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

Is "Penguin English" a real term? Did the character mean "pidgin"?

I think it's her coinage, but she means the stiff, slightly fussy kind of English common in old Penguin Classics translations, esp from the 50s and 60s. (read a lot of these while self-educating as a teen, so Penguin English made me laugh).

OK, that's possible.

The book seems to get quite a bit more problematic in the next section. I'm still enjoying it in spite of the face that i don't like the characters one bit.

I'm reminded, somewhat, of Richard Powers whose books are very clever and entertaining but who presents you with a lot of people who are hard to love or even like. Stil, I do really like his books in spite of my misgivings.

I generally find child prodigies v. annoying. I had forgotten that.

haha same. this is what had put me off the book in the past (but i'm enjoying it despite that)

The book seems to get quite a bit more problematic in the next section. I'm still enjoying it in spite of the face that i don't like the characters one bit.

i only really liked them in 2nd half of the book, which is a lot more tender and less rigid

that's good to hear, ta.

yeah i've just started that part

Ok, wrote some more notes on the way to work -

child as accumulation of frustrated careers of forebears?

Fragments/uncompleted works symbolic of uncompleted thwarted careers (Aaron and Moses - Schoenberg's artistic plan frustrated by commercial requirements in the US). (Fragments also see 'one task a day' stuff of Yo Yo Ma). Like Browning? The attempt to achieve something achieves spiritually the same as the greatest artists no matter your lack of skill? ("Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,or what's a heaven for?")

Sybilla often wanting to say one thing but realising she must say another because it's polite - a learning process of its own (and often the problem that high intellectual acheivers have? socialising in an equal way with others?). Still, doesn't come naturally.

That said, I find her sympathetic and funny. Engaged with the difficult business of bringing up a child and uncomplacent about him growing up normally (ie, not as the sort of person who could throw someone into the sea if told to) without instruction.

i still haven't read on to next week's section, where i expect things to open up a bit in respect of both language-learning and self-other relations, but i was reflecting the other day on how much or whether this book is very 'psychological', and it occurred to me:

the use of extremely elementary greek in the '-syllabic' sequence serves to set up interiors/exteriors between the characters and between the characters and reader in a quite particular way. when it involves the occurrence of signs on the page that the reader can't even make sense of, he's likely to feel just shut out, and in that sense alienated from the characters for whom the words are supposed to be meaningful. but when the greek is written out in latin script, the reader could at least sound it out; and since in the '-syllabic' sequence, at least, it follows a pattern the reader can use to reconstruct what the sounds mean, it's within the reader's grasp to translate and then understand what's being said. but, knowing well enough what's being said without having undertaken to translate it, the reader will probably also recognize how little understanding it in the original will help him understand about the people who understand it 'untranslated'; nevertheless, the barrier is still there.

at this stage ludo can act as an intermediary between the reader and sibylla since we're closer to his stage of (foreign) language-learning than sibylla's.

sibylla's relationship to ludo is different from ours partly because of the way, in the '-syllabic' scene, she's able to ignore him. we might have to ignore something that is closer, to us, to 'noise'; she's ignoring something that makes sense; it's just not related to what she needs to be doing right then.

(i suppose this is connected in a pretty straightforward way to the kinds of stuff about dewitt in that LRB article about 'your name here' and her post-'samurai' existence: the amount of alienation between people effected by failures to understand one another's language, versus the relative ease with which that alienation could be removed with just a little bit of work.)

Feel like I should post -something- before I start the next session. You've all seen and said way more than I'm able to though. It took me longer to read this thread than to read the assigned section, hah.

I am curious about one bit of reference: my copy said Boris Sidis was a wunderchild that turned out not so great etc -- but surely that was his son William James Sidis. Was this simply an error that was changed in other editions? (I see J. upthread mentioning him without commenting on it, hence my suspicion)
I was trying to figure out if it was intentional, and if so, what it means. I don't know enough about most of the language stuff etc in the book to know if there's a lot of bluffing on Sibylla's part. I assumed there wasn't until I saw that reference.

