have to pick a number between one and ten. Best just get out your dodecahedron die.

Where’s that thing on my word processing dealie that tells me how many characters (including spaces) I’ve used? I’ve got word count down here (2338 it says) but I’d like to count those characters in anticipation of what the gr Review Box is going to say. Oh wait, I see it. It pop’d up over there on the right hand side of my screen where it was camafloged by this youtoob mix of Frank Zappa Live! I’ve been watching. Right now they’re playing a The Roxy Theatre (1973) which is really about the best era of Zappadom, partly because you see he’s just so damn happy playing with a great fucking band and the music’s cool and he actually enjoys the audience and all this kind of stuff (I like the ’88 tour stuff too). At any rate, the stats thing which is included with my word processor now says “Characters: 13,172”. It’s hard to type cuz it changes as I type. Let’s try again. The stats thing says “Characters: 13,279”. So when I hit “9” the whole thing changed to “13,280” so you see what I mean when I say it’s hard to type because it changes as I type it. Basically, the numeral “9” when I typed “13,279” was the 13,280th character in this document. But don’t count on it because I might go back up above there and do some editing and cutting-n-slicing and basically just changing stuff, so some of these numbers might not quite be accurate in any kind of finished form of this document right here.

Two of my favorite Zappa tracks are “Penguin in Bondage” and “Montana”. “Penguin in Bondage” is the opening track of his album “Roxy and Elsewhere” which is like one of my favorite Zappa albums and is the track I remember first hearing which really turned me on to Frank’s music although of course like everyone else I’d heard “Bobby Brown Goes Down” a lot when that guy Bobby Brown (wife=beater Bobby) went down because the radio DJs thought it a funny song to play. Also “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow” which is only part of a larger suite which is pretty cool. You’ll find “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow” on the “Apostrophe(‘)” album which also contains a funny song about a poodle called “Stink-Foot” or something like that, but the famous Poodle Lecture is pretty great.

Meanwhile, I’ll be in Montana.

This review is not going very well.

a) please forgive me.
b) please ignore me.
c) please Like me.
c) please don’t denounce me
d) all of the above
e) write in you favorite candidate here.
f) he’s lost his marbles for sure this time.
g) can he really go on for another 5000+ characters?
h) no
i) yes
j) maybe
k) let’s wait and see
l) no, I’ve got more important things to do like ask aidan for more book=recs
m) this whole review is a wreck
n) pomo is dead!
long live pomo!
p) who did the reader poll first, Federman or Barthelme?
q) why would I care?
r) r you doing 26 lines of this?
s) yes. and then we’ll do one in Greek
t) one in Hebrew
u) one auf Deutsch
v) one in Arabic
w) one in Chinese
x) one in Japanese as soon as you read all those books in that one photograph plus all the other books written by each of those approximately twelve authors
y) I don’t know!
z) oh he’s on first!


RU still hear?

Do you prefer a Quiz or a Poll?

Whence would you recommend we digress next? We have a few dozen characters still required eating up.

I have a question for you! Yes, you in the back with the extremely bored/annoyed/irritated expression on your horse=like face. Yes, thank you for taking my call, big fan, long time listener, first time caller and all that etc etc etc ;; but what I’d really like to know and I’m sure just about everyone else reading this thing would like to know is, Who are you making fun of? Who are you parodying? Who are you travestying? That’s a very good question. Perhaps it would be best to poll our readership and see what they think. We could really get to the bottom of things...... I’d also like to ask, sort of a two=parter, Don’t you have anything better to do?

1)
2)
3)
4)
5) all of the above.

