The book by Helen DeWitt, not the film
40 bandits stop on a hill above a village in Japan.
They decide to raid it after the bailey harvest. A farmer
overhears.
A village meeting is held. The farmers
despair.
1 leaps to his feet with burning eyes.
Let's
make bamboo spears! Let's kill all the bandits!
You can't,
says 2.
Impossible, says 3.
-The Seven Samurai
Akira Kurosawa
Ah, how I remember those days! Eleven years and counting, I took
my first step into the world of literature (or at least high-level
fiction), wary of the cartoonish caricatures
placed in substitute for characters, tired
of those cheaply crafted plot lines standing in for where
stories should be. The first mature novel I read for
pleasure was The Last Samurai, one that I cherish to this
very day.
A first glance
The first time you pick
up this book and slide haphazardly through a few passages, you'll
find it a pretty easy book, perhaps even mundane. You then flip a
page, skimming its contents carelessly, then stop to re-read that
page again, a little surprised at the gaps between paragraphs. You'll find that DeWitt took a lesson or two
from Kafka. Oddly enough, DeWitt does make a
surprisingly complex writer at times. She might even be anti-Proustian in her short, choppy 'hops' around a
description. This tendency gets a little annoying,
but it servers its purpose. I advise: give it a careful read or two
and let it grow on you--it's contradicting themes and non sequitir narrative will make sense in the end.
Once
you get past the oddities, there's the story. It traces the exploits
of Ludovicus and his mother Sibylla, misunderstood geniuses cast out
by the mainstream educational system; Sibylla immigrated herself from
the States to escape mediocre grades and disguise herself as an
eligible candidate for Oxford's
classicist program by lying about her grades and writing
a hell of an essay; the disguise works but is eventually tossed
aside in frustration, when she then works in a publishing firm and
eventually conceives Ludo by annoyed and quick fornication
with the literary equivalent of Liberace (same in all ways except
for sexuality). Aged and unimportant, Sibylla's story is cast
aside for Ludo's as he grows up and as he, too, finds the
mainstream educational system redundant, fallacious
and meaningless.
Characters
Every so often, after the floor is handed to Ludovicus, the
narrative cloth is plunged by the sudden erection of a new
storyline, following the collegial lifestyle of Hugh Carrey (HC)
and Raymond Decker (RD) or of Sibylla, along with several other
seemingly unrelated history pieces or short biographies, which are
always miraculously tied back to Ludovicus. The reader can choose to
appreciate or detest this novel's narrative style at his or her wish,
but I would recommend giving the former a try.
Ludovicus
himself is an interesting character--he's arrogantly full of
himself due to his astonishing intellect and sense of logic; he's
learned several common and exotic
languages before his eleventh birthday and he has dabbed a little in
calculus and fundamental engineering. His brilliant observations,
crafted by his architectural knowledge, often topple on top of him by
the unfortunate laws of reality and entropy
of the universe. Though he's capable of a level of thinking much
beyond his years, one can still see a little child in him. This
juvenile spirit in him fuels his search for the father he never
knew.
But what does the story of a English-American boy
prodigy have to do with samurai? Honestly, very little. The
reference has to do with a blatant allusion to samurai brought up
in the book. As Ludo becomes familiar with more and more languages,
he's turned towards Japanese as his mother raises him around Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai--a failed attempt to
compensate the lack of one real father with seven synthetic ones--,
and he lusts after it. Gradually, the boy picks up Japanese in his
search for his father and goes through seven (!) men in his
quest.
Accessibility
So, does this mean you have
to watch The Seven Samurai (or its western equivalent,
Tall Men in Tight Skinny Jeans) to understand
the book? No, at least not in a practical sense. Certainly, the
allusions will jump out at you more, possibly making an
interpretation of this novel more plausible, but its necessity is
extant only inasmuch as studying languages is necessary to
understand Ezra Pound's Cantos. In fact, simply by the
hilarity of some passages and the general tension of the plot, this
book is actually quite accessible.
If you're like me, or Ludo
or Sibylla or HC and RD, you imagine this muck of stories tedious and
pointless. Some pretentious broad trying to make a name for herself
in self-congratulatory literary circles, you're thinking (and you
wouldn't be alone in that thesis). Well, it's not; believe me. The
entirety of this book is entertaining and most of it is damn funny.
Putting the pieces of this book together and making sense of it isn't
a tedious puzzle nor a hopeless cause, just a life lesson
packed in the most effectively poignant package possible.
The
book itself was received both warmly and harshly by critics and the
reading public alike. Some praised it for its sheer humor
and originality and scope of characterization, while others
knocked it down for pretentiousness and vainglory. A simple Amazon search can illustrate this
plainly.
General Appeal
Hellen DeWitt may have
meant this book to be biographical in nature of her quick
transformation into a Oxford scholar. In fact, she herself left
America for England and quit an academic life in 1989, working on
novels here and there, finally settling with finishing this one. Who
knows whatever other similarities she shares with Sibylla. Surely
then, this book is a product of human experience, something I could relate to then and
now, something you can relate to within a few free afternoon reads.
At eleven years of age, I was no
Ludo myself, and I find today, five years older in a subsequent
perusing of the book, many facets that I couldn't hope to understand
at the time and perhaps some things that I still am unable to grasp.
I recommend any avid reader pick this book up and take a gander. I
don't regret it, despite its daunting length.