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544 pages, Paperback
First published September 20, 2000
(A character in this book once recalls sitting down to write a “See ya” note after a disappointing sex and turns it into a well thought-out multi-page treatise on Greek that took a few obsessive hours to compose — and we learn later that the note in question after twelve years remains unread. Yeah, I’m not even ashamed to say that had I been the recipient of that note, I wouldn’t have read it either. And I’m ok with that.)
One day it occurred to him that there were quite a lot of other books on the shelves. He selected a book with pictures, and he came to my side, perturbed.
—The face on the gutta percha inkstand has a tale to tell —
I explained gutta percha, inkstand and tale
— it is believed to be that of Neptune, moulded to commemorate the successful use of the material to insulate the world’s first submarine telegraph cable from England to France in 1850. —
& I said NO.
"Cuando tocas una obra musical, hay muchos modos distintos de hacerlo. Uno no hace más que preguntarse: Y si. Pruebas una cosa y dices: Pero y si, y pruebas otra. Cuando compras un CD solo tienes una respuesta a la pregunta, nunca escuchas los «Y si»”Pues bien, tengo la esperanza de alcanzar alguno de esos «Y si» en mis lecturas venideras (y no resignarse a no conseguirlo es otra de las cosas a las que nos anima DeWitt), pero ahora tendrán que conformarse con lo que hay, y tengo que advertirles, aunque si me han leído anteriormente ya se habrán dado cuenta sobradamente, de que no soy lo que se dice un genio, estoy a mil años luz del niño que, junto a su madre Sibylla, protagoniza esta novela y que a muy corta edad ya sabe griego, francés, hebreo, árabe, japonés, español, ruso y algo de latín, además de tener conocimientos básicos de otros 17 o 18 idiomas, un niño que encuentra trivial la diferencia entre la ley de la relatividad especial y la general, un niño capaz de aprenderse de memoria la «Ilíada» por si algún día le meten en la cárcel.
“Cualquier cosa sería mejor que esto. ¿Se supone que es por mi bien? ¿Cómo puede ser por mi bien, si yo lo detesto? Sería mejor que fuera alocada, atrevida y que se jugara todo lo que tenemos”Sibylla está obsesionada con la película «Los siete Samurais», de Kurosawa, a la que acude cada vez que su alienante trabajo la hunde en la miseria, una película que, según ella, muestra modelos masculinos que Ludo requiere.
"… en esencia la película trata sobre la importancia del pensamiento racional. Deberíamos extraer nuestras conclusiones de las pruebas de que disponemos en lugar de lo que hemos oído, y procurar no dejarnos influir por ideas preconcebidas. Deberíamos esforzarnos en ver lo que nosotros seamos capaces de ver en lugar de lo que nos gustaría… solo porque alguien sonríe no quiere decir que no estaría mejor muerto"Sibylla es de esas personas “que cree que el aburrimiento es un destino peor que la muerte”, que se desespera con la falta de lógica con la que se conduce el 99% de la gente, que se entristece cuando su mente se percata de su propia debilidad. Sibylla no cree ser especialmente brillante, tampoco cree que su hijo lo sea, simplemente, piensa, son el producto de una estimulación conveniente desde los primeros años de vida (lo cual indica hasta qué punto pueden equivocarse hasta los genios. Otra enseñanza de la novela, como que su genialidad no les impide tampoco ser unos capullos ¿verdad, Ludo?). Sibylla salta de una cosa a otra continuamente, hace un relato fragmentado repleto de anécdotas, historias de personas excepcionales y referencias a otras lenguas y a sus especiales e interesantes particularidades gramaticales (adopte una lengua y no la abandone, ella nunca lo haría, parece venir a decir la autora). Sibylla, y después Ludo, nos sorprende con el funcionamiento de su mente genial, haciéndonos reflexionar sobre qué pensarían de nosotros y de nuestra cultura seres aún más inteligentes.