Yes.

btw, if you see things like “you’re” instead of where “your” should be or like if you see “it’s” where an “its” should be it’s not because I can’t or don’t differentiate between the two very different words but it’s because everything that’s in my brain that finds its way onto this white splotch in cyber=space is mediated through my CANTANKEROUS KEYBOARD and the situation is not improved in that sometimes my fingers have a different opinion than my brain and perform what might only be characterized as grammatical sabotage. So seriously, if you wnat to make a FEDERAL case about my not proof-reading my own goddman work I sya, “well you know wnat i’mabout to say and it’s not fitfor the younguns so just cover there ears before I”

old joke, I know. Apologies. But I did just correct one of those “you’re”s to the correct “your”. Things like that will perpetually embarrass, especially if your make you living telling other people how illiterate they are just because they have to work with a CANTANKEROUS KEYBOARD.


I feel like I’m sort of hogging all this cyber=space and really I’m not the type of creature that tends towards the Monolingual, but much prefer the Dilingual. Although probably a better term would be dialogical or something, which isn’t exactly what Bahktin is talking about, but it’s kind of similar. What I mean is that rather than Hold Forth I’d much rather have a pint or two with you and we can go back and forth. I guess the Ancients might have called it dialectic. Or just discussion or conversation. So, and I know this is sort of a hollow gesture given the structure of this Review Box, but I’d like to provide you, My Treasured Review Reader, with a little space of your own so that your voice too might be heard. Here it is (just go wild!!!) ::

______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________


That doesn’t feel like a lot, but please feel free to expand on the other side of this Review, or maybe down below in the conversational Thread where we can get in more than the mere 20=Grand characters allowed up here.

No, but I think you make a very good point. And I’d rather (I mean I feel like I’ve been talking and talking and it’s time for someone else maybe to get a word in edgewise) maybe hand the mike over to other people in our reading audience today and see what they have to say about your question. I mean, I think it’s a serious question and I’d really like to hear what other people might have to say.

Oh yeah I totally agree that this here is pure entertainment (if that!) and doesn’t even begin to nudge something we might call “art”. But what is art anyway? I think maybe some people think a toilet in a museum is art so it’s really hard to say. I mean in an objective sort of way. Is The Last Samurai art? or is it just a novel? something to kill some time while sitting enthroned? maybe it reshapes the world we live in?

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first sight this is dazzlingly erudite but almost immediately DeWitt undercuts the intellectualism: with wit, with acuity, she navigates a story which both valorises knowledge and intellectual pursuits but also recognises the limitations of pure mind when it comes to living what philosophers term 'a good life'.

This is a book which zooms between disciplines: music, maths, literature, language all play important parts - and we should note the character's names: Sybilla and Ludo, because there's no end to the layered game playing.

Beneath all this, though, is a boy's relationship with his mother and search for a father - biological or other. And it's this melding of the experimental style with a classic story which gives the book both edge and heart.

[BJ Lillis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book about how much more we might expect from ourselves, and from literature, that proves the point by existing.

“The fact is that a clever man so seldom needs to think What’s a syllabary?” (30).

A book about how knowledge, art, language, literature do and don’t, can and can’t, might and mightn’t give life meaning.

“It seems to me that it is does not take miraculous intelligence to master the simple fact that Ὀδυσεύς is Odysseus, if you go on to master 5,000 similar simple facts you have only shown that you are a miracle of obstinacy” (127).

A surprisingly subtle book, as much about courage and cowardice as all the things it is more obviously about.

“Everyone can imagine a life’s regret for a moment of cowardice, but you could just as easily regret a moment’s courage” (329).

“At first I thought I was not going to be able to do it. But then I thought if you’re a coward you deserve what you get. You deserve what you’ve got.” (385).

A book that, against all odds, convinced me it was told by a child.

“In a less barbarous society children would not be in absolute economic subjection to the irrational beings into whose keeping fate has consigned them: they would be paid a decent hourly wage for attending school” (72).

A book that convinced me to spend more of my time memorizing german idioms, not because it makes me somehow a better person to be able to say that I have tomatoes on my eyes or that I didn’t just swim over here on the noodle soup, but because it is a purer and more lovely escapism than television or even novels.

“In my mind I saw the beautiful girl glowing in the light of the film. If Sibylla had always watched Seven Samurai she would always have been beautiful, but there is more to life than art” (467).