Ennihoo, I've enjoyed it moderately well so far. Liked the stuff about "Something" looking out of the father etc. Funny that Ratsey mentions de Vries, as the Chopin references made me think of his "The Blood of the Lamb". But that didn't feel relevant; certainly just a product of me having read that recently.
Not sure I trust the telling of the evening with Liberace -- on the one hand the story is sort of pathetic, so perhaps that's a reason to believe it, but then I can't help but think Sibylla'd rather convince us that it was -her choice-, even if it's a silly one, than to admit she'd been wooed by that offputting fellow. I was wondering why she went home with him in the first place.
There was one scene that I found tedious, but since it's been a week already, I've managed to forget whatever it was.

Hrm, probably should've started writing this at home, so I could look up whatever I've underlined etc, but I don't think there was anything not mentioned already. Think there was something near the beginning that made me think "honor" would be a major theme. Believe it was the dad who went on about "giving the other side a fair chance" etc. Fits well with the samurai as well.

Ideally you'd want your kid to be a greater physical presence to you than a wailing voice who occasionally needs to be dumped upstairs.

― Ismael Klata, Tuesday, 7 September 2010 12:49 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well he's more than a wailing voice, he's a questioning, information devouring, knowledge vampire, who might well leave little time/effort left for a proper mother/son relationship.

― ledge, Tuesday, 7 September 2010 13:07 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I think I've changed my mind, or at least my attitude. The clues are in the chapter headings in this section: 'We never get off at Sloane Square for Nebraska fried Chicken', 'We never get off at Embankment for McDonalds', 'We never go anywhere', 'We never do anything'. Ludo is perhaps not entirely happy or fulfilled in his savant enterprise. Those clues only barely filtered through my consciousness though, and during the Circle line chapters I was starting to find the interruption-heavy narrative schtick somewhat irritating. But then I read the Yamamoto chapter, and it was devastating. Not Yamamoto's story itself, which didn't quite ring true (specifically the part where the kid asks him to save him - if you were trying to escape your village under fear of death, would you be persuaded to hang around and beat a large drum as loudly as possible?), but the concert. Still not entirely sure what Yamamoto's (or Sibylla's) aesthetic thesis is, let alone whether I agree with it, but the concert sounded extraordinary (admittedly a two minute description can't exactly give a true impression of sitting through all ~10 hours of it), and I was almost moved to tears merely by Sibylla's account of being moved to tears by it. And then we find that Ludo is missing, and it was an OMG moment. I felt complicit for having forgotten about him while just reading about the concert! The poor kid! And when she gets home and finds him, her first and only thought is not of apologising but of chastising. In short, difficult as it must be for her, I now think Sibylla is being a bad mother.

I found the whole Yanamoto interview slightly absurd. That's not how interviews go, is it?

I'm not actually sure where I am in relation to where we're supposed to be, but I think we're gradually seeing a reversal of roles between Ludo and the mother, where the amount of learning Ludo has exceeds Sybilla's. Increasingly concerns about integrating knowledge into life (whether that's school or the emotional relations that to a certain extent Sybilla's approach was intended to compensate for) seem to complicate their relationship and both their approach to work and intellectual matter.

Ludo's learning becomes increasingly targeted at finding out who his father is, throwing knowledge at the absence.

And yes, the whole Yanamoto thing, of fragments (of a life, of art, unfinished business) gesturing beyond the whole...

What was that moment (haven't got the copy with me) where she talks, during his performance, about the multiplicity of possibility that the fragments represented, but then how the single performances represented the one chance at getting the whole right. That seems to fit in generally with what's happening (the CCTV cameras on the underground showing alternate realities for instance).

perhaps this is partly investigating the idea that Sibylla possibly feels total knowledge can thwart these mutually exclusive possibilities, can bind all fragments in a totality, which she realises they can't. Ugh, overthinking this, and work is getting in the way, how dare it. Then there is the seven role models rather than one.

That's not how interviews go, is it?

maybe it is if the interviewee is a headstrong ex-child prodigy with a bee in his bonnet (and, perhaps, shades of autistic spectrum disorder).

