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 view optionsfont: A A size: - 12 +book reviewspeoplemystic fiction health identity music/moviesjazzgrrlsmovies rantrrrampage
260 hysterical
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These two are broke American expatriates that travel the Circle Line of the London Underground because they can't afford to heat the drafty old house they rent. So many novels I read about living in London feature impossibly cold houses. Anyway, they ride the Circle Line and young Ludo progesses through works such as The Oddessy in the original greek, J.S. Mill and The House at Pooh Corner. Here goes the quoting: L: Why not?
Playful: It's not nice if somebody wants to read it.
L: But I am reading it.
Idiot, winking idiotically at me: Oh really? What's it about then?
L: I'm at the bit where they go to the land of the dead and this is the bit where she changes them into pigs and this is the bit where they go to the king of the winds and this is the bit where they sharpen a stick in the fire and gouge out the eye of the Cyclops because it only had one eye so if they gouged it out it couldn't see.
Brain left school at six while body did time: Well that wasn't very nice now was it?
L: If someone's about to eat you you don't have to be nice. It's acceptable to kill in self-defence.
Slow on the uptake (google-eyed): Blimey.
L (for the five-hundreth time that day): What does that mean?
Slow: It means that's absolutely amazing. (To me) Aren't you worried about what will happen when he goes to shcool?
I: Desperately." Sorry sorry sorry, but I have to go on quoting, I find it all super-funny: Amazing: 7
Far Too Young: 10
Only pretending to read it: 6
Excellent idea as etymology so helpful for spelling: 19
Excellent idea as inflected languages so helpful for computer programming: 8
Excellent idea as classics indispensable for understanding of English literature: 7
Excellent idea as Greek so helpful for reading New Testament, camel through eye of needle for example mistranslation of very similar word for rope: 3
Terrible idea as study of classical languages embedded in educational system productive of divisive society: 5
Terrible idea as overemphasis on study of dead languages directly responsible for neglect of sciences and industrial decline and uncompetitiveness of Britain: 10
Stupid idea as he should be playing football: 1
Stupid idea as he should be studying Hebrew and learning about his Jewish heritage: 1
Marvellous idea as spelling and grammer not taught in schools: 24
(Respondents: 35; Abstentions: 1,000?)
Oh, & almost forgot:
Marvellous idea as Homer so marvellous in Greek: 0
Marvellous idea as Greek such a marvellous language: 0" Okay I'm finished now. Sibylla's witty analytic brain doesn't seem to get her any closer to personal happiness. This is a shame because she is honest, helpful and very entertaining. Her views are unusual, but (she would be most insistent) perfectly logical. Both Sibylla and Ludo make for terrific reading. As Ludo gets older the book's consciosness shifts from mother to son and we end up looking at her from his eyes. And it only says cheerful things that her unorthodox motherly support turns out such a capable and considerate kid.
Now I'm just going to throw in the bio notes on the author. It says here on the back leaf that Helen deWitt grew up in Mexico, Brazil, Columbia and Ecuador... She started a degree at Smith College and dropped out twice, the first time to read Proust and Eliot while working as a chambermaid, the second time to take the Oxford entrance exam... In 1988 she started her first novel. Over the next decade she started work on some fifty other novels while working as a doughnut salesperson, dictionary art tagger, copytaker, fundraiser, management consultant and night secretary for a Wall Street law firm's London office. The Last Samurai is her first finished novel; it will be published in fourteen countries. Inneresting wouldn't you say? -- RBR
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Buy “The Last Samurai” from 
it's a comic masterpiece, shandyesque in it's willingness to digress and in it's love of arcane information (grammatical niceties of icelandic, say or arabic, various maths, musical theory) and with a way of writing "he said," or "I said," above the paragraph (which follows without quotes) that i've only seen done once before, to equally great effect (It makes everything said seem to stand out more, be more meaningful) in ford madox ford's masterpiece, "parade's end."
the story is about generations of brilliant and creative underachievers. it's about a woman who is as close to the bottom of the social hierarchy as she is to the top of an intellectual aristocracy, and of her genius son. it's about that son's search for a father worthy of him using the samuri archetypes of kurasawa's 'THE SEVEN SAMURAI' as a template.
this books works on so many levels simultaneously. it's another great book from a new generation of english writers such as david mitchell, zadie smith and rachel cusk