A book about how there is more to life than art—but maybe not quite so much more as people seem to think?

[Britta Böhler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though I didn't love everything in the book (I only skimmed the long quotes from obscure books or the passages written in Japanese and Islandic), but it still blew me away.

[Vipassana · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 in book reviewing?

There is a LOT in this book. A lot of ideas. A lot of layers and those ideas manifest differently in different layers.

The book is structured in two parts. The first is predominantly written in Sybilla's voice. Single mother to a precocious Ludo, who is as precocious as the word precocious can suggest. She takes parenting seriously. Teaching him to learn Greek at the age of four, debating whether she should rebuke him for walking home from a concert by himself at the wee hours of the morning and generally having an internal dialogue on everything concerning Ludo. Her outlook towards parenting is influenced by what she lacked growing up with parents who were frustrated by not being able to achieve their potential. She believes that the structure of power between parent and child is imbalanced and seeks to better it in her relationship with ludo

In a less barbarous society children would not be in the absolute economic subjection to the irrational beings into whose keeping fate has consigned them: they would be paid a decent hourly wage for attending school.

Sybilla repeatedly plays Kurosawa's Seven Samurai to substitute for the lack of a male figure in Ludo's life. The movie serves as a substitute for the kind of human connection she desires but neither pursues nor talks about throughout the book.

The second part is in Ludo's voice. He decides to find his father through bits of information from Sybilla and a letter she had written for Ludo in case she died. On finding his biological father and being unimpressed and mildly disgusted, he decides to seek a father figure. The quest is filled with disappointments but he learns to navigate the realm of human emotions. Having being subject to years of Seven Samurai, it is only natural that he should test if the potential fathers will parry the blow

Helen DeWitt's prose grasps the cacophonous nature of living in the 21st century. It shifts between diary entries, conversation, snippets of books and stream of consciousness. Some of the parallels she drew are so good, they should become a part of everyday life. She likens her one night stand with Ludo's biological father to an unpleasant medley, where the performers transition uncomfortably from one song to another and just when the song gets mildly comfortable it shifts to another one. Medley sex has nice ring to it and makes for a useful phrase today.

I'd watched Seven Samurai once before I started the book. I've watched it thrice since. The book serves as an excellent companion for the movie but the converse is what makes this book a masterpiece. DeWitt has structured the book to make it subtly similar to the critical analyses of the movie, snippets of which also feature in the movie. While this serves as an intellectual treat, it doesn't satisfy me to see that as the whole picture. The meticulous manner in which she chooses to overlap Seven Samurai and The Last Samurai in style suggests that she wants you to pay attention to specific details. She speaks about how one perceives art

Once you saw that you could potentially have dozens of fragments that could not be part of the finished work, and what you saw was that it was perceiving these fragments as fragments that made it possible to have a real conception of what wholeness might be in a work

The fragments of the father figures, is what allows Ludo a perception of wholeness in a human. Reconciling with all those fragments is what makes Ludo a genuine samurai

There are several underlying themes that mature along with the novel, along with Ludo. There is one idea that provides a point of action when you wonder, WHAT shall I DO? It seemed to me that the events of The Last Samurai all culminated to this idea.

It is literally untrue to suggest that peace, contentment, happiness, follows a single battle, no matter how important, and that a hero who actually becomes is tantamount to a villain.

Ludo parries the blow. Ludo doesn't become.

--
29 April, 2015

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The answers were less smart than the questions, and I think a good experimental novel needs to deliver more in the end than at the beginning.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's some heart in this novella after all. I'm skipping the pithy quotations to give it to you straight. Here are a few things:

I sometimes feel depressed too. 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 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.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had planned to watch Seven Samurai before writing this review, because the novel leans so heavily on it, frequently interpolating the film’s dialogue, and drawing from its structure and themes. But finding the time for that has proved difficult. And while I think the film is important for a full appreciation of The Last Samurai, the novel does provide enough context for it to be understood alone.