It was more the questions in fact. But yes, I take your point. Anyway, I'm still enjoying it very much, finding it very readable.

putting this here for future thought:

"I began imagine L seeing all kinds of things in the film which would not be incompatible with throwing a person from a plane on orders from a third party"

p. 128 in my edition

made me think of the discussion upthread about how 'out of place' the parts with the plane pushers seemed. will return to investigate

I'm still enjoying the reading, but Sibylla is really annoying me now. Ludo, to his credit, does appear to have the capacity for other interests if only he were allowed to get out and try them. But she's stuck and has stuck him in an ur-Canon of received culture-that-is-good, of Greek epics and Kurosawa and Bach - basically the things that posh people of my acquaintance like to quote at each other to show how learned they are. It's all very far from pool sharking and motels, and only the odd glimpse of an Ohio Fried Chicken or idiot members of the public hint at any other kind of life beyond.

Wd agree that the knowledge gathering is increasingly looking like a pathological response to an absence (you may know everything as long as you do not ask about one thing - a slightly fairy tale motif - you will be happy as long as you never ever go in room x/blow crystal horn y, oh whoops guess what happened).

As this continues Ludo has more and more control of the narrative. He's become something other than the sum of knowledge, and is seen to actually be growing into a human being, as his mother's narrative presence declines.

Whether this works in terms of reader enjoyment is a different matter, I'd agree - she does go on rather, and the early compressed narrative of how she came to be in the situation she's in was far more varied.

That said, I too am still finding it v readable + Ludo taking over more = still plenty in it for me.

If I hadn't left it in someone else's house that is. Retrieving soon, and looking forward to it.

1. are we to take it that sibylla gets into more or less the same arguments, on the underground, about (it seems) the rationality of ending one's life, over the course of weeks or months? is she having these arguments with strangers or with people she has met before? (is it a common thing, still, in the uk for people to say 'not in front of the child' in french? if not it's odd that she meets two people who say it. are we to take sibylla's reaction to the person who says it in italian as odd, given that she represents herself as being able to speak italian—and right before that had been told the same thing in french? 'let us converse in one of the four million languages i know, if you should happen to have one of them'.)

2. sibylla and rationality: when she reacts to the person on the train re 'the seven samurai', her counter-interpretation of the movie seems absurd and self-serving on its face. is it apt in any particular way to the actual movie? her problem with the 'elite band' seems to be that the very idea of them gives rise to the kind of deference to authority that causes one to forsake use of one's own reason—to do things like push people out of planes. is her concern more with the effects such an attitude one would have if one were not in an elite band, or if one were?

3. what's with all the wolf books, dog books, books about creature adventures? at least one purpose they serve in the story seems to be that by showing ludo read them obsessively, it's possible to neatly point out that he reads for a kind of comfort, not to be bored, at the behest of his mother, etc., since there should be little other reason he stays so content to read them after he's otherwise blazed far past them in his 'serious' reading. why, if sibylla is so elitist about what people should read, does she coddle him with these other books? is it simply connected to her attempt to keep his hunger for new material under control? some kind of moral-instruction angle? it's odd that we don't see her permitting him more advanced english material—he could easily be reading dickens or something instead of rereading 'white fang'.

4. earlier mentions of 'the alien' are somewhat twisted around because, i think, sibylla's own attitudes toward the alien are pretty twisted around. it seems that when she describes the alien, in this week's reading, as whatever it is that gives specious reasons for cruelty, that firmly establishes that what we would normally think of as everything normal and caring for a mother to do, she regards as cruel, irrational. but the main fault she's concerned to avoid is the one she feels was done to her: to put checks upon her native love of knowledge and to constrain her acquisition of it. at the end of this week's reading, when she sees that ludo is somewhat politely disdainful of the idea that she should give him any help with learning japanese, she thinks that she has been a monster. not, i think, because she thinks that her job as his tutor has been bad so far (in the usual sense), but because she thinks that simply the constraints she enacted for practical reasons—to be able to keep him under control enough that she could try to hold on to sanity and keep them alive—have been taken, by ludo, in exactly the way she hoped they wouldn't, as an inhibition.

5. sibylla is the narrator of the story (in this part). so when she's relating the content of the magazine article with the interview with the pianist, she's the one conveying his story about traveling to africa. so it's meant to be doubly (triply) devastating when we see the pianist give only a self-concerned reaction to the death of his companion, more concerned about the failure of his trip's intended purpose than with having been part of those events; but then see our own narrator relate this story with no comment, apparently unmoved at all, taking as little notice of it as the pianist did: like him, she's concerned to see him pursue his genius. but we do see a compensating reaction, in that she's one of the few people who stays to the end of the concert, and her reaction is massive, tears streaming down her face.

