Although I can name myself a bookworm, there is a blank in the list of books when it comes to modern literature. I prefer literature of XIX and XX centuries just because I like its ideas, style, characters more. Even so, I do not want to be a person that always criticizes the present and romanticizes the past and I enjoy an abundance of things that have been created in 21 century; in art, especially in literature, my favorites are always in the past.
Considering this fact it is always a great surprise to find original, brilliant and beautiful books, that was written by our talented or even genius contemporaries. This post I would like to devote to “The Last samurai” of Helen Dewitt that I found occasionally, I just wanted to read something new and took a random book from my roommate’s shelf. And this random choice has given me such pleasure; hence, I started to look for her others work, but unfortunately, it was this author’s only novel.
Anyway, let’s move to the content of this book.
This story is about an exceptionally smart and a little weird woman, who has a son. At the beginning of the story, he was nearly 5 years old and in the end 13 years old, as far as I remember. According to her behavior, she can be called a sociopath, though she is just not too interested in other people and more in linguistics, literature studies, and cinematography. Sometimes she acts irrationally; for instance, in order to escape from the clingy attention of her friend and make him stop pronouncing nonsense and superficial opinion about one of the objects in literature studies she decides to kiss him. And the consequence of this kiss and later events was the appearance of her son – wunderkind Ludo.
The tragedy of this story is despite being extremely talented and brilliant Ludo’s relatives could not fulfill their plans due to life’s circumstances. Ludo is curious whether his father is also like them, this is one of the reasons why he starts to look for him and meets interesting people from different spheres.
When I was looking for information about the author of “The Last Samurai” Helen Dewitt I read enough negative reviews. It mostly was criticized for the illogical actions of the characters, but from this point of view even Dostoevsky could be criticized and he actually was. Anyway, I love this book and was really impressed by it. I think it is interesting, has beautiful style, plausible characters, well-written sad and funny moments. I hope, if you read it, you will enjoy it as well.
That sounds like a really good book! Is it more about Ludo or his mother, or perhaps both?
I'm the opposite of you; I love the twentieth century, but I'm not so interested in older books. If you like stories about weird characters, Timothy Findley's book "Not Wanted on the Voyage" is very odd with lots of funny and weird characters
Thank you for your corrections and recommendation! As far as I remember the beginning of the book, nearly 30%, is about the mother, and the rest is about Ludo, but there are also their interactions throughout the whole book. Hope you will enjoy it)