Recent Reading The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

 

To me, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai is a book that seems impressive if you have read fifty or fewer difficult books in your life. I am confident that I have read more than five hundred books in my life, so I am ambivalent about this book. I did like the book, but I feel like I would have been much more impressed if I had read this book when I was 24. Now that I am 54, I admire the effort, but I also think that there are better books that achieve some of what DeWitt was trying to achieve in The Samurai. I would suggest that the stories of Borges, Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and much of the work of Saul Bellow (especially Humbold’s Gift and perhaps The Adventures of Augie March) are good places to start if you want to see how a good story can be constructed around the idea of books being about other books.

There is a plot in this book about a single mother, her son, and the son’s quest to find his father. However, the plot is mostly beside the point in DeWitt’s book. The Samurai is really a book about learning to read and understand other texts. The main texts are The Odyssey and Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. There are a number of other texts included as well and a good amount of DeWitt’s novel includes long sections of Attic Greek, Icelandic, and a long series of numbers meant to illustrate some mathematical principle. There is also a lot of blank space throughout the book. So, while the book exceeds 500 pages, to me it feels more like reading a 300 page book.

At one point, a character finds himself climbing a difficult mountain. And this mountain climbing is, then, compared to the intellectual work of reading Greek and Roman classics:

    He found a handhold and a foothold, and he began to climb.
    
    …Perhaps no one would back down who’d started such a thing. HC would never back down. He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men. He had been through the Iliad and Odyssey and each time he had come to a word he did not know he had looked it up in Liddell & Scott and written  it down, and if there were five words in a line he had looked up five words and written them down before going on to a line in which there were four words he did not know, and at the age of 14 he had worked through Tacitus in this way and at the age of 20 he had read the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun and at 22 the Dream of the Red Chamber. Now he moved one finger a centimeter and then another, and then he moved the tow of his boot a centimeter and the toe of his other boot a centimer.

At least in my opinion, this section is about as close as DeWitt comes to providing an answer to the question of what the point of The Last Samurai is.

I enjoyed the book. But I was also left with the thought that I might be better of using my time to take a deep dive into one of the classic texts DeWitt name drops in the novel. A good use of one’s intellectual energy might be spent reading one of the plays of Aeschylus along with a commentary to understand some things that would not be apparent otherwise.