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queenluaI picked up this book because one person whose taste I trust said they loved it, and another person whose taste I trust said they hated it.
That's gotta be the fastest way to get me to read a book, by the way. What can I say? I'm the kind of gal always who wants to stick her nose right in the middle of a dispute and suss out who's right!!!
And I think my opinion of this novel fell somewhere solidly in-between those two poles—well, at least until I read the afterword that was tucked into the back of my edition, but let's death-of-the-author that right outta here and come back to it later.
SO. The Last Samurai is a novel suffering from a very unfortunate name collision—it has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie, nothing to do with Meiji-era Japan, nothing to do with war or battle or any such thing. (The novel came first, for what it's worth.)
Instead, The Last Samurai is the story of Sibylla, a young, charmingly-lowkey-deranged multilingual humanities academic in late-1980s Oxford, who gets PISSED OFF after putting in a lot of work to translate some scholarship that turns out to be SHODDY and ILL-FOUNDED, and in fact she is so pissed off by this that she decides to (1) fuck off from academia entirely, (2) hooks up with a foppish, callow, pseudointellectual guy she meets at a party, (3) gets pregnant, (4) decides to keep the kid but doesn't tell the dad about it, and (5) works a really-poorly-paid typing/editing job from home so she can raise the kid, Ludo, to be a piano/language/etc prodigy, in the spirit of John Stuart Mill.
When you lay it out like that, this Sibylla person is kinda unhinged, right? Like, "one dumbass made a stupid argument in a dusty old tome" is a pretty silly reason to quit academia. Probably Sibylla would have better resources for raising her quirky kid if she stayed in academia. And Sibylla's job seems both low-paying and kind of soul-sucking, but she never seems to show any interest in getting a better or more lucrative one, even though she seems bright enough to find one, even though they can't even afford to run the heat in the winter so she and Ludo will simply spend hours riding the Circle Line on the subway to stay warm.
But, well. I've certainly known some people who do the "irrational", unhinged thing, simply because their constitution will not allow them to do otherwise. The company they work for commits some minor act of moral ineptitude, and they storm out in a self-righteous fury. The hypocrisy and preening self-satisfaction of the so-called "greats" in their chosen creative field grates on them, so they simply one day wake up and leave, Omelas-style, without any clear plan in mind except "not this."
And though I often think these people would be happier if they learned some degree of "yeah dude, putting up with some amount of puffery/fakery/obnoxiousness from the people around you is just part of being in society," like... I also get it, right? It's kind of eyeroll-worthy if they're like "the universe must Rearrange Itself To Suit Exactly My Niche Needs," but pretty sympathetic otherwise!
And for the first quarter of this book, I couldn't quite get a handle on what stance the narrative was taking toward Sibylla and her whims, exactly! Like, there's an early bit where Sibylla's telling us the story of how her grandfather was robbed of a chance to attend Harvard, right, and it just... seemed a little bit too "oh no I have been Cast Away From Academia and am now Condemned To Languish In Obscurity" for my tastes? (Other schools exist jfc.) And there's several long sequences where Sibylla is riding the Circle Line with her son Ludo (age six), while he's reading Homer in the original Greek, and random strangers keep coming up to her with variations on "wow, isn't that too hard for him? aren't you pushing him too hard? Can A Child His Age Really Appreciate Ancient Greek?", which, uh, feels a little like the kind of story a Wounded Former Gifted Kid would share on Tumblr to prove their former prowess or whatever haha.
So I was rolling my eyes a bit those sections, and bracing myself for this to take a turn for "prodigies are an oppressed class" or whatever, and yet... well, Sibylla, man. Sibylla's so goofy??? She can't bear the idea of telling Ludo who his father is, not because she thinks he wouldn't want to know, not because she thinks he wouldn't help out (they sure could use some money!), but because he is a CRINGE MIDDLEBROW PSEUDOINTELLECTUAL. Meanwhile Sibylla just loves ideas and learning stuff to a charming degree—she feels so ENLIVENED after reading about the principles behind Schoenberg's 12-tone music (basically, "in the future our music will seem so primitive because it was limited to such rigid, sad ideas of scales and harmonies") that she goes on a full-on tangent about how in the future, novels will be told in multiple languages and each section will be written in the language that best conveys the message regardless of silly concerns like "wait how many readers would actually know all those languages tho" and "why are the Italian characters speaking Japanese in this section, what" because that would be BETTER ART BABEY. It's goofy! But charming in its earnestness and goofiness! (I'm reminded of that little detail in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota books, where it's just kind of assumed in the future everyone will simply learn The Official Language of the hive they want to join. Language people are so cute about this sort of thing. And wrong! But adorable about it haha.)
