kurosawabunga! (The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt)

Member Name: pje

Product:	The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt
Date:	10/08/01 (252 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: DAZZLING

Disadvantages: You won't be clever enough or knowledgeable enough to understand it all.

"?
let's take the example of two men who are about to be ritually disembowelled. A dies at time t of heart failure and B dies at time t+n from having someone plunge a stone knife into his chest and rip the beating heart out with his bare hands. I think we would agree that B's life was not improved by the additional n minutes ?"

Erm, I've never read anything quite like this before.

You don't expect a novel to teach you to read Greek doo yoo?
Well this one does, and some Japanese too. Nor can there be very many books with a chapter called:

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Did you think "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"
was clever and funny? Well I think this is cleverer and funnier.
This is an astonishing, baffling and, at times, spellbinding book.


Helen DeWitt was born in the USA, but grew up in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador. She dropped out of college to read Proust while working as a chambermaid, and then went to Brasenose College, Oxford where she read Greek and Latin literature and gained a doctorate. She now lives in Derbyshire for some reason. The Last Samurai is her first completed novel after fifty attempts.

What is it about? That's a very good question.
It's about possibilities, it's about achieving potential. Learning.
It's an exuberant call to go out and see what you can find in this incredible world rather than settling for what you are given.

I'm sorry, do I sound intoxicated?
It must be the book, I'm only drinking shandy tonight, honest!

Yes, but what's it about?!! Well...

Sibylla is an American who came to Oxford to study languages, she is also a single mother struggling to raise a child prodigy, following in the hothouse footsteps of Mr. Ma (Yo Yo's pa).
Rather idiosyncratically, she decides to provide her son Ludo
with ma
le role models by showing him Akira Kurosawa's classic Japanese film The Seven Samurai over and over and over again.

Ludo learns to read Homer IN GREEK by the age of four,
is keeping a diary by the age of 5¾ and learning Japanese by
his sixth birthday. Oh, and he wants to know who his father is...

Here are two extracts from Ludo's diary:-

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1 April.

Sibylla still did not feel like cleaning a chicken today.
I asked if my father's name was Ludo and she said no.
I asked if it was David and she said no.
I asked if it was Steven and she said no.
I said well what is it then and she said Rumpelstiltskin.
Then she suggested we go out to Ohio Fried Chicken.
I asked if it was really Rumpelstiltskin and she said no.

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14 September, 1993

Today was my second day at school.
We started the day off by painting pictures of animals.
I did a picture of a tarantula with 88 legs. Miss Lewis asked what it was and I explained that it was an oktokaiogdoekontapodal tarantula. I don't know if there are any real ones, I think this is just something I made up. Then I did another picture. This one was of a heptakaiogdoekontapodal tarantula because the first one got in a fight and lost a leg.

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As you can see there are some spectacular linguistic pyrotechnics in this book. But don't be put off by the difficult bits, skip them.
In fact you could start at page 211 if you like, or page 331,
or page 394 even - it's a free country. You would need a degree in Greek grammar to understand anything on page 137 anyway.

This book flackers along like a butterfly in the dazzling sunshine.
As he gets older, Ludo tracks down various men he thinks might be good candidates to be his father. Alo
ng the way there are some fabulous digressions. Tales of exceptional people setting out to explore the world, wonderful short stories woven in - refugees from those other forty-nine unfinished novels perhaps?

If you like watching Kurosawa's film The Seven Samurai over and over again, or if you're a single mother who speaks Japanese and Greek and is trying to bring up a gifted child, then this is the book for you. It's a pity you won't have the time to read it of course.
If you're not a single mother who speaks Japanese and Greek and who is trying to bring up a gifted child, then read it anyway.

In my op on Pat Barker's latest book I said that I was looking forward to reading more opinions about it. There haven't been any so far (tut tut) so I'm probably wasting my breath again here, but I really do want to hear what other people think of this book.
I think it is dazzling in every way.

It has a bright yellow cover, adorned by an adorable picture of
a young boy with his nose in a book called... The Last Samurai.


¶ Hardback: £16.99 ¶ pp530 ¶ ISBN: 0701169567 ¶
¶ Paperback: £6.99 ¶ pp494 ¶ ISBN: 0099284626 ¶

By the way, did I say it was dazzling?_________________________________________ ___________ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯

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