the last samurai by helen dewitt

[meikuree]

this 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).

what the book is about

the book's own blurb probably puts it best, and is also more straightforward than anything you'll read in the actual book:

Sibylla, a single mother from a long line of frustrated talents, has unusual ideas about child-rearing. Yo Yo Ma started piano at the age of two; her son starts at three. J.S. Mill learned Greek at three; Ludo starts at four, reading Homer as they travel round and round the Circle Line. A fatherless boy needs male role models; so she plays the film Seven Samurai as a running backdrop to his childhood. While Sibylla types out back copies of Carpworld to pay the rent, Ludo, aged five, moves on to Hebrew, Arabic and Japanese, aerodynamics and edible insects of the world – they might come in handy, if he can just persuade his mother he’s mature enough to know his father’s name.

so: Sibylla leaves her graduate research fellowship at Oxford because she was being led to waste time on meaningless scholarship instead of more genuinely groundbreaking pursuits, gets pregnant, has a child, and raises him (Ludo) as a single mother. on its own that's compelling; there's a lot to mine from the topic of alienation from 'intellectual' environments, the actual intellectual paucity of hallowed academic fields, etc.

one of Helen DeWitt's 2023 blog posts provides a good spiritual taster of this book's thesis and what DeWitt was trying to say when she wrote it:

One of my ideas is to offer a two-hour (well, maybe three) class called Mute Inglorious Nabokovs. Nabokov was taught English and French from an early age; this early exposure to languages other than his mother tongue seems to have been important in his formation as a writer. In Speak, Memory he talks about the entertainment offered by working through a little grammar book, in which the student started on simple sentences, could look forward to ever more exciting grammatical features, and at the end was able to read a simple story. He remembers sitting inside while a servant swept the gravel walk outside; he wonders whether she might not have been happier sweeping the walk than driving a tractor in later years under the Soviets.

This passage always makes me think: But perhaps she was a mute inglorious Nabokov. Perhaps the servant, too, had gifts which would have benefited from reading an introduction to English culminating in an adventure for little Ned. One thing that's certain, anyway, is that most schoolchildren do not get this kind of chance at an early age. More generally, it seems to me, there is never a point at which people are encouraged to try a range of languages, and in particular to see what it is like to read a short passage in each by a great writer. It seemed to me that one could try something like this: introduce three languages of increasing difficulty,* beginning with the simple challenges presented by reading, then working through a short text.

The Last Samurai is, superficially, about the place of intelligence in the world and how it gets cramped by assumptions and perceptions about potential, how people should learn, when they should start learning, and so on. I disagree with DeWitt's perspective on 'gifts' and intelligence. but I'll come to that later.

the book read, in a way, as a very iddy work: here are geniuses, normally the apex of human society and achievement, brought down to earth by the inevitable profane unglamorous foibles they encounter. as one of the reviews I searched up put it, "[Sibylla] like so many classical heroes—Achilles, Ajax—is a difficult amalgam of the highest and the lowest, the divine and the animal. Which is to say that she’s thoroughly human." the novel never detaches from the allure and intellectual erotics of brilliance and curiosity, and instead dwells in it while serving it up with a side dish of absurdist (and thematically sexy) suffering & debasement.

what I liked

some good points first so this isn't a total rantfest. there was a seed of an anti-elitist message: Ludo isn't really a prodigy; any child could become like Ludo, given an environment which encourages their interests and curiosity.

for a book not explicitly concerned with the topic, it has some pretty progressive ideas which echo those of youth liberation/child rights/family abolition. that's an A+ in my book. although as usual with DeWitt these ideas are also practised by characters to the point of gallows humour and parody. consider these quotes/scenes:

• [from Sibylla] "In a less barbarous society children would not be in absolute economic subjection to the irrational beings into whose keeping fate has consigned them: they would be paid a decent hourly wage for attending school. As we don’t live in that enlightened society any adult, and especially a parent, has a terrible power over a child."
• [from 11 yo Ludo's pov] "[It was 2.15 AM.] I [...] called Sibylla. I said I was in Knightsbridge and needed to be there early in the morning so I thought I would just stay there but I did not want her to think I was being held hostage or sold into sexual bondage to a ring of paedophiles.
  
