Rating: 
Summary: An inspiring tale spun by an intelligent writer.
Review: In "The Last Samurai" DeWitt grabs hold of silky threads of thought from the webs her personal experiences and knowledge and crafts them into an amazing story the keeps the reader engaged and intrigued. So many nuggets of information so unrelated to the plot, yet so critical to the grasp that the book has on the reader, keep the story swirling in the readers mind, always moving forward.
Aside from the obvious draw to the life of Ludo (our young hero) "The Last Samurai" has piqued my interest in so many disparate topics. I want to know more about everything DeWitt pulls into the story... Kurosawa, lost tribes in China, obscure painters, the syllabraries of languages I have had no previous exposure to. Well done! An excellent read for the inquisitive mind with a thirst for knowledge.
Rating:
Summary: Lessons in irony
Review: First, allow me to offer my condolences to those who have classified Helen Dewitt's "The Last Samurai" as "pretentious nattering" and "showing off" (and especially for the egocentric ignoramus who compared this work to sushi with the fatuous claim that "no one really likes it, but they have to say they do, to appear sophisticated"). You missed out on a great novel.
The term 'irony' comes from the greek 'eironeia,' meaning feigned ignorance. In modern parlance, irony denotes a discontinuity between what is said and what is meant--the feigned ignorance is on the part of the utterer, not the recipient. Irony is an elitist mechanism, humor for the informed. If you don't know (or at least have a frame of reference for) the source material, you won't get the jokes. Helen Dewitt's "The Last Samurai" is steeped to the gills in irony.
No, I do not mean that this work is only for the elite. Unlike T. S. Eliot, who insisted that the various lines of his "Wasteland" not be translated from the Hebrew and Latin, Dewitt translates her foreign words and phrases.
Nor do I agree that this novel is a lot of work. Quite the contrary, despite the length, "The Last Samurai" is a quick read (I was disappointed that it was over so soon). You do not have to understand any language but English to understand "The Last Samurai." You don't need to learn the greek alphabet, the hiragana, or any of the kanji, to see what the characters are going through. You do not have to solve any of Ludo's math problems. You don't even have to see Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" (if you haven't, though, you should). You do, however, have to understand what it means to really want to read a work in its original language. You do, however, have to be able to view learning a foreign alphabet or syllabary as a fruitful endeavor. Most important of all, you do have to understand what it is to want to go on being different despite all the pressures to conform to a standard you know to be lower.
One reviewer compared "The Last Samurai" to "Little Man Tate," judging each work as a "thinly veiled portrait of an insecure former 'gifted child.'" Oh, you can positively taste the miasma of working-class snobbery rising off of that line, can't you? Dewitt, in fact, shows us (in Sybilla and her parents) three prime examples of insecure former prodigies, each one having run aground intellectually through slight variations on tangential travel and accompanying enertia. Dewitt focuses a harsh light on Sybilla's inferiority complex throughout the novel.
Dewitt succeeds, however, where many works about gifted children fail; whe provides a bildungsroman about a gifted child who is believably gifted, believably a child, and believably maturing. Ludo is insatiably curious, intellectually indefatigable, and lucky enough to have the eidetic memory to support his desires.
The only appreciable flaw I could see in the work was the somewhat abrupt insertion of the Japanese piano virtuoso. The ending never quite mitigates strangeness of his first appearance in this work. I consider this a minor plot hiccup, however, and not enough to drop my rating down a full star. This is an incredible novel, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoys learning.
Fair warning, though, if you've ever had any desire to learn a new language, this work will likely rekindle that desire. I've already spent a buttload on books for learning Japanese.
Rating:
Summary: Dear Helen,
Review: Hope you're home safe and sound. Thank you for your wonderful book and for the tremendous sacrifice (unbidden and bidden) such creation entails.