Anyway, by the time I got to this bit, where Sibylla's recounting the night where she slept with Ludo's dad (emphasis mine)...
While the main narrative is pretty straightforward (the first half is Sibylla's point-of-view, taking us through some early experiences raising Ludo; the second half is Ludo's point-of-view, age 11, when Ludo goes on some mini-quests to find out who his father is), it's packed with tons of stories-within-stories and charming digressions about, say, the subtleties of grammar in languages I do not speak, or a LENGTHY over-the-top backstory sequence on some Nobel prize winner, and so on. Ordinarily this sort of heavily-digression-based narrative feels unfocused and annoying to me, but they're just incredibly rhythmic and fun here; you feel the narrative circling around similar ideas over and over, in a "theme and variations" kind of way that really worked for me.
But okay, remember at the beginning when I mentioned that afterword? Ugh.
My edition had this afterword from the author:
And unfortunately it did leave a sort of sour taste in my mouth for an aspect of the core novel as well. Without spoiling too much, there's a penultimate mini-arc in the novel that seems to be brushing up against rather headier themes than we've seen before—life, death, how much pain a person can be expected to endure, all that. Prior to that, the book's mostly been interested in stuff like "what's the deal with contemporary art" and "what makes contemporary art Good versus Bad" and "isn't it cool how much meaning is packed into language" and "isn't it wild how much chance/coincidence/etc affects our lives" and all of that. Little parlor games, philosophical jam sessions, shaggy dog stories.
But the penultimate arc, which is brooding on life and death... the novel's usual breezy style feels somewhat inadequate to the subject that's being broached. And I'd like to think that's because it was meaning to show us the limits of what knowledge and erudition can do, deliberately showing that these little parlor games and jam sessions and shaggy dog stories can be great fun, but they're not The Point Of It All. That section's told through Ludo's point of view, and for all his precociousness he's still so young. What a beautiful note to meditate on, I thought, right before the end.
And maybe that was the intended effect! And even if it wasn't, hell, nothing can take that first reading away from me, the way I felt when I was reading it. But, well, nothing can take away the way that afterword made me feel, either: a thudding realization that maybe this narrative felt inadequate when groping at The Big Stuff because it simply doesn't have anything adequate to say in the face of such things, just a dim insistence that a Big Honking Nerd Society is just one Oprah's book club pick a way. Gah!!!
And, see, since that came right at the end this is making me sound way more negative about the book than I actually am. It was a fun ride! particularly in the first half! I'm glad I read it! but skip the afterword, jeez.
That's gotta be the fastest way to get me to read a book, by the way. What can I say? I'm the kind of gal always who wants to stick her nose right in the middle of a dispute and suss out who's right!!!
And I think my opinion of this novel fell somewhere solidly in-between those two poles—well, at least until I read the afterword that was tucked into the back of my edition, but let's death-of-the-author that right outta here and come back to it later.
SO. The Last Samurai is a novel suffering from a very unfortunate name collision—it has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie, nothing to do with Meiji-era Japan, nothing to do with war or battle or any such thing. (The novel came first, for what it's worth.)
Instead, The Last Samurai is the story of Sibylla, a young, charmingly-lowkey-deranged multilingual humanities academic in late-1980s Oxford, who gets PISSED OFF after putting in a lot of work to translate some scholarship that turns out to be SHODDY and ILL-FOUNDED, and in fact she is so pissed off by this that she decides to (1) fuck off from academia entirely, (2) hooks up with a foppish, callow, pseudointellectual guy she meets at a party, (3) gets pregnant, (4) decides to keep the kid but doesn't tell the dad about it, and (5) works a really-poorly-paid typing/editing job from home so she can raise the kid, Ludo, to be a piano/language/etc prodigy, in the spirit of John Stuart Mill.
When you lay it out like that, this Sibylla person is kinda unhinged, right? Like, "one dumbass made a stupid argument in a dusty old tome" is a pretty silly reason to quit academia. Probably Sibylla would have better resources for raising her quirky kid if she stayed in academia. And Sibylla's job seems both low-paying and kind of soul-sucking, but she never seems to show any interest in getting a better or more lucrative one, even though she seems bright enough to find one, even though they can't even afford to run the heat in the winter so she and Ludo will simply spend hours riding the Circle Line on the subway to stay warm.
