Author of The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods, “Helen Dewitt knows, in descending order of proficiency, Latin, ancient Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese: ‘The self is a set of linguistic patterns,’ she said. ‘Reading and speaking in another language is like stepping into an alternate history of yourself where all the bad connotations are gone’ (New York Magazine).”
The Last Samurai
by Helen DeWitt
Paperback
$13.00
$18.95
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- ISBN-13: 9780811225502
- Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Publication date: 05/31/2016
- Pages: 576
- Sales rank: 66,755
- Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.40(d)
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Called “remarkable” (The Wall Street Journal) and “an ambitious, colossal debut novel” (Publishers Weekly), Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai is back in print at lastHelen DeWitt’s 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was “destined to become a cult classic” (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights in twenty countries, so “Why not just, ‘destined to become a classic?’” (Garth Risk Hallberg) And why must cultists tell the uninitiated it has nothing to do with Tom Cruise? Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo’s shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.) Lacking male role models for a fatherless boy, Sibylla turns to endless replays of Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn’t know: his father’s name. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew. He’ll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. He may not live to see twelve. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.
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Helen DeWitt's first novel, The Last Samurai, did not go unnoticed when it was published in 2000: it was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award as well as for the UK's prestigious Orange Prize; in the New Yorker, A. S. Byatt called the novel a "triumph." And yet the book more or less vanished from the shelves of American bookstores, to the point where we can now be grateful to New Directions (which also published DeWitt's second novel, Lightning Rods, in 2011) for bringing it back into print.
At first, The Last Samurai is narrated by Sybilla, a young American who is struggling to raise her son, Ludo, in London. Having landed an improbable job retyping the text of magazines with titles like Practical Caravanning and Tropical Fish Hobbyist for a "project into 20th-century language," she distracts Ludo by feeding his insatiable appetite for knowledge: already, at age five, he knows Greek and Latin, a smattering of Hebrew and Arabic, and some elementary number theory. Ludo's father is not in the picture, so Sibylla gives him a wealth of surrogate fathers in the form of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film, Seven Samurai.
This is a whimsical premise, and what follows is in some ways a whimsical book — think Tristram Shandy as told by a broke single mother — but Sibylla's passionate commitment to language and to Ludo gives the novel so much intensity that you can't refuse to take it seriously. There are any number of virtuosic fictions in the world, and any number of narrators who are eager to lead us around their mental cabinets of wonders, showing off long words and odd facts; but The Last Samurai is one of those rare books that seems genuinely to care whether you (or Ludo, or someone) learns something from it.
And in fact there's a surprising amount of knowledge on offer here: if you follow Ludo's education with a little patience, you stand a chance of mastering the Greek alphabet and getting an idea of how Greek counting numbers work; you might also pick up a few words of Japanese, and a kanji or two, not to mention an intimate familiarity with the central scenes of Seven Samurai. For all its pedagogy, though, DeWitt's novel is hardly dry. Sibylla's intensity, and her high standards for what counts as rational behavior lead her into some extremely funny situations, as when, leaving the bed of a travel writer (Ludo's father, it turns out) whose drunken advances she was too polite to resist, she writes a note glossing part of the Iliad:
kisesas, moving [masculine nominative singular aorist participle] de and [connective participle] káre head protí. . . musthésato addressed [3rd person singular aorist middle indicative] ón his thesón soul/spirit/mind/heart [masculine accusative singular]You can't help but wonder what the single masculine person accused by this note thought when he woke up. Probably the boor didn't understand what Sibylla has been teaching us for 125 pages at this point: that language is a beautiful thing, capable of moving our heads and our hearts, if only we pay it close attention.