The novel itself is an original, highly innovative work, making bold and unexpected decisions in terms of its structure, narrative, viewpoints, and plot. Despite fairly static conditions in the first half, and some fairly dry topics covered, the novel manages to be highly engaging and entertaining (I finished these 500 pages in less than a week). The close view into Ludo’s mind during his learning and development, filled with detailed discussions about art, language and science, were a pleasure to read. The experiences of Ludo and his family provide a nuanced framework for the examination of the interplay between genius, ambition and success, as well as an exploration of family and its influence on personal identity.

My only criticism of the novel is that the second half is comparatively underdeveloped. There is a repetitive structure that mirrors Seven Samurai, and it felt as though the author was afraid that the repetition would become tedious, and so the final few chapters, including the culmination of Ludo’s paternal search, felt somewhat truncated. Which is a pity, as some of these latter dialogues are high points for the novel, and I feel that there was potential to explore the themes that had been established much more deeply in these later stages.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 3 out of 5]

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. And that’s actually more on me than on this book: I’ve just, over the last handful of years, in my ever evolving and shifting reading habits, have slowly, patiently, [utterly unintentionally] moved those targets in my mind where a book like this hits just to the side of the mark, or falls just a bit short. And there is a bit of sadness that goes along with recognizing that – it’s like putting on a movie you once loved, or an album that once spoke so deeply to you, and finding it wanting: and along with that there is an aspect of yourself that you once totemized and brandished like a shield and felt defined you in a way that your petty words could not encompass that you realize only now exists in a nostalgic haze, and is not in fact a part of you any longer. I run into this a lot lately, and I’m still trying to wrap myself around it – there are parts of me that I still long for and cannot get back, and the furniture of my mind that has taken its place is still unfamiliar and I keep slamming my shins into askew placements, and I’m living in a house that I built for myself, but am still unsure how I got here. (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. I say all this knowing full damn well that most of what I read is utterly unappealing to the average reader, so take this all with a massive grain of salt

[Justin Pickett · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a 1600-scorer is to takers of the SAT, this book is to literature. It is the smartest in the room, odd in a good way, and deserving of attention. It focuses on the growth and pursuits of Ludovic (Ludo), a young, hardheaded genius—a “two-year-old workaholic” (p. 44), a “Homerolexic infant” (p. 105), “a miracle of obstinacy” (p. 127)—who eventually tries to identify (and then choose) his father against his mother’s wishes. The story is intellectually suspenseful, engaging, and very frequently hilarious:

“Then I thought, there must be some other way not to listen to all this … It would be rude to put a hand over his mouth, but If I were to put my mouth on his mouth this would stop him talking just as well without being rude” (p. 73).

“Today, as soon as I got into class Miss Lewis took me to one side and said, ‘Stephen, I want you to make a real effort to be a cooperative member of the class.’ I said it was hardly necessary to remind me of this as Dr. Bandura had underlined the importance of cooperative behavior. Mis Lewis said, ‘Good’” (p. 224).

“Let’s take two people about to undergo 10 years of horrible excruciating boredom at school, A dies at the age of 6 from falling out a window and B dies at the age of 6 + n where n is a number less than 10, I think we would all agree that B’s life was not improved by the additional n years” (p. 230).

The book wrestles with a lot of related themes. One is the social and familial difficulties sometimes associated with genius. These include disappointment and wasted potential due to unfavorable life circumstances and/or family discouragement as well as judgement and stigma, particularly around childrearing: “Far too young … wouldn’t he really be better off playing football I think you are making a terrible mistake” (p. 117).

Another theme is what’s lost in translation between geniuses and ordinary people. I’m just ordinary, but I found the substory about Yamamoto’s repetitive, marathon (7+ hour), drum-filled piano concerts causing most normal people to walk out (even while tears streamed down the face of those who understood the point) to be maybe the clearest and most beautiful illustration of what sets true brilliance apart.

