His rereading of The Last Samurai draws powerful insights from sociological field theory while tempering the rigidities of that model with dazzling displays of interpretive finesse and a book historian’s nose for the quirky particulars of the case-the vivid, surprising details that may be found at the heart of every great literary-production story.
Konstantinou brings an entirely fresh perspective to this challenging novel.
Merve Emre, University of Oxford and contributing writer at the New Yorker
His book will remain close at hand every time I reread and teach The Last Samurai. Lee Konstantinou has done it, and he has done it with amazing insight, clarity, and humor. 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.įinally! I have been waiting for years for someone to give The Last Samurai, the most inventive and delightful novel of the twenty-first century, the critical attention it deserves. He argues that The Last Samurai allegorizes its troubled relationship with the institutions and middlemen that ferried it into the world. 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. The novel helps us think about our capacity for learning and creativity, revealing the constraints that capitalism and material deprivation impose on intellectual flourishing. 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. Lee Konstantinou combines a riveting reading of The Last Samurai with a behind-the-scenes look at DeWitt’s fraught experiences with corporate publishing. The novel’s cult-classic status did not come easy: it underwent a notoriously tortuous publication process and briefly went out of print. Inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, he embarks on a quixotic, moving quest to find a suitable father. Disappointed when he meets his biological father, the boy decides that he can do better. 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.
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