Book Group: Helen DeWitt's "The Last Samurai" - Discussion Thread

Yeah I enjoyed it, shame it petered out at the end.

Yeah - I thought maybe we could do one a week? Then if you missed a week's story, no big deal, just read the next one? I don't know.

I was going to nominate Junot Diaz's Drown one time if book club is to become a thing. That might fit what you're looking for. It wouldn't need a week per story though, they're pretty short.

just finished this the other day. wasn't really a fan of how she structured the second half after samurai confrontations.

however I have decided that I should watch seven samurai pretty soon.

The thing I liked about the week-a-story idea is that you could read it on like Wednesday and then catch up with the discussion? Because reading stuff in sync with other people is hard. I think shorter is better really - c.f. the listening clubs (rip) where people were asking for 2 listens of 2 albums a week, plus buying/download time - that's clearly too much commitment, but a 40 page-or-less story probably wouldn't be, especially if it was online somewhere to begin with.

I see what you mean. The listening clubs got a bit ridiculous - the funk one was pumping out four albums a week, with no discussion - hardly seems like a club if there's no interaction.

I reckon your idea should work, but it'll take a ringleader pushing it forward I think - these things can peter out a bit. I'd be up for participating anyway - haven't read much in the way of stories for a long time.

Do you think it would be better to start it here, or on ile? Or does it not make any difference in the SNA era?

Its natural home is here I think. But be sparing imo, give it month or two's lead-in - people have to buy books, clear time, etc.

How about picking off from where we left off? Both myself and roxymuzak registered an interest in starting this again.

Suggested seasonal.

Check here again round mid-week to see if there is any interest with a view to getting a nominations thread going (if anyone wants to go ahead then by all means).

Then a poll. Then reading.

i'm in.

Yeah, I'm interested too. And I'd like to go ahead and nominate Egan's "Good Squad" which was mentioned in some other thread. But ... are we nominating here or do you want to do a separate nominations thread? Either way I'd like to throw in the Egan and I'll try to come up with other ideas for candidates. Do we want to stick to contemporary literary stuff? or maybe do a classic? My only thought is that I'd like to have it be not too long. Maybe 350 pgs or less, just because I have a ton of other reading to do (I'm in school).

Anyone in New York/Boston been/going to see her book tour for Lightning Rods?

she's got a new story out - http://recommendedreading.tumblr.com/post/29475857392/helen-dewitt-recovery

Yikes. Rural retreat did not go well.

yeah, that sounded bad. saw hints for a while but not the details.

Very nice interview/discussion

Happened upon it after reading Will Self on how serious fiction is a minority interest now but my eyes just stopped as I skimmed ahead to a discussion of McLuhan. I only know 3rd/4th hand versions of his ideas and I suppose those two things merged a bit...how fiction that isn't at all worthwhile is made today because those energies have gone to other things: TV (the discussion of Brit comedy in the DeWitt piece), film (more the case in France, see Margerite Duras who is like the mid-point between these tendencies).

OTOH wrt to Self I saw that as excuse making for how badly this generation have done - not that I would know. I have v little interest in British fiction, and his article which is why I barely read it.

After all that I find the DeWitt interview awesome - love how they are saying at times 'you know, just stop reading contemporary fiction', even if some of it is good do you need it? Funny too bcz DFW (who they talk about) doesn't interest me at all! It does sound like the sort of thing Will Self is saying, but here its cast in a much more stimulating manner.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n16/helen-dewitt/diary

that sounds shitty

was some of this public before? i had a weird sense of deja vu reading it

on her site maybe?

A blog entry on this was linked here.

Started Lightning Rods in the morning, saw this in the afternoon, then onto another few chapters of LR...just an odd day. xp

blog entries/bits on twitter - yeah really shitty. I'm not sure I'd still be there, tho I can understand her wish not to be threatened out of her home, and the financial and other practical reasons for not doing so. I imagine it's hard even in periods of repose not to find the association of place with events too strong to not be mentally overwhelmed by them, and the purblind stupidity of the law must only aggravate those feelings. just hope she can start feeling safe, and start writing again, tho it doesn't look like she's going to be feeling safe any time soon.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/09/03/helen-dewitt/tashu-duset-sekar/

So ties in to The Last Samurai.

On a few bits and pieces and great as usual with it.

whoops, sorry, meant this to go in this thread, missed it in my search because of the quote marks

http://lithub.com/seven-ways-to-hand-sell-a-lost-modern-masterpiece/

and podcast interview mentioned here:

http://paperpools.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/podcast-with-scott-gosnell.html?m=1

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/06/08/helen-dewitt-on-the-last-samurai/

http://evergreenreview.com/read/sexual-codes-of-the-europeans/

god that's a beautiful website

it’s a really wonderful piece of writing as well. utterly piquant.

