So a novel that appears on the surface to be elitist — concerned as it is with great works of art, scientific achievement, and excellence generally — is actually profoundly anti-elitist at its core. DeWitt’s novel is infused with the belief that any human mind is capable of feats we tend to associate with genius ... DeWitt’s stroke of comic brilliance is to combine the pathetic and parodic in Sibylla’s efforts at survival as Ludo diligently ploughs through the epics of world literature ... The Last Samurai is, in a few ways, an instruction manual. It contains an ethics of living and learning, but it also attempts to tell its readers how to learn and to show them that they can learn things that they might have thought beyond their grasp ... It drinks deeply in the canon while at the same time renewing it.
The Last Samurai is not a novel for everyone—no novel is—but it is a novel for many people. It is deliberately—proudly—erudite and intertextual; it is, like the mind of its author, stubbornly idiosyncratic. But also, importantly: it is a novel less interested in being ambitious for ambition’s sake, than it is in cultivating ambition in its readers ... If DeWitt could not set aside the limitations of her time, The Last Samurai certainly struggles against them. Narrative trains of thought are interrupted, mid-sentence, and then picked back up, pages later ... We are all too dumb, I suspect, for Helen DeWitt, if only because we are too lazy to be the one out of the hundred who refuses to spare herself the trouble of rational thought.
That’s the DeWitt tone—tart, brisk, snobbish, antic. She can take a recognizable social situation or fact and steadily twist it into a surrealist skein ... Repressed pain is the engine of The Last Samurai. It is a wonderfully funny book, but comedy dances near the abyss ... It would be a mistake to force this strange and brave book into a sentimentality it deliberately disrupts. It won’t be made into a conventionally humane domestic novel about a frustrated single mother and a brilliant, questing son. Still, it is not only about being inefficiently intelligent and trying to raise a genius, not only about the inanities of the school system.
DeWitt’s work consistently brings off a striking double movement: her fiction is at once a very modern examination of the relationship between art, science, and commerce, and an exploration of enduring philosophical and moral questions. It is also entertaining, lively, and darkly humorous ... The novel does not feel difficult. The Last Samurai is funny and well-plotted. Its learning is brought forth in such a way that the reader is invited into Sibylla and Ludo’s enthusiasms. We are regularly presented with the spectacle of curious people taking pleasure in learning new things, rather than already-learned characters overawing the reader with their intellects ... A good novel can, and should, compass the entire range of human learning and accomplishment, and far from being a didactic exercise, The Last Samurai shows that such material is the very stuff of compelling fiction.
This bizarre, bold, brilliant book, originally published in 2000, is original both in content and form ... Conversation reflects rhythms of speech rather than formally correct grammar and punctuation, and the narrative moves in and out of digressions, contemplating, for instance, John Stuart Mill’s education. Perhaps the book is a little bloated, but DeWitt’s zeal cannot fail to enchant.
As DeWitt describes her complex plot, with a kind of hilarious deadpan, the novel is 'the story of a single mother who uses Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to provide male role models for her fatherless boy.' As much as the novel does in its 576 pages, this is a pretty succinct and accurate description ... Even as DeWitt’s novel fetishizes video, it provides an elegant—and newly useful—meditation on what it means to feel so intimately close to what we watch on TV ... As much as The Last Samurai is a novel about a mother’s struggle to raise a son on her own, it is also a novel about art—not making art, or inspiring it, but consuming it and engaging with it in a million informal, inappropriate, but profoundly meaningful ways.
DeWitt’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.
The novel is itself evidence of genius. Just shy of 500 pages, it is sure to scare off some readers with a shattered, fragmented form and esoteric passages of Japanese syllabaries, German phrases, and Homeric critique. Dewitt’s writing is digressive, daring, and all its own. Some parts are more convincing than others, but every excursion is vividly animated and greatly affecting ... Dewitt’s fiction is lethal, limitless, and economical. She has more fun on the page than most. The Last Samurai is filled with eccentric flourishes: hieroglyphs, excerpts from Icelandic sagas, and long mathematical number equations from Ludo’s diary about his first weeks in school ... The second half of the novel is structured like a detective story, as Ludo searches for a 'benevolent male'. Each of these stories is heavily laden with the symbolism of a quest, and each bears inventive and mysterious symmetries to the others ... The book’s deep concern is with what we make of opportunity when it presents itself, and the devastating truth that some of us will never recognize that moment.
This is a strange book, with strange charm, and DeWitt launched the literary kitchen sink at it. It should be read by everyone for its splash factor alone, although it will not be enjoyed by everyone. But, like all good samurai, it will finish you, before you can finish it.
The 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...
While energetic and relentlessly unpredictable, the novel often becomes belabored with its own inventiveness, but the bizarre relationship between Sibylla and Ludo maintains its resonant, rich centrality, giving the book true emotional cohesion.
In a witty, wacky, and endlessly erudite debut, DeWitt assembles everything from letters of the Greek alphabet to Fourier analysis to tell the tale of a boy prodigy, stuffed with knowledge beyond his years but frustrated by his mother’s refusal to identify his father ... Unabashedly over the top at times but, still, a saga that gives rise to as much amusement as it does sober reflection. A promising start, indeed.
