RaveGrantaThe 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 ... There is so much contained within its pages...and this plenitude is heartening, even when the themes of DeWitt’s writing are themselves very sad. It is the novel I have read which best expresses the honest and sad truth of art: that it is often produced in precarity and performed in near silence, but that it can also redeem a life ... I doubt we’ll see anything like it for another decade...
