Considered by some to be the greatest novel of the twenty-first
century, Helen DeWitt's brilliant The Last Samurai tells the story
of Sibylla, an Oxford-educated single mother raising a possible
child prodigy, Ludo. Disappointed when he meets his biological
father, the boy decides that he can do better. Inspired by Akira
Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, he embarks on a quixotic, moving quest to
find a suitable father. The novel's cult-classic status did not
come easy: it underwent a notoriously tortuous publication process
and briefly went out of print. Lee Konstantinou combines a riveting
reading of The Last Samurai with a behind-the-scenes look at
DeWitt's fraught experiences with corporate publishing. He shows
how interpreting the ambition and richness of DeWitt's work in
light of her struggles with literary institutions provides a potent
social critique. The novel helps us think about our capacity for
learning and creativity, revealing the constraints that capitalism
and material deprivation impose on intellectual flourishing.
Drawing on interviews with DeWitt and other key figures,
Konstantinou explores the book's composition and its history with
Talk Miramax Books, the publishing arm of Bob and Harvey
Weinstein's media empire. He argues that The Last Samurai
allegorizes its troubled relationship with the institutions and
middlemen that ferried it into the world. What's ultimately at
stake in Ludo's quest is not only who might make a good father but
also how we might fulfill our potential in a world that often seems
cruelly designed to thwart that very possibility.
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