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The Last Samurai Reread
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.
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.
- GenresNonfiction
144 pages, Paperback
First published November 22, 2022
2 people are currently reading
49 people want to read
About the author
Lee Konstantinou
13 books118 followersI've written fiction, criticism, and reviews.
- I wrote the novel Pop Apocalypse (Ecco/HarperPerennial, 2009).
- With Samuel Cohen, I co-edited The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (University of Iowa Press, 2012).
- Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction was published in 2016 by Harvard University Press.
- The Last Samurai Reread came out from the Rereadings series at Columbia University Press in 2022.
- I co-edited with Georgiana Banita a collection called Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman (2023) with the University Press of Mississippi.
I'm working on a new project called “Creator-Owned Comics" which is about the ideal and practice of creator-ownership in the comics world in the 1980s and 1990s.
- I wrote the novel Pop Apocalypse (Ecco/HarperPerennial, 2009).
- With Samuel Cohen, I co-edited The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (University of Iowa Press, 2012).
- Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction was published in 2016 by Harvard University Press.
- The Last Samurai Reread came out from the Rereadings series at Columbia University Press in 2022.
- I co-edited with Georgiana Banita a collection called Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman (2023) with the University Press of Mississippi.
I'm working on a new project called “Creator-Owned Comics" which is about the ideal and practice of creator-ownership in the comics world in the 1980s and 1990s.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
October 9, 2022
For me, this is a genre of book to be treasured. One sharp critic reads one novel and its context. Columbia University Press has created an entire series called Rereadings (you can find the link to the series here https://cup.columbia.edu/series/rerea...), which over the last two years has featured short books by critics and scholars about such novels as Vineland, The Savage Detectives, and A Visit from the Goon Squad. I have just finished the most recent book in the series, Lee Konstantinou’s The Last Samurai Reread, and I believe Helen DeWitt’s great novel has received a much-needed strong and comprehensive reading. If you are a fan of DeWitt’s novel, as I am, you should read this book.
Here's my full review.
https://www.thevisionarycompany.net/b...
Here's my full review.
https://www.thevisionarycompany.net/b...
April 7, 2023
Came across this book by chance today and read it in one sitting. What a pleasure to see one of my favorite novels considered and canonized so thoughtfully.
In reading it, an echo of discovering and (to borrow a phrase) loving, as one does, The Last Samurai.
In reading it, an echo of discovering and (to borrow a phrase) loving, as one does, The Last Samurai.
December 17, 2022
my god I loved this. my perfect book, in many ways. I'd read a Reread of this Reread ... and then probably a Reread of that too. It is possible that this addiction to endless drilling down and thinking about how a thought came to be thought is why I am doomed, intellectually...In any case...
REALITY, BABY:
"The boy's quest is, in a sense, quixotic, doomed to fail in advance, yet in his determined refusal to settle for a bad father we can see the core dialectic of The Last Samurai. One must, the book suggests face reality honestly but never submit to that reality. We must judge what exists, what is given, what we unthinkingly take as natural or necessary or conventional by the most stringent standards of analysis-not by the standard of what exists but by the standard of what might become possible in a better, more rational world. When we marry our wildest desires to the highest standards, we thereby test our reality. ... A good reality will parry the blow."
Oh fuck...:
"TLS might, by this light, be read as a novel-length example of Quit Lit. The genre typically features a narrative of academic breakdown and disillusionment. In the prototypical example of Quit Lit, we witness the journey of an Aspiring Academic who at first identifies wholly with the role, with the mission of higher education, and with the academic institutions that were once thought to sustain that mission. Enduring a series of abuses, humiliations, and travails, the Aspiring Academic discovers that academia is an uninhabitable planet, a discovery that sometimes requires a painful disidentification with a mentor or advisor to whom the Aspiring Academic has been complexly attached. Our hero will be forced to leave that destitute world, to discard the bad mentor. In this case, Sibylla's disillusionment (and DeWitt's) is structured around the clash of, on the one hand, the fantasy of Oxford as a home for reason and, on the other, the grubby ordinary reality of the place. In a final retrospective speech act, one that structures Quit Lit as a genre, our trusty narrator exposes the badness of the institution by ultimately affirming their own, higher rationality. The hero's act of public disavowal ultimately-dialectically-valorizes their intellectual seriousness, affirming the importance of the very values that the bad institution has failed to uphold or defend."
REALITY, BABY:
"The boy's quest is, in a sense, quixotic, doomed to fail in advance, yet in his determined refusal to settle for a bad father we can see the core dialectic of The Last Samurai. One must, the book suggests face reality honestly but never submit to that reality. We must judge what exists, what is given, what we unthinkingly take as natural or necessary or conventional by the most stringent standards of analysis-not by the standard of what exists but by the standard of what might become possible in a better, more rational world. When we marry our wildest desires to the highest standards, we thereby test our reality. ... A good reality will parry the blow."