But, well. I've certainly known some people who do the "irrational", unhinged thing, simply because their constitution will not allow them to do otherwise. The company they work for commits some minor act of moral ineptitude, and they storm out in a self-righteous fury. The hypocrisy and preening self-satisfaction of the so-called "greats" in their chosen creative field grates on them, so they simply one day wake up and leave, Omelas-style, without any clear plan in mind except "not this."
And though I often think these people would be happier if they learned some degree of "yeah dude, putting up with some amount of puffery/fakery/obnoxiousness from the people around you is just part of being in society," like... I also get it, right? It's kind of eyeroll-worthy if they're like "the universe must Rearrange Itself To Suit Exactly My Niche Needs," but pretty sympathetic otherwise!
And for the first quarter of this book, I couldn't quite get a handle on what stance the narrative was taking toward Sibylla and her whims, exactly! Like, there's an early bit where Sibylla's telling us the story of how her grandfather was robbed of a chance to attend Harvard, right, and it just... seemed a little bit too "oh no I have been Cast Away From Academia and am now Condemned To Languish In Obscurity" for my tastes? (Other schools exist jfc.) And there's several long sequences where Sibylla is riding the Circle Line with her son Ludo (age six), while he's reading Homer in the original Greek, and random strangers keep coming up to her with variations on "wow, isn't that too hard for him? aren't you pushing him too hard? Can A Child His Age Really Appreciate Ancient Greek?", which, uh, feels a little like the kind of story a Wounded Former Gifted Kid would share on Tumblr to prove their former prowess or whatever haha.
So I was rolling my eyes a bit those sections, and bracing myself for this to take a turn for "prodigies are an oppressed class" or whatever, and yet... well, Sibylla, man. Sibylla's so goofy??? She can't bear the idea of telling Ludo who his father is, not because she thinks he wouldn't want to know, not because she thinks he wouldn't help out (they sure could use some money!), but because he is a CRINGE MIDDLEBROW PSEUDOINTELLECTUAL. Meanwhile Sibylla just loves ideas and learning stuff to a charming degree—she feels so ENLIVENED after reading about the principles behind Schoenberg's 12-tone music (basically, "in the future our music will seem so primitive because it was limited to such rigid, sad ideas of scales and harmonies") that she goes on a full-on tangent about how in the future, novels will be told in multiple languages and each section will be written in the language that best conveys the message regardless of silly concerns like "wait how many readers would actually know all those languages tho" and "why are the Italian characters speaking Japanese in this section, what" because that would be BETTER ART BABEY. It's goofy! But charming in its earnestness and goofiness! (I'm reminded of that little detail in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota books, where it's just kind of assumed in the future everyone will simply learn The Official Language of the hive they want to join. Language people are so cute about this sort of thing. And wrong! But adorable about it haha.)
Anyway, by the time I got to this bit, where Sibylla's recounting the night where she slept with Ludo's dad (emphasis mine)...
I did not want to be there when he woke up but it would be rude to leave without a word. On the other hand almost any note would be impossible to write. I could not say thank you for a lovely evening because you can’t. I could not say hope to see you again because what if he took this as encouragement to see me again? I could not say I had a horrible time and I hope I never see you again because you just can’t. If I tried to write a short note that said something without saying any of these things I would still be there five or six hours later when he woke up....at this point, I was howling. This woman cannot manage to slip out after a one-night stand without overthinking the hell out of it and barfing up some ancient Greek. Incredible. It was at this point that I decided the book had to be having a bit of fun, decided it was being whimsical and tongue-in-cheek about all of this. Yes, the narrative loves IDEAS and LANGUAGES and LEARNING STUFF FOR ITS OWN SAKE, but it's got a sense of humor about it! and that's an agenda I can get behind.
Then I had an idea.
The thing I do, I thought, was to imply that we had had an interesting conversation which just happened to be interrupted by the fact that I had to leave (for some sort of appointment, for example). Instead of marking the close of the occasion the note should present itself as a further element of a conversation which was still in progress & only suspended. The note should appear to assume that Liberace was interested in things like the Rosetta Stone & should purport to answer a perceived skepticism as to the possibility of putting together such a thing in such a way as to be generally comprehensible, thus presenting itself as part of an ongoing discussion to be resumed at some unspecified later date. All I would have to do was write down a short passage of Greek, as if for this interested sceptic, with translation transliteration vocabulary and grammatical comments—taking pains, of course, to write the latter as if for the type of person who can’t get enough of things like the middle voice, dual number, aorist and tmesis. I am usually not very good at dealing with social dilemmas, but this seemed a stroke of genius. It would take about an hour (comparing favourably with the five-hour unwritable note), and the final tissue of false implication would practically guarantee (while avoiding gratuitous cruelty and yet not departing for one instant from the truth) that Liberace would never want to see me again.