Oh man, I am only like 30 pages in and this thread is totally running away on me because I'd prefer to avoid spoilers. I look forward to reading all your wonderful thoughts when I'm a bit further through it.

just finished the second week's reading. wondering how the yamamoto piano anecdote relates to s's mother - playing a piece N times in a row, practicing scales in a way that maybe resembles percussion (weight must come from the shoulders), etc. also, wondering how yamamoto's experimental division of music into fragments & passages relates to yo-yo ma's father's proclamation of teaching by dividing into quarters.

Just by chance I watched The Magnificent Seven yesterday, as it was on TV. Will try and screen The Seven Samurai asap. And then Battle Beyond the Stars.

About midway through wk III's reading now. It gets so much better and more enjoyable once ludo takes over - not only is he a more sympathetic and mature character, he appears to have the capacity to develop and to distinguish between important and unimportant, which means a plot is beginning to emerge.

Stayed up way past my bedtime finishing wk III. It was great, I really enjoyed the long yarn across Asia.

It's very interesting how far we are into the thicket of unreliable narration. I think the proportion of incontrovertibly real events ('He said...', 'I went...') is much greater now Ludo/Stephen/David's in charge, but how high that proportion yet is I do not know.

Also interesting and kind of a relief to find out that Sibylla's been fronting all along, and eg still can't follow the film dialogue, though it does rather take what she's done to the boy beyond the quirky/comic/farcical and into the monstrous. Whether there's a wider metaphor beyond the futility of learning I guess we'll see. How much greater the boy's capacity is to distinguish between point and pointlessness we'll see too, though the first sentence of wk IV is promising.

On a personal level, it's nice to have pomp & snobbery lampooned so. You occasionally come across people who claim to have spent a year learning Russian in order to read Tolstoy in the original or whatever, and it's such bollocks. My french is v good and there isn't a magazine article I'd get more out of untranslated. I seem to have little capacity for front, and sadly not much more capacity to recognise and deal with it, and frankly I feel I'd be better off if I did. It's been a pleasure to see bollocks exposed, if you'll pardon the expression.

Not sure what you mean about Sibylla's fronting? She's obviously a sharp cookie and has a remarkable command of languages, and it's also fairly clear that he is more of a prodigy than she ever was, him outstripping her at some point was fairly inevitable. And, certainly from her perspective, he was the one driving the process, demanding to be taught rather than being forced to learn.

I meant that while she was narrating I understood that she was prodigious at languages, but as soon as it switches to Ludo I got the impression that she was an amateur. Though as I say it's hard to know how reliable the narration is - this might be simply because he's stunningly gifted so everyone looks amateurish, plus it might just be Japanese and iirc she considered herself not fit to teach it right at the start. But his remark that 'she's been watching The Seven Samurai for a decade and still has trouble with the japanese' was quite cutting I thought.

i did japanese at university and have difficulty understanding anything toshiro mifune ever says tbh

to me, 'she's been watching this film for a decade and she still has trouble with the japanese' is mostly just revealing of how Ludo doesn't get what it is like to be a normal language learner! Plus Sibylla tends to learn languages as languges-to-read, not languages-to-speak/listen, and I think these are significantly different skillsets. I was rereading the bit where Sibylla describes Liberace (not the)'s writing style and started thinking about what 'language' means - Liberace has this monstrous facility with language in his writing (even if strewn w logical fallacy) and Sibylla has this delight in language in her reading, but particularly in parsing it (and even just thinking about parsing it - the fact that Estonian has fourteen cases as something to cling to).

i guess i don't think of her as fronting being good at languages because the whole bit where she drops out of her phd (or whatever it is) after losing 30+ hours trying to read a book in german!

ps i am really enjoying Ismael's reactions because i totally heart Sibylla and it's a v useful corrective

Ha yes, there is something of a 'taking sides' about it at this stage.

yeah i'm not a huge fan of sibylla but it's interesting to hear how many ppl think she's great.

Finished WK.II, now into WK.III

I love the Yamamoto interview (not like a Sunday Times interview but obv the Sunday Times interview you'd like to read.) Just felt that Cecil Taylor was begging to be somehow inserted into this, as a piano-percussion man.

