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the last samurai by helen dewitt
Sep. 13th, 2025 08:37 amthis will mostly be me kvetching. props to this: I haven't read something which sparked such a polarised opinion from my own self in a while.
aesthetically this was a 4/5. I admired how experimental and unnovellike this was, the 'take it or leave it' approach to style and its avant-garde structure, and so on. great form, A+. but I hated much else of the book! I did not like the content undergirding that formal innovation, the entire scaffolding of ideas surrounding its (apparently) exploration of nature vs nurture or the place of intelligence in the contemporary world, so emotionally my rating is a 1.5/5.
in short: if there was an Olympics category for pissing me off, this book won it. the worst part is that the book is far from unsalvageable. it’s definitely original, good at points. it could have been pushed further. I could see many times how this book could've been better crafted to get across its (indeed defensible!) message better, but it just felt insular.
secretly, I also find this book to be ignorant and racist. not overtly racist, but racist in the way any book imbibing wider ideas about intelligence while leaving its core untouched will be: because of the fabric of how it conceptualises intelligence, and where the scope of its attention extends to (and also doesn't).
( Read more... )
aesthetically this was a 4/5. I admired how experimental and unnovellike this was, the 'take it or leave it' approach to style and its avant-garde structure, and so on. great form, A+. but I hated much else of the book! I did not like the content undergirding that formal innovation, the entire scaffolding of ideas surrounding its (apparently) exploration of nature vs nurture or the place of intelligence in the contemporary world, so emotionally my rating is a 1.5/5.
in short: if there was an Olympics category for pissing me off, this book won it. the worst part is that the book is far from unsalvageable. it’s definitely original, good at points. it could have been pushed further. I could see many times how this book could've been better crafted to get across its (indeed defensible!) message better, but it just felt insular.
secretly, I also find this book to be ignorant and racist. not overtly racist, but racist in the way any book imbibing wider ideas about intelligence while leaving its core untouched will be: because of the fabric of how it conceptualises intelligence, and where the scope of its attention extends to (and also doesn't).
( Read more... )
