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 PlaceChristoph Martin WielandGrete WeilWendy WalkerPaul VerhaeghenDubravka UgrešićAmos TutuolaJonathan Swift (? probably not)Ronald SukenickAli SmithXiaoxiao Lanling ShengPhilip Roth (probably?)Maurice RocheIshmael ReedAnne Gédéon LaFitte, Marquis de PelleportGil OrlovitzComte de Lautréamont Lee KleinDanilo KišGuillermo Cabrrera InfanteLiam HowleyH.D.Gustave FlaubertHenry FieldingRalph EllisonRosalyn DrexlerW. COQKay BoyleRobert BolañoOh 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 SamuraiProloguei1 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]Interludeii1 We Never Get Off at Sloane Square for Nebraska Fried Chicken2 99,98, 97, 963 We Never Get Off at Embankment to Go to McDonald’s4 19, 18, 175 We Never Go Anywhere6 We Never Do Anything7 End of the Lineiii1 1, 2, 32 a, b, cMy First Week At SchoolMy Second Week At SchoolMy Third Week At SchoolMy Fourth Week At School3 999999[7] = 999999[....etc....that’s me, nr, not bothering with maths]999iv1 Trying to feel sorry for Lord Leighton2 I know all the words3 Funeral Games4 Steven, age 115 For David, with best wishesv1 A good samurai will parry the blow2 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 med) all of the abovee) 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) noi) yesj) maybek) let’s wait and seel) no, I’ve got more important things to do like ask aidan for more book=recsm) this whole review is a wreckn) 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 Greekt) one in Hebrewu) one auf Deutschv) one in Arabicw) one in Chinesex) 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 authorsy) 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?
The Last Samurai is a Babel of a book, a clamor of languages and sounds and symbols. Yet it speaks like the Christian story of the Apostles at Pentecost with tongues of fire over them and and they speak all the languages of the world to each other with equal understanding. The story begins with a mother, Sibylla. She lives a life burdened with high expectations and doubly burdened when she cannot reach up to them. Her father was an atheist who went to a ninth-rate seminary to please his father and became a failed business man. Her mother was a musician repressed into accounting by her neurotic father who would not be satisfied even by genius. She went into Oxford and buried herself deep in into intellectual specificity and obscurity, and now writes for pet magazines. After a one-night stand with a writer she calls 'Liberace' for his vainglory, she gives birth to a son. She names him Ludo. He learns quickly, too quickly. He takes in vector calculus, ancient Greek, French, classical Chinese, Arabic, Icelandic, French and colloquial Japanese like water. It is thus fitting that his name comes from the Latin ludus, meaning game. All of it is a game to him. He plays with Greek verb declensions and original Icelandic sagas and counting Chinese and Japanese numbers and marks up The Odyssey with fat colored markers. When he is introduced to primary school, he argues with the teacher about John Stuart Mill and concludes, without a hint of arrogance, that schooling would be a disaster.Ludo is a lonesome child. By age 11, his only socialization aside from his mother is with the other children in his judo class. His mother withdraws further into herself. His father was never here. Instead, Sibylla plays the Kurosawa movie, Seven Samurai, as a surrogate for Ludo's father and as obsessive emotional distraction for himself. At this point, Ludo concludes that he must find his own father.Here the narrative shifts entirely. Ludo's mother fades almost entirely from the picture as he searches for his new father. The facts multiply. Facts are not answers. Experimental novels often shy away from plots and narratives, but there is still 'A Story' here, cloaked in the references to the Seven Samurai and the Odyssey. Genius, as expanding and powerful as it can be, is not always the lone answer to emotional isolation. This second story is about making peace with these images we have of ourselves, and of attempting to find some value in ourselves if we cannot reach these imagined ideals. Realizing that we are human and thus limited in our capabilities does not mean that every person should kill themselves or despair, it is a push some other emotional grounding. If the boy's father is lacking or insufficient, then he decides that someone else must be his father - not a genetic father, but symbolic father. The story is then a series of emotional dialogues between a boy searching for a father and a father who is human and therefore deficient in some way. Not just to the artificially high standards of the boy, but because they are all human.The Last Samurai is somehow a book with both vast learning and feeling - these things are so often portrayed as mutually exclusive, but here they are together. It is an intellectual investigation and a psychological journey, one which retells the old story of mother, father, and son through a new vessel, on to new shores. The samurai has parried the blow.
Do You like book The Last Samurai (2002)?
Woah. Amazing book - flashy, but with a chewy center. The author spends most of the novel being so awesome it's almost over the top, but fortunately she never goes too far. The characters are all profound and compelling, and deeply tragic in their own individual ways; the themes of connection between geniuses, and of self-isolation, really hit home, and Ludo turned from an excellent plot device in the early chapters to an excellent character in the later ones. And, surprisingly, a blazingly fast read.I regret the brevity of the education section in the first half, though. Clearly DeWitt needed to get on with the story, but I was learning so many things, Greek among them! Ludo's studies felt more cursory later in the book, which made sense I suppose considering the change of focus, but it would have been nice to see more what he was working on, reading, thinking about.One bit of advice for any potential reader: while it's not necessary to understand the plot, please do yourself a favor and fine a copy of Seven Samurai and watch it first. It will make a few sections of the novel make a lot more sense, and will give you images to tie into the movie. Plus, you'll be watching a classic of modern cinema.
—Max
[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.
—Matt
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.
—Diane