Rating:
Summary: This Isn't That Difficult, Guys
Review: I agreed with "pretentious nattering". I don't feel that an intelligent book necessarily needs to ramble on with intellectual references that have no basis in the lives of everyday people. I found no truth in any of the characters in the book except in the way they might exist in the mind of the hyper-intellectual. If this disqualifies me from membership in the club, I'll have to just live with that.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, engaging book - in a class by itself
Review: I'm no literary critic, but this book is one of the most brilliant I have read in the last year. Not only is the premise of the story engaging but the techniques Ms. DeWitt employs work beautifully to weave a witty and endearing novel. An interesting cast of characters, especially Ludo and Sybilla! Lessons in French, Italian, Ancient Greek, and, of course, Japanese! Travels from the Amazon to the wilds of Central Asia! And select scenses from Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai"! What is there not to love?
Rating: 
Summary: Fun to read and great idea
Review: It is very interesting to see how would Ludo face the world. A genius but he is still a child. It is very funny how he reacts to the world and search for a father. I still don't see a tight "connection" between Ludo and the "Seven Samurai". Also, the ending seems a little sudden.
Rating:
Summary: I wish there was more to read
Review: Ludo is four when we meet him. He has all the usual foibles of someone that age - when he wants something, he wants it NOW. He has no volume control, and he's stubbornly insistent on bringing along favorite objects when he leaves the house. What Ludo wants to bring along in the stroller is a massive Homeric dictionary, so that he can look things up while he reads the Odyssey. He's reading the Odyssey because his mother Sibylla has said that she won't teach him Japanese until he's finished it. Sometimes Sibylla tells the story, sometimes Ludo, as the two negotiate raising a genius on the minimal wage Sibylla earns from typing in old issues of magazines. As he grows older, Ludo's learning outstrips his mother's not inconsiderable mental skills, and he turns his mind to solving the puzzle of who his father is, influenced heavily by the strategic skills he learns from The Seven Samurai, a movie his mother watches incessantly. This book is a joy to read, absorbing, fascinating and unpredictable. Its characters, even the peripheral ones, are intricately sketched in and DeWitt's writing throughout pushes you onward to a finish that is satisfying in every way, except that the book is then over.
Rating:
Summary: Make that 10 stars to the tenth power, and keep multiplying!
Review: Once in a too-long while, at midpoint in a great tale, I become aware that I have absolutely no idea where the author is going to take me next. I don't mean waiting to find out "whodunit," or wondering how characters will sustain themselves once the traumatizing crimes/illnesses/abuses of their pasts are shockingly revealed, circa most 1990s literary fiction. I'm talking about covering new ground emotionally and intellectually and spiritually, a wholly original experience. Think of Robert Olen Butler's short stories in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, or Ian McEwan's novel Enduring Love, or the Wim Wenders films "Wings of Desire," "Paris, Texas," and "Until the End of the World." Helen DeWitt tops them all with The Last Samurai.The bare story line describes an unmarried, impoverished, depressed mother, Sibylla, whose precocious only child, Ludo, searches for a father figure and for his way in life. Sounds familiar, but I promise you haven't read anything in this book before. There is not the tiniest hint of sentimentality here, not a single false or maudlin line. DeWitt writes rollickingly funny and accessible dialogue on one page then, on the next, veers off into a third-person tangent so obscure that readers have to work hard to keep pace. But put in the effort, and you'll be rewarded. On first reading the joy your gray matter takes in this story may almost-not quite-mask its effect on your heart. Sibylla and Ludo react to every situation by turning it into a hypothetical construct. They debate with each other and within their own heads as if real life dilemmas were simply a matter of theory or philosophy, and it takes some time to understand that they're using reason as a cover for fury, panic, or grief. The Last Samurai isn't a sad book but, for all its braininess, it's emotionally detailed. It disarms the reader quietly, just in time for one of the most fully realized scenes I have ever read, in the third to the last chapter. Profound events that should terrify little Ludo instead reveal his fundamental kindness and drive him into an intellectual frenzy, trying to parse what he thinks with what he feels. Despite his wit he's too young to have learned that the mind and heart don't have to be consistent. That knowledge remains beyond him, but you get the pleasure of seeing him move toward it. In one of the book's funnier passages, an elementary school teacher complains to Sibylla about the impact the six year old Ludo's stellar performance has had on his peers (at school Ludo is called Stephen): "I have one boy who has been working his way through the alphabet one letter at a time and just last week he finally reached the stage where he could recognize all the letters with confidence, well, I am not saying Stephen necessarily means to be unkind but what do you think the effect is if Stephen starts writing all the names of the dinosaurs in Greek and explaining that a lot of the letters are the same? If you want my opinion that boy has more of an accomplishment to be genuinely proud of in that single alphabet than Stephen with dozens, but he was absolutely devastated. Weeks of work undone at a stroke." If this first novel offers any inkling of pure ability, it would be similarly, comically unfair to put any contemporary writer in the same class with Helen DeWitt.