Lots of London concert detail I was amused by. Ice cream (which is kinda weird) and you're always home on time but what if you did miss the last train home (circle line closure), what then?

Is Ludo demonstrating a capacity for other interests? He has learnt way too much, wants to devour more, but has no curiosity about the other boys at school. At the point where he takes over so...

(I just happened to read Elsa Morante's History in between sections of this last week and was really struck by Giuseppe: similar age, a mother and no father, but he is undernourished and develops illness post-WWII, illiterate, has the odd friendships and acquaintances. Just noting the coincidence of coming across these two novels.)

where yall at?? some slack-ass book groupers on this thing.

I left it in a place I am not. Will rectify at the weekend. Feeling the lack.

really busy period of my life, acutely aware that I missed last week's reading. hope to get back in the saddle soon.

I'm done. And I don't know what to make of it. What was it about, what was its purpose? It wasn't really a story, or only in the barest sense. Was it just 'a bunch of stuff that happened'? It wasn't short on themes, really it was overburdened with them and they were picked up and dropped more or less at random.

The second section seemed weaker than the first, being essentially a loosely strung series of anecdotes. The dads were caricatures - albeit highly accomplished ones, I was continually wondering if this or that anecdote had been cribbed from some Sunday Times supplement about a real-life adventurer or intellectual or artist. It was entertaining, but not engrossing.

Also the suicide chapter I found problematic. The dismissal of the Samaritans was trite and the whole understanding of depression was very limited. You can hardly blame Ludo for this but when it was shared by Sibylla and never countered I can't help but see this as an authorial problem. Other people have found the actual death scene moving, I just found it a bit creepy and weird.

(I checked Jonathan Glover's 'Causing Death and Saving Lives' and he does indeed unhelpfully suggest changing jobs, emigrating or leaving your family. He also suggests psychiatric help but groups this with the others as an 'upheaval'. But it's just a throwaway line really, the book is really more about dealing with these issues from an outside and relatively dispassionate perspective.)

accidentally finished the book again last week and can't quite remember where we are meant to be? are we meant to have finished?

(nb just after writing the 'basically i can never understand what Mifune is saying' comment above, i read on, and found Ludo mentioning the fact that no-one can ever understand what Mifune is saying. it is not just me!)

this is the week for finishing i believe, the home straight, late finishers should be aware there may be no tea or cake left in the village hall.

Haven't finished it, saving the last part for this weekend. Didn't post on part 2, as I didn't feel there was much to say about it. I kinda enjoyed the Idiot's Guide To Greek part, was a bit bored by the pianist's African adventure, enjoyed the rest of his silly interview, and felt happy that I didn't attend that concert.
Agree that it's picked up a bit again when Ludo takes over the writing (or is everything in the book filtered through him to some level or other? Not sure how many levels of narration we can assume here ... )
I'm a sucker for portrayals of geniuses, I must admit, though the business with the school was the first time I started thinking about how Sibylla might indeed be a pretty bad mother.
Take his ruminations over people's amazement at his knowledge, how he just started wondering if everyone else who -didn't- say anything didn't because it's actually completely commonplace, even subpar.

What do we know about his time in school? I didn't catch any reference to how long he stayed there, and how they managed to get him out without getting into any trouble. It was interesting how his notes on the school don't have a word about the other kids, except through his and S's arguments with the teacher.

Sibylla on the subway was kinda sad comedy, I think it was around this part where I started thinking of A Confederacy of Dunces. She somehow reminds me of Ignatius Reilly -- the shock at what people are saying, the lack of social skills. The whole allcaps repetition of phrases bringing to mind "Can I BELIEVE what I'm hearing" or whatever his riff was. Ah, I haven't read that book in a long time, I cannot say more than it gave me a sort of whiff of remembrance.
There's good comedy in her ranting always resulting in responses like "I really think", "I really don't think" ... Wait, is this a comedy? (Or how does that work, if it's jokesy in the middle it's going tragedy in the end? How'd 7 Samurai end again? Ingratitude? People getting back to work? Uh, nevermind)

So we finally got to see the first lesson L learned from 7 Samurai, when he decided to just go ahead and parry the blow and get himself a different dad than his real one. His conversation with his real dad was nice, particularly when he let on that he never bothered to read S's ridiculous note.