Whatever you might think of Sybilla's parenting techniques, The Last Samurai is one of the great novels about raising a child, and being a child, to have been written in the last half century or so. (Other books that might be on that list: Knausgaard's My Struggle, which DeWitt's novel resembles in some ways; Steven Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse, which it resembles in others.) And like other novels about childhood, it has a hidden drumbeat: Ludo is growing up. When The Last Samurai begins, he is a brilliant five-year-old brat, shouting out the names of hypothetical many-footed cephalopods in Greek; by the end of the novel he is nearly twelve and actively in search of his missing father. By means of a kind of narratorial judo (a martial art Ludo studies) which you don't often get to see in fiction, he takes charge of telling the second half of the book, and it picks up speed as he interviews one unlikely candidate for fatherhood after another. The range of DeWitt's talents as a writer may be on display here — although I wouldn't be surprised if she had other ranges of talent, hidden behind the first, like mountains behind mountains — as she renders deft portraits of two journalists, a painter, a bridge champion, a pianist, and an astronomer, all of them more or less entrenched in London's upper crust but few of them any match for the fierce Ludo, who has taken his samurai upbringing to heart.
Ludo's ascendancy leads The Last Samurai farther and farther from Sibylla; in the last third of the novel we get what amount to self-contained tales about an Irish prodigy in Central Asia, an artist who bathes, literally, in lamb's blood, and a gambler who relies on the number 28. There's a bit of Bolaño's stunt- flying in these stories — and maybe more than a bit of the French genius and madman Raymond Roussel, whose Locus Solus goes about as far with the self-contained tale as you can go. DeWitt's dazzling miniatures tumble kaleidoscopically one after another, but a diptych of images that emerges from them is increasingly clear, and sad, and exhilarating. One half is a portrait of Ludo, becoming more and more independent; the other is of Sibylla, who has spent her life trying to get away from her own oppressive childhood in the States, but who can't quite seize for herself the freedom which she is so wonderfully capable of passing on to her son. DeWitt's hyperkinetic playfulness is a long way from the hyperrealism of Knausgaard, or the more tightly controlled knowingness of Elena Ferrante (another great writer about childhood, whose books The Last Samurai does not resemble at all); but it has an emotional reality and a fierce vitality of its own, which deserve to be rediscovered.
Paul La Farge is the author of two novels: The Artist of the Missing and Haussmann, or the Distinction.
Reviewer: Paul La Farge
Daniel (age 14)
The book has been a great source of motivation for me. I must outdo Ludo, because he is younger than I am but smarter than I am. My father says that this is ridiculous, as Ludo is a fictional character. But this is precisely my point: how can I let a character who isn’t even real outdo me?Time
The Last Samurai is an original work of brilliance about, in part, the limits of brilliance.”A. S. Byatt - The New Yorker
A triumph—a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form.Off the Shelf
[...] a Molotov cocktail of a book, an incendiary experience for readers that breaks through the mundanity of life, work, and love to achieve greatness.bn.com
It's tough to say who's more of a genius: young Ludo, the Odyssean hero of The Last Samurai; his teacher/mother, Sybilla; or his creator, first-time novelist Helen DeWitt. Ludo is a feisty six-year-old with a talent for languages who, inspired by Akira Kurosawa's classic film Seven Samurai, sets off in search of his father. A totally unique contribution to contemporary literature, DeWitt's debut is a powerful tale of self-discovery that is at once intellectually challenging and profoundly moving. And while The Last Samurai proves at times to be a difficult read, it is an experience that will linger in your mind and heart long after you've finished the book. Highly recommended.
Washington Post Book World
...a brilliant debut novel...keeps things moving at an exhilerating clip...DeWitt is formidably intelligent but engagingly witty...she is a joy to read.ѿ(September 17, 2000)
Time Magazine
Dazzling...an original work of brilliance...
The Boston Globe
The Last Samurai may be the find of the season. I loved the confident
velocity as well as the promise of heady unconventionality. The spell
sustained itself. Within pages I found myself caught up in the strangest
and most gratifying intellectual novel I've read since Norman Rush's
Mating and Nicholas Mosely's Hopeful Monsters...crisp and vivid...The Last
Samurai is very much the story of an education, an arduous discovery of
self...—(September 24, 2000)
Seattle Times
One of the outstanding first novels of 2000...inventive...a
wonderfully drawn portait of a complicated relationship between a mother and
her brilliant young son...Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
DeWitt's ambitious, colossal debut novel tells the story of a young genius, his worldly alienation and his eccentric mother, Sibylla Newman, an American living in London after dropping out of Oxford. Her son, Ludovic (Ludo), the product of a one-night stand, could read English, French and Greek by the age of four. His incredible intellectual ability is matched only by his insatiable curiosity, and Sibylla attempts to guide her son's education while scraping by on typing jobs. To avoid the cold, they ride the Underground on the Circle Line train daily, traveling around London as Ludo reads the Odyssey, learns Japanese and masters mathematics and science. Sybilla uses her favorite film, Akira Kurosawa's classic Seven Samurai, as a makeshift guide for her son's moral development. As Ludo matures and takes over the story's narration, Sibylla is revealed as less than forthcoming on certain topics, most importantly the identity of Ludo's father. Knowing only that his male parent is a travel writer, Ludo searches through volumes of adventure stories, but he is unsuccessful until he happens upon a folder containing his father's name hidden in a sealed envelope. He arranges to meet the man, pretending to be a fan. The funny, bittersweet encounter ends with a gravely disappointed Ludo, unable to confront his father with his identity. Afterward, the sad 11-year-old resumes his search for his ideal parent figure. Using a test modeled after a scene in Seven Samurai, he seeks out five different men, claiming he is the son of each. While energetic and relentlessly unpredictable, the novel often becomes belabored with its own inventiveness, but the bizarre relationship between Sibylla and Ludo maintains its resonant, rich centrality, giving the book true emotional cohesion. Foreign rights sold in Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the U.K. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
Library Journal
DeWitt's first novel revolves around Sibylla, an American displaced in London, and her young son Ludo, both geniuses. Sibylla earns a bare living typing for mundane periodicals like Carpworld and International Cricketer, grudgingly squeezing her assignments between viewings of Kurosawa's classic film, Seven Samurai. Ludo, who has been reared on this film, decides to use the challenges it presents to find his own mysterious father. When he is disappointed with the real thing, he searches for a more acceptable candidate. The last half of the book is very readable and beautifully written, as Ludo discovers that perhaps the perfect father is nonexistent. Overall, however, the excessive display of erudition obstructs DeWitt's wonderful use of language and imagination. After spending too much time either trying to understand her rhetoric or skipping pages loaded with arcane languages or mathematical theories, readers may find it difficult to persist.--Patricia Gulian, South Portland, ME Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\
Myla Goldberg
Exuberant . . . DeWitt is eager to display her
intellectual and artistic gifts. It is easy to be carried
along by the tempo of her prose . . . At its best,
the writing is playful and engaging.—New York Times Book Review
New Yorker
A triumph— a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form, which has more to offer on every reading but is gripping from the very first.Kirkus Reviews
In a witty, wacky, and endlessly erudite debut, DeWitt assembles everything from letters of the Greek alphabet to Fourier analysis to tell the tale of a boy prodigy, stuffed with knowledge beyond his years but frustrated by his mother's refusal to identify his father. Sibylla and five-year-old Ludovic are quite a pair, riding round and round on the Circle Line in London's Underground while he reads the Odyssey in the original and she copes with the inevitable remarks by fellow passengers. Sibylla, an expatriate American making a living as a typist, herself possesses formidable intelligence, but her eccentricities are just as noteworthy. Believing Kurosawa's Seven Samurai to be a film without peer, she watches it day after day, year after year, while in the one-night stand with Ludo's father-to-be, she wound up in bed with him for no better reason than it wouldn't have been polite not to, although subsequently she has nothing but scorn for his utterly conventional (if successful) travel books. Ludo she keeps in the dark about his patrimony, feeding him instead new languages at the rate of one or two a year, and, when an effort to put him in school with others his age wreaks havoc on the class, she resumes responsibility for his education, which, not surprisingly, relies heavily on Kurosawa's film. As Ludo grows up, however, he will not be denied knowledge of his father, and sniffs him out—only to be as disappointed with him as his mother is. Hopes of happiness with the genuine article having been dashed, Ludo moves on to ideal candidates, and approaches a succession of geniuses, each time with a claim of being the man's son. While these effortsareenlightening, they are also futile—and in one case tragic—until Ludo finds his match in one who knows the dialogue of Seven Samurai almost as well as he does. Unabashedly over the top at times but, still, a saga that gives rise to as much amusement as it does sober reflection. A promising start, indeed.