  Sibylla did not say anything for a very long time. I knew what she was thinking anyway. The silence stretched out, for my mother was debating inwardly the right of one rational being to exercise arbitrary authority over another rational being on the ground of seniority. Or rather she was not debating this, for she did not believe in such a right, but she was resisting the temptation to exercise such power sanctioned only by the custom of the day. At last she said: Well then I’ll see you tomorrow."
• at one point, a 6 yo Ludo ticks Sibylla off enough that she remarks she might 'hit him' if she stayed in his presence. she has enough self-restraint to not do that and simply walks away until she's cooled down enough. with how often it's acceptable for parents to hit their children it's maybe sad that this is noteworthy, but it is. this stands in contrast with one of Ludo's later potential "fathers" who upon finding out Ludo is not his flesh and blood punches him. a defenceless 11 yo!

-- though I admit I really dislike the 'enlightened society' phrasing in Sibylla's line. I'm deeply suspicious of any Enlightenment Romanticisation in general, the idea that human civilisation must trend on a historical upward bound or the concept that how enlightened or conversely """backwards""" a society is is related at all or enters the picture.

and I also catch whiffs of rationalist and libertarian rhetoric in Sibylla's Children Should Be Free ideology. some of her lines would not be out of place in an Ayn Rand novel. so, lol. good spirit but wrong reasons.

but you see, Sibylla resists the move to view Ludo simply as her property simply because he was yeeted out from her womb in a hospital, unlike some of the later "fathers" who do see Ludo in that framework despite having the least right to. the novel also points out how undemocratic, unreliable, and false the cult of genetic intelligence is. consider this line from when Ludo meets a "father": "[Sorabji] had been so excited about the Fourier analysis [I] before; I couldn’t see why it made such a difference if the person who had done it [Ludo] did not happen to share 50% of his genes." there's a point there about how much genetic gatekeeping sucks.

also, Ludo doesn't really come from a starred pedigree according to DeWitt's pov. Sibylla is brilliant but not a genius (I disagree, but we'll come to that). then there's Ludo's father. Sibylla really does not want Ludo's father, a pseudointellectual sexist writer to be involved in Ludo's life. Ludo points out to Sibylla many times that his dear mother is a hypocrite for refusing to tell him who his father is when he has some right to know, and deciding purely on grounds of his too-young ethical/moral/intellectual refinement that he's not ready to find him.

what I disliked

lol. where do I begin...

my biggest pet peeve with this is the sheer NPC sentiment it has, the number of times Sibylla or Ludo dismiss the interiority of 'average people'. for all that they are curious and intellectually voracious people they can also be really insular assholes. which likely is the point. but DeWitt does NOT execute it well, as I will explain.

an example -- here's an excerpt of when Sibylla bumps into a by-all-accounts "normal" ""unintellectual"" lady at a Tesco who stopped her from committing suicide in the past. the lady and her children say hi. Sibylla responds by quoting the mortality soliloquy from Hamlet. at first it all looks unhinged and funny. but it is also very revealing. this is all from 11 yo Ludo's pov:

No one who knew Sibylla well would have opened a conversation with a remark of such unparalleled fatuity. [...]

Now two of the children wept into pudgy fingers, one screaming.
The woman tried, with small success, to restore order.
And is this your little boy? she asked brightly.
Sibylla was still silent, and now her lips were pressed tightly together.

If the woman opposite was capable of thought, something for which we had as yet no evidence, her thoughts were certainly opaque to her companions. I could see Sibylla’s thoughts circling her mind like goldfish in a bowl. At last she spoke.

To be or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep—
No more and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation

The woman glanced aghast at the small fat crew and was at once relieved, for it was clear enough that they had not understood a word of this.

Well, of course we all have our cross to bear, she said cheerily.

it's the 'if the woman opposite was capable of thought' that really drives me aghast. what the fuck? it's so nasty! I wondered if it might all be part of a master game to satirise intellectuals. much of the book is clearly about the limits of intelligence. intelligence does not buy empathy or grace, evidently. I also strongly suspect DeWitt wants to repudiate banal things like a clear packageable message or soundbite about intellectuals. more power to her.

but I have trouble believing DeWitt isn't also on some level completely earnest about banality being the Site of Wanton Death and seeing all these Banal People as oppressors of the hidden geniuses in our midst. DeWitt wrote an afterword in a later edition that to me is frankly repulsive (with thanks to queenlua for the excerpt):

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.