Rating:
Summary: Every time I read this book it sends me into fits of giggles
Review: The back says it's a story about a genus boy and his mother. And yes, it absolutely is. But it's also a book that's less about missing fathers than about keeping mothers. It has everything and nothing to do with the movie The Seven Samurai. It acts as a kind of a rosetta stone for Japanese, Inuit, Norse, Greek & Latin. It sideswipes the basic principles of aerodynamics, some math, history, philosophy, religion and death. And yet, I kind of think the author is in love with adventure novels and travel writers too. I don't want to really bore you with the details (or reduce an amazing book to paltry words written by a half-rate lit critic like myself). Suffice it to say, every time I read this book it moves me. It makes me giggle - loudly and usually inappropriately. I read in a coffee shop for two hours on Wednesday night and made snarf-choke-chuckle sounds so often I know I drew stares. Each time I read it I'm caught up by the diction, the style, the brain, the sarcasm and the intense joy. I cannot recommend this book enough. I'm in the process of buying it for those I love so they will know what all the fuss is about. If you're smart, you'll read it too.
Rating:
Summary: A brainy read that exhausted moms will love
Review: The book's title refers to Akira Kurosawa's film, The Seven Samurai. If you haven't seen the movie, it won't impede your pleasure of reading this novel, though you'll probably be eager to rent a copy afterwards. Don't let the title or the reference fool you. The book has nothing to do with war lords or feudal Japan. Instead it revolves around Sybilla, an American living in London and an unwed mother, raising her son, Ludo, alone. Sybilla is exceptionally intelligent and her particular passion is for languages. In fact, she makes the study of linguistics seem fascinating, exciting and almost sexy. Ludo, is a genius, picking up numbers and alphabets and languages almost faster than Sybilla can teach him. Short of money, mother and son spend the winter months riding London's Circle Line reading Greek. The identity of Ludo's father is rather an embarrassment to Sybilla and to compensate for Ludo's lack of a father in his life, Sybilla has him watch a video of The Seven Samurai over and over again hoping that the characters in the film will serve as surrogate male role models for him. The first half of the novel is Sybilla's. She's a fascinating character that while brilliant makes some odd personal choices and seems to be missing common sense as she reveals the events stumbling towards her present circumstances. Her exhaustion at barely keeping one step ahead of Ludo's ever expanding brain is palpable. The second half of the book shifts to Ludo's perspective at the age of twelve and focuses on his quest for his real father and some idealized substitutes. This part of the journey is both more painful and more poignant. What's strange is that he narrates with the voice of an adult but from the experience of a 12 year old boy. His dedication to his quest is fierce and the results are mixed. He tests some possible fathers by telling them that he is their son producing varied reactions both dramatic and comic. DeWitt's prose is bright and clear, unfolding an engaging tale of a mother and son and the fathers that might have been. This is a remarkable first novel by DeWitt and was one of my favorite reads of last year.
|