His agent had to remind him of various clauses in his contract and he had reminded him of his obligations of a professional musician.How Yamanoto deals with this was, for me, one of the most breathtaking parts of the book, and a true illustration of why geniuses are simply not like you or me. (Unless you're really a genius. I've met exactly one of those on GR so far.) They're off on another level that normal folks simply cannot comprehend, and it's lonely out there.
Yamanoto said: My agent always like to say that you could count on a Japanese to act like a true professional...What does that mean, to be a true professional? What's so Japanese about that?
Well, as you probably know the exchange of gifts is quite a big thing in Japan and part of it is that the gift has to be wrapped up in the right way. People go there and they miss the point. They think the thing the Japanese are really worried about is wrapping it up to look right it doesn't matter if what's inside is a piece of shit. I thought: that's what I'm supposed to do, they've already bought the wrapping paper and now I'm expected to give them a piece of shit that will fit the paper, I'm supposed to be a true professional and feel good about it because I gave them something that would fit the paper.
In a less barbarous society children would not be in the 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.Sybilla repeatedly plays Kurosawa's Seven Samurai to substitute for the lack of a male figure in Ludo's life. The movie serves as a substitute for the kind of human connection she desires but neither pursues nor talks about throughout the book.
Once you saw that you could potentially have dozens of fragments that could not be part of the finished work, and what you saw was that it was perceiving these fragments as fragments that made it possible to have a real conception of what wholeness might be in a workThe fragments of the father figures, is what allows Ludo a perception of wholeness in a human. Reconciling with all those fragments is what makes Ludo a genuine samurai
It is literally untrue to suggest that peace, contentment, happiness, follows a single battle, no matter how important, and that a hero who actually becomes is tantamount to a villain.
a supposedly fun book I'll never read again...
I wanted to clear my head. I wanted strangeness and coldness and precision.
My mother’s father was a jeweler. He was a handsome, shrewd-looking man; he was an accomplished amateur musician. He spoke excellent English, but he could hear his own accent and he knew there was something comical about it.
I have come to the end of this gigantic book, finally. After many a summer the swan has died, and what a long-lived swan this was. For in the course of this novel if in fact a novel it is I have buried an uncle, sadly, and seen the sunny days of September give way to the cold comforts of rainy October, and all along there was Helen DeWitt's giant of a novel (if in fact...) waiting for me, always. Yet why is there no feeling of triumph in my heart, no great emotion, at having reached the end? I probe my heart and brains and soul tonight (outside there blows a breeze that comes in through my tiny western window, suggestive of nocturnal rains), to try and understand my apathetic arrival at this end that I have sought for a bunch of weeks now, but without conviction, for I am somewhat devoid of interest about the whole affair, now that I have reached the end.
My grandfather had left Vienna in 1922 and he had settled in Philadelphia and done pretty well. The quality of the music available was not really comparable to what he was used to, but otherwise it was not too bad. He married and got through the Depression all right and from a business point of view the War was a good thing because sales of wedding rings shot up. From another point of view the War changed his views
"The whole affair" isn't quite right. For there was delight, in fact, in the pioneering pages of this tome. We started, in the first days of October, jovially, at the beginning of things, as it should be. Here is the world before the two central persons (Sybil, the mother; Ludo, the child, the prodigy) of the novel emerge, in the old pioneering America of the vast lands and the great silences. Here are the ancestors in their old ancestral saga of an existence, very interesting, very engaging, and somewhat biblical, esthetically. There was in a way a that old-epic feeling one feels when one reads about the old old America, as in that little delightful novel Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson. There is that kind of atmosphere in these initial chapters, which is perhaps why I read the book in the first place, for I thought, I expected, I hoped, that the book would be this kind of epic, in a way. But it was not. It is an epic, alright, but of an entirely different order. A kind of domestic, claustrophobic epic of motherhood and genius, a kind of large-scale study of its two persons, repetitive, obsessive, almost manic, catatonic, skimpy...