"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.) [...]

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.

as a friend put it, Helen DeWitt is spectacularly missing the point. the cause of intellectual atrophying is not that people aren't enchanted enough with the classics or that the reading material in school libraries is too banal/not profound enough. if USA society has 'low expectations', it's because the system was deliberately designed that way. I'll quote my conversation with my friend since she'll be more eloquent than anything I have to say:

friend: the reason behind the "low expectations" is not that libraries don't have a book collection. it is that the american school system was very intentionally designed to trap black kids and anyone whose lives looked like theirs in dead end basic skills/vocational studies courses without "intellectual matter that would corrupt their ability to labor" or "incite them to revolution" cf frederick douglass. which is maybe not going to be solved by "oprah reading the last samurai" and whose worst expression is actually not that your book couldnt find a publisher. like. its based on the evil of needing to create an underclass, not a desire to keep down the RULING class. how can [helen] get it wrong in such a TWISTED way?

me: [this book] feels like classicist major syndrome all over again, in that learning greek or specific corpus of greek mythology is seen as the pathway to edification or a more '''''refined'''' populace when, um... shouldn't it be more about the philosophy behind learning, about not setting down pre-drawn guardrails for children based on how you've assessed their potential or value?

friend: [also] like...if you wanted this book to make the theme powerfully...no poc here who actually have been shut out of institutions? no engineer trained in another country whose degree the american system wont accept? no studious kid on a reservation whose high school doesnt offer past year 9 math? no inner city black students who arent allowed to take a foreign language because its only for students who """"speak properly"""""?

this hits at my fundamental issue with The Last Samurai: for all that DeWitt wants to undercut the establishment view of Intelligence and Giftedness, her novel affirms some of the very ideas that prop it up. even though the book purports to be about the contradictory humanness of ‘geniuses’ it truly did not come off that way for me because throughout the book you meet all these people who seem to cling hard onto the bygone days of their wunderkind potential and talent, who are the ones asserting the divide between genius/profane human.

call me an anti-intellectual, but it's as if DeWitt can only conceive of intelligence in terms of Classical Literature, Great Works, and Pure Knowledge -- knowledge learned for its own sake, not material advantages or prestige. I mean, sure? that's alright on the face of it? it's a noble message. but giving Nabokov's servants access to Homer's myths in the original Greek would not have solved the political reasons why she was part of an indentured underclass that led to her not being able to explore her gifts in the first place.

but maybe the book isn't for me... which is fine! it's just, I am sick of self-absorbed navel-gazing by self-described intellectuals, a la The Plight of the Former Gifted Child narratives, about how they are the real victims of the education system and whatnot. if you ask me, the tragedy of thwarted gifted child narratives should not be that these children lose their chance to harness their potential or are insufficiently accepted into the ruling elites/allowed to use their 'gifts' for improving society and """humanity""". the tragedy should be that for every gifted child who gets the lion's share of educational resources or pedagogical autonomy, the corollary is a child who is deemed ungifted, too intellectually disabled to make it, and an unviable economic subject, who is deemed at best only ever good enough to become the grist for society's mill, and that this unjust stratification of educational quality is justified with pretty eugenicist appeals to ""natural"" potential, aptitude, and intelligence which affirm class and racial hierarchies. it's as if the problem that Former Gifted Children really want to pearl-clutch over is being lumped in with the rest of the great unwashed, instead of holding the reins as they apparently deserve.

technical nitpicks

another quirk of The Last Samurai is that the characters digress into musings about Ancient Greek grammar, Finnish, Inukitut, Japanese, and Chinese at various points. these segments help demonstrate Sibylla's True Fascination with Languages and Learning as an Intellectual in it For The Love of the Game and Not Gain.

here's my problem. I unfortunately can't speak for Ancient Greek, Finnish, or Inukitut. but I know Mandarin Chinese (fluent) and Japanese (low intermediate) and the way Sibylla commented on Mandarin Chinese just looked to me like an amateur's understanding of Chinese linguistics, which therefore achieved the opposite effect. DeWitt has been honest on her blog that she doesn't know Mandarin Chinese. fair enough. but still... where was the fact-checking?