While the main narrative is pretty straightforward (the first half is Sibylla's point-of-view, taking us through some early experiences raising Ludo; the second half is Ludo's point-of-view, age 11, when Ludo goes on some mini-quests to find out who his father is), it's packed with tons of stories-within-stories and charming digressions about, say, the subtleties of grammar in languages I do not speak, or a LENGTHY over-the-top backstory sequence on some Nobel prize winner, and so on. Ordinarily this sort of heavily-digression-based narrative feels unfocused and annoying to me, but they're just incredibly rhythmic and fun here; you feel the narrative circling around similar ideas over and over, in a "theme and variations" kind of way that really worked for me.
But okay, remember at the beginning when I mentioned that afterword? Ugh.
My edition had this afterword from the author:
[. . .] J. S. Mill thought that he had no special aptitude or intelligence, only the advantage of an unusual education; we still don't know whether he was unduly modest.I... kind of hate that the author wrote this? Like sure, it's not part of the original printing, and it's not part of the core narrative; I don't have to take it into account. But it was right there, and I did read it, and after reading a whole narrative suffused with interesting imagery and narrative tricks and intriguing themes and such, it feels like such a kick to the shins to have the author come out and say "actually this is about how public school curriculums suck" or whatever. Like come on! that's the most boring possible takeaway!
"It was not hard to imagine a world where my body stood in this room with something else inside it." It's not hard for Ludo to imagine what he might have been with the opportunities Val Peters thought age-appropriate. It's much harder to imagine what one might have been with better chances, greater challenges. Since there is no age at which the opportunities offered Ludo are the norm, we don't know whether he was a genius or not-only that he is an oddity in a society with very low expectations.
We clearly don't live in a society where the question is whether 4 is too early to start Greek—and the rival merits of 7, 8, 9, 10 or 14 are hotly debated. We don't even live in a society where libraries have, as a matter of course, the sort of collection that might inspire exploration of great literary repertoires outside school. (We don't generally find even a collection of Oxford Classical Texts, with relevant lexica and grammars, never mind offerings further afield from what is notionally the Western tradition.) [. . .] So Ludo looks impressive not only to Val Peters and riders on the Circle Line, but to rather a lot of reviewers. Perhaps he should, perhaps he shouldn't; perhaps we should really be more interested in the unknown capabilities of the reader [. . .]
It's not hard to imagine a world where the effect of the book on what has been a coterie of readers is multiplied to the point where general assumptions about what is possible are changed. We have only to imagine a world where Oprah Winfrey picks up The Last Samurai. Or a world where a bookseller presses The Last Samurai upon President Obama [. . .]
But it has been 20 years since London editors looked at the manuscript and complained that there was too much Greek and Japanese, there were too many numbers, 17 since Jonathan Burnham of Talk Miramax Books took the book to the Frankfurt Bookfair and caused a sensation. And the assumptions underlying the National Curriculum and Race to the Top remain firmly in place [. . .]
And unfortunately it did leave a sort of sour taste in my mouth for an aspect of the core novel as well. Without spoiling too much, there's a penultimate mini-arc in the novel that seems to be brushing up against rather headier themes than we've seen before—life, death, how much pain a person can be expected to endure, all that. Prior to that, the book's mostly been interested in stuff like "what's the deal with contemporary art" and "what makes contemporary art Good versus Bad" and "isn't it cool how much meaning is packed into language" and "isn't it wild how much chance/coincidence/etc affects our lives" and all of that. Little parlor games, philosophical jam sessions, shaggy dog stories.
But the penultimate arc, which is brooding on life and death... the novel's usual breezy style feels somewhat inadequate to the subject that's being broached. And I'd like to think that's because it was meaning to show us the limits of what knowledge and erudition can do, deliberately showing that these little parlor games and jam sessions and shaggy dog stories can be great fun, but they're not The Point Of It All. That section's told through Ludo's point of view, and for all his precociousness he's still so young. What a beautiful note to meditate on, I thought, right before the end.