Sweet baby jesus that hit the spot tonight. Maybe the first piece of writing by Helen I have really fallen hard for since The Last Samurai

i really enjoyed this. finished it last week. i missed the mom's voice though. would have liked to know more about her. it switches from mom to kid pretty quickly. or it felt like it did to me. there was obviously the long first section all in mom-voice. i love how readable she made the structure of the book. that takes some work right there. could have been a mess or precious or whatever. but it really keeps you going. brainy page-turners are my fave kind of page-turners.

curious about lightning rods. people don't seem to like it half as much.

Last Samurai is the best

lightning rods is amazing. her style and tone manages to be very controlled, rich, and capable of great flexibility and humour (her ability to write very well without punctuation, that you mentioned elsewhere scott, is a sign of that). the sexual codes of the europeans posted just above is also brilliant. she must write more.

Lightning Rods is great. And more topical than ever, tbh.

New and near you soon: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/some-trick/

New and near you soon: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/some-trick🕸/

Should all be getting reviewer-early copies anyway, we've all done good work on this thread.

Yes. So excited to see this. Although I still wish that YOUR NAME HERE would get a proper release.

Amazon says this is 13 stories. I assume short stories. If so, I’m curious whether this collects her short stories that have already been published but in difficult to access literary journals, etc, or whether this is all new material.

i did write to hdw about your name here and she responded giving a number of reasons why it wasn’t available. publisher reluctance in various forms - “too adventurous for a mainstream publisher” was what she was told, infuriatingly.

she did also say it was a collaboration and that people never read it as such, but as a piece by her, which she didn’t want. also, she said if she had known how it wd turn out she probably wouldn’t have done it in the first place.

it sounds - as often with her - there’s a lot of complexity. i wish her life was easier! sounds like she had a bad year last year as well (from her most recent blog post).

"Novelist Helen DeWitt describes her new book, Some Trick, as a story collection preoccupied with 'the cussedness of talent.' Below, the author of The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods recommends books that illuminate the workings of singular minds."

only read three of these, the tufte, and transfiguration of the commonplace, which is wonderful, and against the gods, which is also excellent.

Collection is out next week; my friend who subscribes to more periodicals than I do says she’s been popping up a bunch so it seems like her PR is doing their job. I’m excited and I hope people buy it.

not until the 26th June in the U.K. apparently ffs.

so I read Some Trick, and i'm just going to chuck some stuff down about it, because although i've got plenty of unresolved thoughts about it, if i try and do anything more cogent i won't get it down. if this were an essay i would probably title it from a line in the last story Entourage - "Umlauts up the gazoo". Most of the stories are in the recent HdW manner - content and style. Content: obsessional application of theoretical if not mathematical models to creative or artistic problems, and the absurdity of progressing from a reasonable point via reason to an eccentric point. Style: dry, laconic authorial control, generally indirect free speech, that is to say third person heavily laced with the expressions and thinking and reasoning of her enthusiastic and excitable characters or doubtful pragmatic characters. Managing the filo thin layers of control, voice and irony (rationality, sympathy, humour, contempt, enthusiasm, tragedy) so that both the dexterity and a unity of HdW 'voice' is apparent is one of the main thrills of reading her, aside from the content (tho the unexpected juxtapositions and logic of that content is very much part of that layering. To expand on that, the mathematical, rational 'mode' which drives the direction of many stories, is absolutely a voice, a layer, a structure.

There is a sprinkling of stories from her time at Oxford in 1985. These are different in style. Clearly more juvenile works, less tight in style, more juvenile in their expression of cleverness (of course another excitement of HdW is the cleverness). Their subject is often an intelligent female voice existing in a pragmatic, wry and doubtful space created by forceful or dullard men, or just men who aren't as clever as they think they are. These are less successful, I think, though Famous Last Words is very enjoyable.

It does raise the question of why these are collected here in this way. It's not, as far as I can tell, a retrospective or collection as such. The collection has a good, elliptical poem as an epigraph.

Next time someone tells you desire
Is a trick of grammnar
Tell him
If what I have is what I said I wanted
It's not what I wanted
I know what I want
But I don't know its name

and later

Some trick

So using this, and the title, to try and draw things together a bit:

[*]It's a trick of stories in the card-playing sense there are thirteen, and i'm not sure whether there is an interrelation or symbolism relating to that at play – nothing jumped out at my, but I'm afraid to say some of my reading was a little inattentive (tipsy on tube or interrupted by things, and just generally i haven't felt as sharp recently as i'd like to be). I might need to look at that again.

