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

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 keep trying to write about it but you see i just got given a 'descriptive grammar of ket' which is weird and fasinating and really I think my reading that is what sibylla would have wanted.

"Linguists and specialists on Siberia are generally familiar with the name Ket, which designates a small ethnic group on the Yenisei and their language, widely regarded as a linguistic enigma in many respects. Ket is a severely endangered language with today less than 500 native speakers. Together with Yugh, Kott, Arin, Assan and Pumpokol, all of which are completely extinct, it forms the Yeniseic family of languages, which has no known linguistic relatives."

a linguistic enigma in many respects!! (why yes i am supposed to be reading sociology books right now)

I don't find "questioning how much of the book was real at all" particularly productive, myself?

I like how Yamamoto's CD is like Sibylla's mother playing Chopin's prelude no 4 in D minor.

Oh, it's not productive at all and I'd much rather not because it leaves me feeling cheated, but I felt it drove me that way. I've been waiting for Alex to weigh in and put my mind at rest by explaining it all, actually, but it's probably not that kind of book.

Sorry! I will tackle it soon. Law school is busy.

I am...almost halfway through week 3's reading

;_;

I have been reading the comments on the Conversational Reading posts, which are fascinating although less for how they affect my understanding of the book (getting the sense that my feelings about have been set in stone somewhat, i read stuff and go 'that is v interesting but that is not how it is ok') than their sheer, I dunno, internet-comment-ness.

Are we finished with this now? I thought the book group format worked alright, even if it fizzled out a bit towards the end, maybe due to its losing readers by the wayside. I was going to say it could've done with a bit more discussion of what's-happening-and-where's-it-going, but it definitely wasn't that kind of book.

Thanks for turning me towards something I'd never have gone near myself anyway.

I liked it a lot. In some ways I wish I had finished in 3-4 days and then spend time re-reading it. But I will revive this.

Just on the w/e I finished reading this novel I came across this story. Quite a coincidence.

The father of the boy has said that his son is no genius. The thing is he wasn't afraid to make him curious, to teach him (or get him to learn) as much as he could. A bit like S in this book, she does not think she is pushing her child too fast too young. Very much a 'how much work you do' approach.

The father also said something like that the main thing is to get kids reading by two years of age. Seemed like half of the equation.

This kid is also learning French and Russian and has written some sort of reference book on Shakespeare, btw.

Yeah, I enjoyed/am enjoying this as well - the only reason I haven't finished is that my life is in a state of advanced chaos at the moment, just in terms of material possessions being strewn about various places, which means that I haven't had the book on me. Anyone read any of the Your Name Here stuff?

i read YNH a while ago but sadly lost the pdf in a grand hd crash - i remember enjoying it, though.

i remember that there was this bit about language learning that I disagreed with - the narration in YNH collapses the distance between 'learning to read a script' and 'being able to read a language', in rather the same way that, in TLS, Sibylla handwaves away the period between 'teaching Ludo the greek for 'of the king'' and 'Ludo understands greek grammar and only needs to ask about vocabulary'.

i guess it jarred because in so many other ways the book and the narration is so meticulous, especially the book is meticulous in awkward and despairing things, and then this bit which is kind of about the hope of further human understanding is so vaguely drawn.

(but as aforesaid i haven't looked at ynh for years, so it's poss i'm filling in gaps from imagination not memory)

I have the PDF of YNH and since it seems stuck in publishing he'll I would gladly send it to people, provided on honor that they toss DeWitt 4 or 5 bucks on paypal or whatever she was charging for it.

I didn't do this - but did people enjoy this? Maybe it would be good to have a bookclub here where read longform short stories and then talk about them? I would like to do this.

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.