here are the offending segments and then my commentary:

1. "An idea has only to be something you have not thought of before to take over the mind, and all afternoon I kept hearing in my mind snatches of books which might exist in three or four hundred years. There was one with the characters Hakkinen, Hintikka and Yu, set provisionally in Helsinki—against a background of snow with a mass of black firs, a black sky & brilliant stars a narrative or perhaps dialogue with nominative genitive partitive essive inessive adessive illative ablative allative & translative, people would come on saying Hyvää päivää for good day there might be a traffic accident so that the word tieliikenneonnettomuus could make an appearance, and then in the mind of Yu Chinese characters, as it might be Black Fir White Snow, this was absolutely ravishing."

2. "I realised suddenly that if the Chinese characters were the same as the Japanese I knew the characters for White Rain Black Tree: 白雨黑木! I put these provisionally into the mind of Yu and laughed out loud [...]"

in Chinese, single characters = single words in isolation, yes. the keyword is in isolation. once you put characters together no Chinese speaker will parse it in their head as Black Fir White Snow. that just plays into orientalist tropes about Chinese as a 'broken' language. Chinese is a language where putting characters together can change or alter the meaning of the characters together (this is a bad explanation, but). in summary, this misunderstands linguistic units and phrasal construction in Chinese.

a quick illustration of what I mean. 光复 is made up of 光 (lit. light) and 复 (lit. recover/return). however, 光复 together means 'retrocession' (returning ceded territory to a government). no Chinese speaker is going to see the characters and think "ah! the Recovery of Light." they simply integrate the higher-level meaning of the phrase.

on the bright side, I had fun meme-ing with a friend about DeWitt's bad linguistics:

friend: mean of you to bring phenomenological experience of actual chinese speakers into this thought experiment, mei 🙁 you are oppressing her with Woke 🙁 🙁

me: helppppp I should have been the lady at Tesco oppressing sibylla with how little thought I have in my head

friend: absolutely. and causing the decline of modern intellectualism

friend: [...] i HATE people who like. masturbate about the quirky features of languages but hate doing even the slightest investigation into what basic linguistic features (eg reading characters together) feel like to speakers of those languages. like once you have read this, do you really believe sibylla is a competent speaker of chinese.

verdict

I rest my case:



that said I can see the appeal of this book. in personal disclosure territory, I know a girl quite like Sibylla, an old schoolmate and friend who was very sharp and intellectually intense. at the time that we were 17, she read of her own volition Joseph Stiglitz, Truman Capote, Keynesian theory, Francis Fukuyama, and mathematical theory books (this is where I hit the limits of my memory). she dabbled in readings about epistemology and geopolitics. she regularly conversed with another classmate about undergraduate-level economics and with one of our tutors about socialism. coincidentally enough, she was also fascinated by Ramanujan, one of the mathematicians whom Sibylla and Ludo mention a lot. I recognised some of the geniuses mentioned in The Last Samurai because this friend talked about them too.

her ambition was to be a teacher, and (most ideally) help reform the education system to be less restrictive and more able to nurture critical thinkers. but one day she came to our mutual friends at a bench and started ranting about some of the students she was doing substitute teaching for in a lower-income school. they were not curious; they did not try to question the dominant narratives about the country in their history textbooks even when she tried to push them. they were not critical. she implied that it was partly their fault. what was the point of reforming the curriculum and education if these students weren't going to rise to the occasion? she and her peers could do it; surely they could too.

does that sound familiar? what she didn't bring up in that conversation, and what I couldn't articulate until years later was that she was only half-right. those students could have become more critical and reasoned thinkers. but the reason they didn't wasn't due to a personal failing. it was likely they'd been primed and groomed through educational stratification into what I'll tenuously call vocational citizenship now: their highest calling and contribution to the nation in future was not to become future leaders, like my friend obviously was, but to be docile and effective workers and professionals, intelligent enough to labour in the workforce but not so intelligent they risked upsetting society. she was not going to find what she wanted from these students through the isolated apparatus of classroom pedagogy without an attention to politics. more than that: it was not clear that her imposing her ideas of what they could and should learn would genuinely nurture or emancipate them rather than becoming another yardstick with which they were reminded of their relegation to academic inferiority. 