Oh fuck...:
"TLS might, by this light, be read as a novel-length example of Quit Lit. The genre typically features a narrative of academic breakdown and disillusionment. In the prototypical example of Quit Lit, we witness the journey of an Aspiring Academic who at first identifies wholly with the role, with the mission of higher education, and with the academic institutions that were once thought to sustain that mission. Enduring a series of abuses, humiliations, and travails, the Aspiring Academic discovers that academia is an uninhabitable planet, a discovery that sometimes requires a painful disidentification with a mentor or advisor to whom the Aspiring Academic has been complexly attached. Our hero will be forced to leave that destitute world, to discard the bad mentor. In this case, Sibylla's disillusionment (and DeWitt's) is structured around the clash of, on the one hand, the fantasy of Oxford as a home for reason and, on the other, the grubby ordinary reality of the place. In a final retrospective speech act, one that structures Quit Lit as a genre, our trusty narrator exposes the badness of the institution by ultimately affirming their own, higher rationality. The hero's act of public disavowal ultimately-dialectically-valorizes their intellectual seriousness, affirming the importance of the very values that the bad institution has failed to uphold or defend."
June 23, 2022
The Last Samurai Reread, by Lee Konstantinou, is the third book I've read in the Rereadings series and like the others it offers new (at least for me) perspectives on reading The Last Samurai.
There is one major difference for me with this volume and the other two in the series that I've read. I had read the novels discussed (Vineland and A Visit from the Goon Squad) in the other books multiple times while I have only read The Last Samurai once. If you are like me in this respect, then I think this book will be a wonderful read and will likely make you want to both reread (imagine that!) The Last Samurai as well as (re)visit Helen DeWitt's other work.
I don't yet know to what extent I am in agreement with some of Konstantinou's connections (within the work, between the work and DeWitt, or as a larger statement about society or the writing/publishing life) but I certainly find the case he makes compelling. Since I don't currently have a copy of DeWitt's book I am probably not going to be rereading it for several months, but I will have some of my notes from reading this book handy.
I would highly recommend this to anyone who has read The Last Samurai, no matter what your opinion of it is. This book sheds light on some things and makes connections you might not have considered. I don't recommend this to those who haven't read it, but I can't imagine too many people who haven't read it would pick up a book about rereading it. If you are by nature someone who rereads books on occasion, this is ideal for you.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
There is one major difference for me with this volume and the other two in the series that I've read. I had read the novels discussed (Vineland and A Visit from the Goon Squad) in the other books multiple times while I have only read The Last Samurai once. If you are like me in this respect, then I think this book will be a wonderful read and will likely make you want to both reread (imagine that!) The Last Samurai as well as (re)visit Helen DeWitt's other work.
I don't yet know to what extent I am in agreement with some of Konstantinou's connections (within the work, between the work and DeWitt, or as a larger statement about society or the writing/publishing life) but I certainly find the case he makes compelling. Since I don't currently have a copy of DeWitt's book I am probably not going to be rereading it for several months, but I will have some of my notes from reading this book handy.
I would highly recommend this to anyone who has read The Last Samurai, no matter what your opinion of it is. This book sheds light on some things and makes connections you might not have considered. I don't recommend this to those who haven't read it, but I can't imagine too many people who haven't read it would pick up a book about rereading it. If you are by nature someone who rereads books on occasion, this is ideal for you.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
June 27, 2022
Note: I received a free ARC of this book through NetGalley
The Last Samurai Reread is Lee Konstantinou's entry into Columbia University Press' Rereadings series where authors and academics revisit post-1970 novels and write about them through a present day lens. I originally chose to read The Last Samurai Reread because I remember reading Helen DeWitt's landmark novel and enjoying it while also knowing that I wasn't fully understanding it. Knowing Lee Konstantinou's work as an academic focused on postmodern literature, I felt that he would be an excellent teacher to lead me back to DeWitt.
The Last Samurai Reread does exactly what you would want it to do. After reading it I want nothing more than to find my old copy of The Last Samurai and devour it. Particularly enjoyable are Konstantinou's investigations into DeWitt's struggles writing and publishing her novel and how that impacts the novel itself as well as where DeWitt's lived experiences diverge from Sibylla's and Ludo's in the novel. Konstantinou is able to write about some difficult and often heady concepts -- postmodernism is not often an easy period in literature to grasp -- in a readable way. Since graduating from college I have often missed deeper, academic discussions of literature and The Last Samurai Reread scratched that itch for me. It also encouraged me to seek out other titles from this series to hopefully discover (or rediscover) more great literature.
The Last Samurai Reread is Lee Konstantinou's entry into Columbia University Press' Rereadings series where authors and academics revisit post-1970 novels and write about them through a present day lens. I originally chose to read The Last Samurai Reread because I remember reading Helen DeWitt's landmark novel and enjoying it while also knowing that I wasn't fully understanding it. Knowing Lee Konstantinou's work as an academic focused on postmodern literature, I felt that he would be an excellent teacher to lead me back to DeWitt.