The novel, the book, the treatise, the volume, is divided into two rough halves, structurally. There is the first half, narrated by the mother, and the second one by the son, that's called Ludo. Ludo is the prodigy, the genius, the...
The first part was okay, and well written, and that's the problem. For I have, as a principle, a great aversion to good roads that lead on to bad roads, in that deceptive way of roads, and this first part was a good well built road leading on to a bad road, so to speak. Listen:
This book, this novel...is a postmodern kind of thing. And therefore a lot of the things that are in it seem only there to fill up the pages, to create an absurd situation for the reader, to, in other words, bore and encumber the reader, poor creature. Nothing here of the old fashioned directness of narrative, not linearity, (I'd never ask for that), but that... focus, on character, on emotion, on living.....
I begin to loose my thread...
Barbaric comes from the Greek word βρβαρος which means a non-Greek but in English it means something completely different.
In the first half we hear Sib, the mom, who is an American woman living out there in England, I think in London, with her ludicrously named son Ludo, who happens to be a genius, a prodigy (not the same thing!), where they just, well, live,... We hear this woman narrate, these are, in fact, her notes towards some work which she hopes to create, for "posterity." There's a sketchiness to them, a casualness, which is nothing to cry about, really. The woman goes about her business as a typist, working at home for some publishing house, and bringing her son to age, educating him as much as she is by him, two creatures in a petri dish, and, most importantly, watching The Last Samurai, a film she deems "a masterpiece of modern cinema." It's mostly about these few things she writes about, which is to say, thinks about, in her day to day business of existence. And at times, how Ludo came to be, how her own parents brought her into this strange world, her personal history. It's that kind of thing, dear me, in the first many chapters.
Anyway I have been watching Seven Samurai once a week with L to counteract the deplorable influence of the Circle Line.
The Last Samurai (1954) is the beating heart of the book that I'm talking about, but it is mostly the beating heart of the first half of the book I'm talking about. A thousand times or more we find her (Sib) watching what she calls "a masterpiece of modern cinema," often in the company of her somewhat reluctant son.
We are sitting in bed watching a masterpiece of modern cinema. I sat at the computer for three hours this morning, & allowing for interruptions typed maybe an hour and a half. At last I said I was going upstairs to watch Seven Samurai & L said he would too. L has read Odyssey 1–10; he has read the story of the Cyclops six times. He has also read a voyage of Sindbad the Sailor, three chapters of Algebra Made Easy, and a few pages each of Metamorphoses, Kalilah wa Dimnah and I Samuel following some scheme which I don’t understand, and every single one involves a constant stream of questions.
I myself have watched the film in question, once, on my phone, some months or in fact years back. The Last Samurai, when I watched it, left me thinking of little else but watching it again, for I was old enough or rather young enough to know or rather to believe that there could not possibly be another film as good as this, and so one must watch it many times, until it becomes to one a reality and not some old movie. I haven't watched it again, nor did I, as I read the book, nor perhaps will I, having finished this book that I will definitely not read again, and which is the best reminder I had to re-watch Seven Samurai, after all these years (or months, as the case might be).
I got home and I thought I should stop leading so aimless an existence. It is harder than you might think to stop leading an existence, & if you can’t do that the only thing you can do is try to introduce an element of purposefulness.
And because I have long lost interest in this book, which no one was paying me to read, and have long longed to be through with it; having lost touch with it, somewhat, yet having read it long enough to have loved it in an offhand kind of way; and having in fact determined that it was not entirely a waste of my time, which isn't as precious as time is generally understood to be—having come this far, I wonder what is the thing I wished to say, in this essay, in this sentence, yet, in that same offhand way, I feel free, and what I'm I doing, standing here staring at the prison from which I've just been set free? I should run headlong into the next book, or go watch Seven Samurai, a masterpiece of modern cinema, again—