RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksDeWitt’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 ... As Wunderkinder and their eccentric guardians go, Ludo and Sibylla remain remarkably sufferable, due in part to the tight grip DeWitt maintains on her protagonists’ purse strings ... DeWitt’s insistence on style in its incisive sense — razor-stropped similes, distinctions shaved mandoline-fine — suggests an affinity with the fiction of Lydia Davis, whose spare, austere short stories and fastidious translations from the French attend to sentencecraft with nearly neurosurgical precision.