The Last Samurai Reread does exactly what you would want it to do. After reading it I want nothing more than to find my old copy of The Last Samurai and devour it. Particularly enjoyable are Konstantinou's investigations into DeWitt's struggles writing and publishing her novel and how that impacts the novel itself as well as where DeWitt's lived experiences diverge from Sibylla's and Ludo's in the novel. Konstantinou is able to write about some difficult and often heady concepts -- postmodernism is not often an easy period in literature to grasp -- in a readable way. Since graduating from college I have often missed deeper, academic discussions of literature and The Last Samurai Reread scratched that itch for me. It also encouraged me to seek out other titles from this series to hopefully discover (or rediscover) more great literature.
August 10, 2023
This book wasn't yet published when I read The Last Samurai a few years ago. I'm glad to have discovered it during a group re-read.
Konstantinou primarily looks at the development of the novel over time, from its first conception in DeWitt’s fantasy of choosing her own father, to a sophisticated crusade against the institutional forces, the societal and artistic norms, that constrain art, to its reflection of DeWitt’s own struggle to bring her work to the public in the face of multiple difficulties financial, artistic, and organizational. He then turns to the future and examines how the novel functions as a type of Rosetta Stone – even as it advocates Rosetta Stones for the present.
Highly recommended for those who've read DeWitt's book, or plan to.
FMI see my blog post at A Just Recompense.
Konstantinou primarily looks at the development of the novel over time, from its first conception in DeWitt’s fantasy of choosing her own father, to a sophisticated crusade against the institutional forces, the societal and artistic norms, that constrain art, to its reflection of DeWitt’s own struggle to bring her work to the public in the face of multiple difficulties financial, artistic, and organizational. He then turns to the future and examines how the novel functions as a type of Rosetta Stone – even as it advocates Rosetta Stones for the present.
Highly recommended for those who've read DeWitt's book, or plan to.
FMI see my blog post at A Just Recompense.
January 22, 2023
This is a brief commentary on Helen DeWitt’s novel The Last Samurai, underscoring how in spite of its troubled publication history, it has become a modern classic. Lee Konstantinou both describes the context of the writing and publication of the novel, and engages in some analysis of the book. That first part is where this book is really worthwhile. DeWitt’s work on the novel and attempts to get it to press are a wild read with some colorful personalities and the odd corporate turn of Miramax Films deciding to enter publishing. Unfortunately, the analysis part either covers things that will seem obvious to readers, or cites critical theory that contributes nothing to one’s appreciation or the book and pads the text to reach book length.
February 26, 2023
An in-depth, intelligent and insightful study of Helen DeWitt’s novel The Last Samurai, a novel I didn’t much relate to when I read it a little while back, not least because I was constantly aware that I wasn’t really “getting” it, so this critical analysis was more than welcome. It made much that had been unclear clear, and explained many of the subtleties and underlying themes that had passed me by. Although an academic and scholarly text, the writing is accessible and straightforward, and I learnt a lot. Whether it will give me the strength to try Helen DeWitt’s novel again, well, time will tell. But if I do I will be keeping Konstaninou’s masterful examination of it firmly by my side.
April 13, 2023
I wish there'd been a bit more biography of DeWitt and her manuscript before she began trying to sell; so much of the focus is how that process, presumably underway after a bulk of the novel had been written and conceived, became the subject of the work. Clearly she had similar obsessions already---I just thought that could have been a bit fleshed out. But there was a lot to chew on here, it was a really interesting approach that worked most of the time, and I'll probably reread it or at least re-skim it whenever I reread The Last Samurai. I'm also very interested in reading more of the ReRead series, and more by Konstantinou.
Read
February 5, 2023reading a difficult but brilliant book and then immediately reading a book about that book is such an enjoyable experience. I recommend this two book combo to anyone interested in the literary form, literary criticism, how norms / standards restrict our potential, the vision and genius required to see beyond those norms, or how the last samurai seeks to transcend these norms while being inescapably birthed and structured by these norms
"A good reality will parry the blow"
"A good reality will parry the blow"
March 1, 2023
good good stuff…. only a couple times got rubbed the wrong way by academic-y analysis, will be awhile before i can tolerate certain modes of writing again. in general describes dewitt’s story of publication very well and makes me obsessed w her even more, esp the borderline throwaway line that the true terror of madness is knowing you alone will be picking up the pieces
August 21, 2022
Provided by Netgalley.
I went into this book without reading the previous one. which in hindsight was not a good idea. This was an enjoyable read. The characters and writing in this book was exceptional. I will definitely be reading the previous books.
I went into this book without reading the previous one. which in hindsight was not a good idea. This was an enjoyable read. The characters and writing in this book was exceptional. I will definitely be reading the previous books.
January 7, 2025
I love this series and appreciate this book, and only wish more of it were about the text of The Last Samueai rather than the circumstances surrounding its publication, as significant and interrelated with the text as they are.
February 4, 2025
A book that only works if you read a book that only works if you saw a movie. Love it.
October 14, 2023
Fuck the Chicago manual of style.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews