The Last Samurai
Helen DeWitt
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Last Samurai
Helen DeWitt
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
So a novel that appears on the surface to be elitist — concerned as it is with great works of art, scientific achievement, and excellence generally — is actually profoundly anti-elitist at its core. DeWitt’s novel is infused with the belief that any human mind is capable of feats we tend to associate with genius.
The Last Samurai is not a novel for everyone—no novel is—but it is a novel for many people. It is deliberately—proudly—erudite and intertextual; it is, like the mind of its author, stubbornly idiosyncratic. But also, importantly: it is a novel less interested in being ambitious for ambition’s sake, than it is in cultivating ambition in its readers.
That’s the DeWitt tone—tart, brisk, snobbish, antic. She can take a recognizable social situation or fact and steadily twist it into a surrealist skein.
DeWitt’s work consistently brings off a striking double movement: her fiction is at once a very modern examination of the relationship between art, science, and commerce, and an exploration of enduring philosophical and moral questions. It is also entertaining, lively, and darkly humorous.
This bizarre, bold, brilliant book, originally published in 2000, is original both in content and form.
As DeWitt describes her complex plot, with a kind of hilarious deadpan, the novel is 'the story of a single mother who uses Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to provide male role models for her fatherless boy.' As much as the novel does in its 576 pages, this is a pretty succinct and accurate description.
DeWitt’s masterful debut, The Last Samurai — first published in 2000, long out of print, and recently reissued in paperback by New Directions — gives us a glimpse of the new breed of novel these ardently multilingual readers and writers might produce.
The novel is itself evidence of genius. Just shy of 500 pages, it is sure to scare off some readers with a shattered, fragmented form and esoteric passages of Japanese syllabaries, German phrases, and Homeric critique. Dewitt’s writing is digressive, daring, and all its own. Some parts are more convincing than others, but every excursion is vividly animated and greatly affecting.
This is a strange book, with strange charm, and DeWitt launched the literary kitchen sink at it. It should be read by everyone for its splash factor alone, although it will not be enjoyed by everyone. But, like all good samurai, it will finish you, before you can finish it..
The best book of 2000, Helen Dewitt’s The Last Samurai, is about murky origins and overlooked genius. It is a novel of two competing quests told by two competing narrators.
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..
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.