[*]It's the trick of grammar, of letters, of foreign words and foreign mores creating and canalising desire: (Brutto about an Italian art dealer's enthusiasm for an incredibly ugly suit ('ma che brutto!') an artist made in her sempstress training.

[*]It's the trick of managing artistic control for the vision you want in a world that is trying through enthusiasm, fandom or lack of understanding to grasp hold of that indifferent to the things that make important to its creator.

[*]It's very much the calculus of money and creativity – something that affects Helen de Witt directly.

And in fact it seemed to me that a motive behind this collection may have been to keep some money coming in. She is clearly struggling in the way that many of the artists in her stories struggle - artistic/typographic/visual control, and money.

There are odd linkages and abuttments between the stories: the name (the character?) Gil, Stanisław Lem's Robot stories - these may form little 'tricks' of stories, within the overall hand.

Nothing here as good as The Sexual Codes of the Europeans.

Ticks of her style jump out, or rather the style of the types of people with which she populates her stories, become very obvious - the emphasis of speech with italics, and capitisation and so. many. exclamation marks!!!!!

Is this a problem or not? I don't know. I came to the conclusion not particularly, given that these stories are about a certain type of person, but, well, that certain type of person, the logic of their mind and their manner, is also Helen de Witt's area of concern – they and their thinking is her subject matter. It's noticeable anyway, across compressed short stories. I found the patterns of speech in two English rock band stories quite painful, and the stories not the best in the collection, and given the tight integration of conceptually diverse objects is one of her 'tricks', that is a problem.

Occasionally I found the compression of her style confounded meaning. tho as i say, i wasn't always reading as attentively as i might have done. It does occur to me that at these moments of extreme compression language, or rather an language as an arrangement of letters, becomes as much about texture as content (something made explicit in the final story, Entourage.

However, there's a load to delight in here: Brutto, My Heart Belongs to Bertie, The French Style of Mlle Matsumoto, and Entourage, Famous Last Words.

I also went back and read some of the stories immediately on finishing them. There is just something about her writing that I find utterly compelling (I almost said something about her 'style' but as I say, it is also the content, and the interplay of the two, though even that is too formalist a framing of it).

What’s that epigraph from?! It’s great.

it's her own poem – so i guess not really an epigraph. 'introductory poem' would have been better. that's just a part of it – it toys around with The Wizard of Oz (the last line is 'because because because because because') and absences, the way... well, i thought i had the knack of it the first time I read it, but I can't remember what i thought it was about:

'What would you do with a heart but try not to hurt?'
The Tin Man hadn't the heart to disappoint him.
He thanked him.
'I feel nothing,' he thought.
'But I wouldn't hurt a Behaviourist.'

there's a thing in the book that maps onto this – which is people coming with incoherent or received thinking and feeling, and the narrator (usually) being doubtful, polite, or cheerful - not really having a heart as such, but still human enough - examining the problem with statistics, or probability, or some obsessive rationale and working it through in a way that doesn't conform to the received feelings, but often helps, and HdW's characters often want to help – they're very good natured (that's not always a good thing). Here that's the Tin Man saying well I haven't got a heart, but you know, I'll do my best here. HdW's characters are often like the Wizard of Oz characters.

and that mathematics, or reason applied not in a 'common sense' way, but as a heuristical programme of life is a way out of cliche, and inherited wisdom. that it provides the tools and the experience that we lazily construct received notions of heart, feeling, desire to. sorry, feeling my away around, not very cogently. I am also being laboured – the progress of these people is funny as they hit up against the world's conventions, but the humour is generous to them, caustic to the conditions, wry at the interaction.

What of Dorothy in the poem? That's the last part:

But Dorothy? I don't BELIEVE Judy Garland could fake it.
I think she was glad Technicolor was only a dream
Glad to find she had never left home
Glad to wake up in black and white

Because because because because because

let me rewrite that terrible paragraph - i don't think it actually makes a *load* of sense but the least I can do is make the words into sentences:

mathematics, or reason applied not in a 'common sense' way, but as a heuristical programme of life, is a way out of cliche, and inherited wisdom, received thinking. we lazily find our way through our feelings, the world, with metaphor and loose-ish psychology. that mathematical reasoning provides the tools to see those aspects of us and the world in a way that is slightly strange, clarified by not being muddled up with conventional thinking, and still recognisably human (ie not rationality as applied by forceful wielders of 'reason' but as an exploratory toolkit).

Great stuff Fizzles and roundly otm I think, wish I had the wherewithal to respond in depth but it’s not that kind of weekend