I've been wondering how after a bunch fo years S hasn't found herself a better job. Is she so damn isolated and weird that other work is pretty much out of the question? I can kinda imagine her job applications being the worst/greatest things ever and scaring the hell out of potential employers.

Loved the story of RD and HC. All it lacked was some good old swashbuckling and a fair maid.
Hrm, there's a fair amount of sadness in this book, but at this slight distance I seem to only recall the fun.

(Sorry, this was awfully random and rambly, I really ought to have tried writing down some thoughts immediately after finishing)

Oh lord, how did so little thought become so much text.

Just finished. I enjoyed all the yarns (both real and recounted) but the rest I need to have a think about. Otherwise, what ledge said.

Haven't finished it, saving the last part for this weekend. Didn't post on part 2, as I didn't feel there was much to say about it. I kinda enjoyed the Idiot's Guide To Greek part, was a bit bored by the pianist's African adventure, enjoyed the rest of his silly interview, and felt happy that I didn't attend that concert.

what was boring about the africa trip?? i was quite impressed by how his artistic-development-narrative slid so quickly into a story of real-world consequences that was actually affecting, and even more impressed at how abruptly his own response to those events constitutes a shift in tone to us, yet not to him. i think an awful lot of the interest in the novel's story overall derives from these very adept, exact shifts in tone, the places where you can hear things on the page voiced from two or three different perspectives.

like, once ludo takes over the story, there's an enormous pathos to the way that you can hear his voice, sometimes because he is very explicitly writing about sibylla and his tensions with her, and then suddenly he unselfconsciously recounts himself using one of her subway arguments ('person B dies at time 6 + n').

spoilers spoilers spoilers, obviously

― thomp, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 10:18 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

so in the circle line section: what's with sibylla's sudden pre-occupation with violent death?

― thomp, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 10:21 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Also: "He said later that he wasn't afraid at first because he assumed that he was going to die. Then he realised that his hands were lying in the dirt next to the boots of a soldier. He thought they would destroy his hands and he could not move for terror." : Yamamoto is another version of the you're-a-genius-so-what idea, but that's kind of the starkest formulation of it (yet).

― thomp, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 10:25 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah what is with the violent death thing???

i liked the yamamoto part

― just sayin, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 10:56 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ludo going to school is kind of heartbreaking but also kind of wish-fulfillment-y (i mean, i was/could have been that kid // would like to convince myself i was/could have been that kid.) the school authorities are kind of strawmanish, though, so far.

'is thor heyerdahl my father?' heh.

― thomp, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 1:35 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Thinking hasn't helped - I feel less sure of what was going on now than when I was reading.

I'm questioning how much of the book was real at all. Pretty sure the yarns aren't, which is fine as I'll enjoy a shaggy-dog story if it's flagged as such. But the trekking around to harvest the yarns is more problemmatical because it's on the edge between possible and fantastical - I mean, does Ludo even exist? Is he just Sibylla's demon babbling away about what-might-have-been? ("I thought: why am I keeping her here?")

In which case, what actually happens? Woman gets tangled up in unrewarding work, frustrating herself with a lot of hopeless dreams, sees no way out. The little passage about how to build a motel (spot its potential when noone else wants to know - which I actually did find rather moving) then becomes just about the only reliable thing in the book. That and the concert, though I suspect it was more a normal concert that left her wandering the streets all night in rapture.

Okay, but what are the other 400 pages for? If the whole thing is about moving from trying to interpret everything through a false assumption towards learning one thing through its tiny variations, that's not really what's happened, is it? Maybe it is, maybe the point is just finding a way to cope with the chaos of everything, whether it's through motels or music or bringing up baby. But I can't help feeling it'd've been more fun to get there without the Greek.

The mental disorder seems less about depression than asperger's or schizophrenia, on that reading.

so is everyone meant to be finished?

sorry sir dog et it.

im abt 100 pages from the end but have got distracted by other books :(

i enjoyed the novella but the cover is incredibly hideous in design and also in feel (feels like some weird cheap kids book). the design is so ugly that maybe it's good. not sure.