And maybe that was the intended effect! And even if it wasn't, hell, nothing can take that first reading away from me, the way I felt when I was reading it. But, well, nothing can take away the way that afterword made me feel, either: a thudding realization that maybe this narrative felt inadequate when groping at The Big Stuff because it simply doesn't have anything adequate to say in the face of such things, just a dim insistence that a Big Honking Nerd Society is just one Oprah's book club pick a way. Gah!!!
And, see, since that came right at the end this is making me sound way more negative about the book than I actually am. It was a fun ride! particularly in the first half! I'm glad I read it! but skip the afterword, jeez.
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Date: 2024-10-20 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 01:32 pm (UTC)I'm reminded of that little detail in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota books, where it's just kind of assumed in the future everyone will simply learn The Official Language of the hive they want to join. Language people are so cute about this sort of thing. And wrong! But adorable about it haha
Yes! And also the weirdness about Latin, which I partly headcanon as unreliable narration, there's a bit where the narrator goes on about how Latin is an equal-opportunity challenge to everyone to learn because it's no one's first language, and I was like "surely Romance language speakers would have an advantage?" And also one of the ways in which those books have already dated is that there's no explanation of why nobody ever uses, or considers using, machine translation. (I mean I assume that it wouldn't be up to the standards of Brillist treatises! But there are other possible use cases.) I do imagine that the TI future has found ways to make language learning much more efficient, and that technology is probably involved in that.
It occurs to me that the people I know who have recommended Last Samurai are also TI fans -- which makes sense, as Mycroft is also a JS Mill type.
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Date: 2024-10-20 07:31 pm (UTC)and gosh that's a good point re: machine translation. it's amazing to me how well even the janky built-in automated captions for something like Google Meet work nowadays; i've been able to dip into talks for foreign-language conferences in my field and pretty much been able to follow what's being discussed...!
(the short-short workweek + flying cars probably also hugely helps with language learning. much easier to spend the requisite Large Amount Of Time needed to learn the language if you can simply zip into a country nigh-instantaneously and spend 20+hrs a week there while you're learning.)
(also i did not know anything about JS Mill's love life; just skimmed some wikipedia and i'm fascinated? what a guy haha)
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Date: 2024-10-20 03:44 pm (UTC)The afterword does sound terribly annoying, though.
It's goofy! But charming in its earnestness and goofiness! (I'm reminded of that little detail in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota books, where it's just kind of assumed in the future everyone will simply learn The Official Language of the hive they want to join. Language people are so cute about this sort of thing. And wrong! But adorable about it haha.)
I really love these kinds of "the future is multilingual and people will not just all Speak One Single Common Language
monolingually when native Common speakers and bilingually when they're some kind of marked other" plot points. Granted, it's because I am Language People (but then, according to the last census only 9% of the people in my country are monolingual and 59% know three or more languages). Idk. It just feels nice, y'know?no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 07:26 pm (UTC)and yeah, i definitely prefer "the future is hugely multilingual" projections to "everyone speaks Common Tongue™" hand-waving, it feels both more realistic and more showcasing-authentic-varieties-of-human experience... but in Palmer and DeWitt i sense this undercurrent of "isn't learning a language FUN???? shouldn't you WANT to know as many languages as possible??? isn't this cool???", which is familiar to me from friends who went into humanities academia, but not even all my multilingual friends are quite so sanguine about the benefits thereof, lol—plenty of people seem more pragmatic about it, e.g. "well i had to learn it to do [x] but my god did it take a lot of time," or there's disappointment over how fast certain language skills atrophy when they're not making a deliberate effort to immerse themselves in it, etc
(admittedly i have no way to form my own firsthand opinion, alas! my efforts at language learning all stopped well short of fluency; i can feel both DeWitt and Palmer putting a SPELL on me if i read them for too long, lol)
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Date: 2024-10-20 05:36 pm (UTC)I also love everything of hers I've read, which at this point actually isn't everything she has out, a pleasant change; there's nobody else quite like her. Her flaws are pretty obvious, and consistent across books, but for me at least are balanced by her unusual virtues.
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Date: 2024-10-20 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 06:10 pm (UTC)and each section will be written in the language that best conveys the message regardless of silly concerns like "wait how many readers would actually know all those languages tho" and "why are the Italian characters speaking Japanese in this section, what" because that would be BETTER ART BABEY. It's goofy! But charming in its earnestness and goofiness! (I'm reminded of that little detail in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota books,
I was absolutely thinking of Terra Ignota as you were describing the language stuff in this book (although more specifically of JEDD and his inability to confine himself to just one language when worked up).
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Date: 2024-10-20 07:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 10:56 pm (UTC)