A third theme is the shared needs that all people have, regardless of their intellect, such as being loved, appreciated, and connected to others: “All I wanted was something that everyone else in the world takes for granted and instead I got Laplace transforms and the aerodynamics of insect flight” (p. 271). Although Ludo’s mother succeeds as a parent in some respects, she is utterly neglectful in others. She doesn’t remember Ludo’s birth-certificate name, doesn’t know at what age he must enroll in school, and doesn’t provide him with socialization opportunities (e.g., play groups). She refuses to tell him about his father, because she believes the man is unbearably dull and unintelligent: “You will not be ready to know your father until you can see what’s wrong with these things … millions of people have gone to the grave admiring them” (p. 206-207). The problem, of course, is that not even geniuses are islands.

1) Story (5/5)
2) Writing (5/5)
3) Originality (5/5)
4) Characters (5/5)
5) Set pieces (5/5)
6) Suspense (5/5)
7) Ending (5/5)
8) Relationships (romantic or otherwise) (5/5)
9) Dialogue (5/5)

[boxer_dogs_dance · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF.

This book is about a brilliant underemployed mother raising an intellectual prodigy son.

There were some satisfying paragraphs but a lot of time spent on theory, about music, about linguistics, about film, about pedagogy.

Maybe this award winning book is brilliant, but it asks the reader to work really hard to receive what seems like not very much.

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 of two or three excellent stories (the pianist, the artist, the bridge player). Because it's funny. Because of one or two excellent ideas - on education and knowledge - and because it makes you question the way we think about these things.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. I raced through the first 200/300 pages thinking, how is she doing it? This should be pretentious and it's somehow not; it should be dense and it's somehow not; it should be boring and it's somehow not!

Then the second half of the novel was a complete let down. All the charm of the first half vanished and I waded through another 300 pages of repetitive, slightly annoying scenes. I've seen a few people call this one of the best books of the millennium... C'est la vie.

[Diane · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 writings that frequently have no reason to be in the book except to demonstrate her ability to locate the abstruse.

I stayed with this novel only because I am in a book club, and several had finished it before me, declaring it to be enjoyable. I don't like to be defeated by any literature, but 544 pages would have felt like a waste of my time, except that it did serve the purpose of steering me towards other, more worthy pursuits, including books, music and movies that I might not have encountered.

I pity those who edited this book, and from what I have read, Ms. Dewitt was so involved in the process that she attempted suicide over disagreements on the editing. She apparently has written somewhat autobiographically in The Last Samurai, as each "genius" who excelled in one way or another proved him/herself unfit for society.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Child prodigy Ludo is brought up by single mom Sibylla. Absolutely over-the-top samplings of linguistics (Japanese and Greek in particular) and fairly obscure literary and filmographic culture elevate this rather underwhelming starting point to heights I had not expected. The book pulled me in the same way Donna Tartt’s The Secret History had expertly managed to back then (and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children subsequently failed to, despite getting the formula right somehow).

A central premise of the novel is that children are their own people; whatever formal authority adults bestow on themselves, be it with good intentions, often ends up having little weight on the course of the little ones' lives.

I’m in love. The smarts, the tone, the liberal leanings: I want more books like The Last Samurai. As it is, I go through life reading hundreds of books trying to discover something along the lines of The Last Samurai at least occasionally. These things are hard to find!

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

[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 characters, the story -- it is to me as if this book were given every beneficial adaptation by a doting god, and then set free in a tiny corner of the wild. I am astonished that it has not yet driven its competitors to extinction. It is unbalanced.

[Chris Via]

I cannot think of a flaw in this linguist’s feast!

[nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

“𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘧 𝘢 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘥𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘪𝘵 𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘪𝘵, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘥 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘥𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘱? 𝘞𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥𝘯’𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘢 𝘥𝘢𝘻𝘻𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘤𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴?”