so The Last Samurai does, to me, capture an ugly ruthless slice of how certain brilliant individuals similar to Sibylla and my friend think. I don't mean to rag on my friend, I respected her a lot and still do, this is more about a certain way of thinking than any single person. my friend, too, abhorred banality. she didn't mean it that way, but I got the impression sometimes she couldn't forgive the world around her for being ""mediocre"", and largely viewed social problems through the lens of what she had evaluated to be the best solution to  them, without acknowledging that her perspective was also at risk of being partial and limited.

would I recommend this book? maybe. it can be fun and engrossing at points. Ludo's segments also worked better for me than Sibylla's. but if you're like me and get pissed off at self-centred Gifted Child Narratives? skip this one.

Comments

[sushiflop]

Excellent review, glad I read it.

[meikuree]

happy to hear <3 <3

[firstroad]

Had soooooo much fun reading this review! It's a book I've been avoiding (and will continue to avoid, now), because it seemed to be what A Little Life is, but to ~misunderstood~ academics instead. Which, you know, follow your heart and all, but I do not care for academics who feel slighted by academia.

The woman glanced aghast at the small fat crew and was at once relieved, for it was clear enough that they had not understood a word of this.

Well, of course we all have our cross to bear, she said cheerily.

Okay, this was HYSTERICAL. I started laughing out loud at 'we all have our own cross to bear'. I don't think I had the response DeWitt wanted (IMO the woman is... right... like even if you understand the soliloquy -- which most people likely do? it's a popular one -- this is coming out of nowhere!) but I love u, nice Tesco lady.

You identified all the problems, but, man, my annoyance with the kind of person who shares beliefs with the book, and who seem to have empathy for those who weren't given certain educational/pedagogical opportunities, is that at the end of the day they still believe intelligence exists. They still think that there's a separate class of people who are just smarter. What is the point of all that compassion if you still believe only a select few are worth directing it towards?

one day she came to our mutual friends at a bench and started ranting about some of the students she was doing substitute teaching for in a lower-income school. they were not curious; they did not try to question the dominant narratives about the country in their history textbooks even when she tried to push them. they were not critical. she implied that it was partly their fault.

This reminded me of that teaching Lolita at a lower-income school article (whose author imo did a much better job of identifying what it was that made it difficult and how to foster curiosity), but I am also laughing at this response coming from someone who... wants to reform the educational system...? Surely she can see that, even on the least-critical level, it currently creates such a rigid right/wrong framework that a single educator can't do much (even if they personally do not adopt it)?? And at least your schoolmate was young 😭 what is DeWitt's excuse when she's saying stuff like "We have only to imagine a world where Oprah Winfrey picks up The Last Samurai."

I haven't read the book and will not read the book, but I thoroughly enjoyed seeing you pick apart its flawed arguments 🥰 but I'm also sad that it didn't seem to follow "any child could become like Ludo, given an environment which encourages their interests and curiosity" to even the very first stop of its logical conclusion, which would be that there are no interests that are inherently superior.

[meikuree]

at the end of the day they still believe intelligence exists. They still think that there's a separate class of people who are just smarter. What is the point of all that compassion if you still believe only a select few are worth directing it towards?

GOD yes, this was exactly my problem. it was as if Sibylla's (and DeWitt's, per her mute inglorious Nabokovs post) issue with the unequal access of educational opportunities was not the fact that this is unjust, but that hidden geniuses might be overlooked or miss their chance to be nurtured. DeWitt seems to imply that every child has a gift hiding within them, just waiting to be found, but this means their value is still contingent on having a gift. it seems extremely naive and optimistic to me. you have to be prepared for the fact that some children can't attain the markers that educators associate with intelligence or success, that there is no redeeming quality inside them, and still they deserve care, dignity, and respect. "the domestic help might actually be refined and cultured" is not the revolutionary or egalitarian statement she thinks it is!! the way 'refined' and 'cultured' are defined there still plays by middle class norms!!

ok. rant over.

something I forgot to mention is that Sibylla (& possibly DeWitt) seems quite blase about the idea of politics -- there is a sympathetic interlude dedicated to a piano prodigy who goes on a trip to Chad and remarks that 'I had never cared much about politics' (all while the narrative focuses on this prodigy's woes, not those of his local guide who gets MURDERED), and also talked in an unintentionally condescending way to someone from Chad about his home country. I suspect it's meant to demonstrate ambivalence on politics, but at some point it comes off as apolitical callousness, you know?