My brain hurts. I didn’t think I was gonna learn so much. Haven’t taken in so much since my undergrad. Back to back classes, eyes dry, hungry, very little everywhere. Little money. Little hopes, dreams. Little me. I didn’t expect to learn Greek. I didn’t expect to go back to learning Japanese. Ideas flint left and right. My brain is wired like this. One thought after another. Perfectly pitched on the page as something not so much stream of consciousness, but there’s a running stream. Something is running. Towards something. Away from something. And aren’t we all like that? Aren’t we all some part in the grand scheme of one big chase? A rat race?

Have I said my brain hurts? It continues to hurt. Don’t know where to place this. At once brilliant. But also boring. Compulsive all the way through. And the Kurosawa backdrop just lends to the endless art that backs up other art. Hyperlinks astray, popping off in all directions to no end. When will it end? When is my time up?

What is my last act of goodness? Will the courts know? My friends? Enemies? Who will define what good is? In the end? Does the public decide? What decides the good of the earth? The good of the people. I’ve been such a bad son. My mom knows. She’s tired of me. But she doesn’t know how tired I am of her. I think it shows in my face, in the way I say things, and I don’t talk like that to anybody else, not even my worst enemies. I’m a terrible son. So I make it up in as much good I try to offer. Leave a door a linger longer, strangers rushing in. Accommodating. Giving into the pleasure of helping those in need. I try, I try. Always trying. Doesn’t my mother know? Doesn’t mother always know best? The best of the best is here. DeWitt’s brilliance in how she can shape a story, get away with it, but I’m still a little tired with a lot to think about. And isn’t that just another day in my head, another day on this floating rock, hungry and lonely and wanting to love.

[Enrique · Rating 4 out of 5]

No sé exactamente que esperaba encontrar aquí, pero lo cierto es que me ha sorprendido para bien. Difícil de encasillar.
Arranca de forma fragmentada, con distintos momentos temporales. El lector va tomando razón de las particularidades de la familia a medida que avanza la narración, no se tiene claro en ningún momento quien es el protagonista de la misma, es un protagonismo compartido. Con el discurrir de la historia se va homogeneizando el relato madre-hijo.
 
No es el primer libro que me encuentro en que combinan dos elementos, tres: 1) La continua referencia a los clásicos antiguos y esa búsqueda de significados, ello mezclado con 2) la etimología de las palabras de distintas lenguas (se deja notar la formación de la autora), y 3) una buena historia detrás.
 
La historia desde luego que no es al uso, un hijo superdotado, heredero de dos generaciones anteriores de superdotados, esa educación particular y canalización de esa energía tan brutal. Gran relato.
 
A mitad del libro se comienza a sentir la tensión de la madre de no saber cómo canalizar el torrente de información que demanda ese niño; la escuela parece el sitio más inadecuado para un chico superdotado en un sistema educativo estándar.
 
Peculiar relación madre hijo, llena de soledad y aislamiento. Falta total de afectividad y de las relaciones propias entre ambos. Algo siniestro parece flotar en el ambiente. O no sé cómo calificarlo, más bien desolador.

Y como no, la búsqueda de la identidad por parte de ese niño, de forma un poco particular, eso sí.

Por cierto, que tras las continuas referencias en la novela, terminé por ver "Los siete samurais" que la tenía pendiente desde hacía años...Ohhh que maravilla...

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 Ellises and Franzens of this world have racked up (Ellis actually has been influential, which scares me a little... maybe I should read Tao Lin, it's sometimes fun to have a whipping boy), fiction was moving towards this "it's vapid because we're vapid" mode. Then I remembered this, a warm and big-hearted novel that invites us to sympathize with its characters AND call them out on their bullshit. So socially inept child prodigy Ludo and his cultured but neurotic single mother Sybilla? They fuck up all over the place, and the series of father figures Ludo runs through aren't quite equipped to handle him, but they just feel so real and so complete that I form a real and complex relationship with them. Plus, there's a great form, precise prose, and references to Kurosawa all over the joint. Reading this book is a good idea. Don't worry about a thing: that Tom Cruise movie where a white guy is better at being Japanese than actual Japanese people (see also Dances with Wolves, where a white guy is better at being Native American than actual Native Americans) has nothing to do with this.