Surely she can see that, even on the least-critical level, it currently creates such a rigid right/wrong framework that a single educator can't do much

yes, precisely, and I remember thinking -- but not everyone has had your gilded pathway through education, where you were given the breathing space to question things.

this friend was very thoughtful and conscious in other areas. it was just this one bizarre moment -- and like, if you're going to be a teacher, you need to have unending patience for your students!

it didn't seem to follow "any child could become like Ludo, given an environment which encourages their interests and curiosity" to even the very first stop of its logical conclusion, which would be that there are no interests that are inherently superior.

word. this should be the headline of my review. I'm heartened you enjoyed reading it!

[meikuree]

last point your comment reminded me: TLS frames intelligence almost as a transhistorical phenomenon that supersedes birth origins, when that couldn’t be further from the truth — intelligence takes on meaning because of history and context.

[queenlua]

this was such a great review; thanks for posting it!

the anecdote about your old schoolmate + my fannish brain kinda got me thinking... like, your schoolmate was presumably pretty young when they were ranting on that bench, and maybe they eventually grew/changed their mindset over time, maybe they didn't, and certainly Sibylla hasn't moved on from that sort of thing, but... we know Ludo when he's awfully young. "Ludo at 15 (or 20, or 25, or 30" honestly would make an interesting fanfic/afterword/riff on the contents of the novel. like yeah Ludo is intellectually voracious and has a lot of the same attitudes as his mom but. that's true of lots of 12-year-olds. maybe he comes to realize, by degrees, the stuff he wasn't learning by being brought up in this weird, isolated way and develops some resentment, or a more fully-rounded picture of the world or...?

(also as a non-mandarin-speaker your rundown was both enlightening and entertaining lol. where is the factchecking indeed.)

thank you for the enjoyable writeup (and thanks also to your friend for the additional commentary lol)~

[meikuree]

thank you, that's really nice! in an odd way I'm still glad I read this, at least to see what the hype was about. cheers for putting the book on my radar! :D

your comment prompted me to see if anyone had requested TLS in exchanges, and I found this futurefic about a 17 yo Ludo going off to university (among other things)! I have not read it in full, but it does look like it contends with those questions. ao3 is magical. did you come away preferring either Sibylla or Ludo's segments? I liked Ludo's more even though most people seem to have the opposite response, because we got to see him start questioning the foundations of Sibylla's upbringing...

https://archiveofourown.org/works/21829498

[queenlua]

oh wow, i have now read the fic you linked and... yes, it very much grapples with those questions and. adds a more humanistic focus that worked really well for me. great read, thanks for sharing it <3

re: who i preferred more: i think Sibylla's sections were consistently funnier because she is a little more scattered, absurd, funky-thought-pattern-y overall, but when i think about the moments in the book that actually hit me emotionally, i think they all belong to Ludo? he's a little bit more "straight man" and inexperienced so he's less funny but, e.g., that last dad that he ends up sitting with while he dies, really did get me with watching this very learned kid struggling with the kind of Huge Thing no one can ever really be prepared for, and that's probably what'll stay with me longer.

[flipbook]

hi, I really appreciated this review both because I enjoy your analytical writing and also because-- hahahahaha-- when I was in college 2004-2008, a lot of my classmates (at this small, elite-ish college where everyone I knew was at least a little tortured by having been identified as "gifted" kids or whatever) mentioned this as a favorite/special classic book. and apparently to this day I've felt a little embarrassed about having not read it and knowing nothing about it! and now that has been contextualized for me. thank you for that gift ;)

[meikuree]

this is such a validating thing to hear, thank you, especially since I've been in similar environments more often than I'd have liked to be :,,) I was expecting more too, and sure it's... impactful, but only if you look past glaring elements, or so I think. I'm from a context where ~gifted children~ are feted and truly given disproportionate material opportunities, so I'm disposed to be less charitable to gifted handwringing.