THE LAST SAMURAI - Rare Fine Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing

DeWitt, Helen

ISBN 10: 0786866683 / ISBN 13: 9780786866687

Published by New York City, NY: Hyperion/Talk/Miramax, 2000, 2000

1st Printing. 530 pages. Published in 2000. The author's breakthrough debut novel. Regarded by many critics and serious readers as the greatest American novel of the first decade of the 21st century. The true First Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only that sold out shortly after publication. The First Edition is now rare. Presents, in its true first format, Helen DeWitt's "The Last Samurai". Her tour-de-force masterpiece, unsurpassed by her, and perhaps unsurpassable, a West-Meets-East, one-of-a-kind achievement. "The pleasure of ideas, the rich varieties of human thought, the possibilities that life offers us, and the balance between the structures we make of the world and the chaos that it proffers in return: Stylistically, the novel mirrors these ambivalences. DeWitt's remarkable prose follows the shifts and breaks of human consciousness and memory, capturing the intrusions of unspoken thought that punctuate conversation while providing tantalizing disquisitions on Japanese grammar or the physics of aerodynamics. Remarkable, profound, and often very funny. Arigato DeWitt-sensei" (Burhan Tufail). The title is DeWitt's homage to her protagonists' obsession with Akira Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai", ranked at the end of 2010 by film critics worldwide as the greatest "foreign" film of all time. As DeWitt herself would have observed, "foreign" as opposed to what? Hollywood films? If so, there is no competition to speak of. An absolute "must-have" title for Helen DeWitt collectors. This title is a great book. This is one of very few copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Talk/Miramax, the publishing arm of Miramax Films, collapsed shortly after it was launched. Beset with other priorities (its failed magazine) and internal problems, it failed to undertake a necessary publicity tour for its stunning book coup - and its Berlin-based author. Very few copies were actually printed, making the First Edition hard to find in any condition. Copies available online have serious flaws or are in innumerable subsequent printings from another publisher, New Directions. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare copy thus. One of the most brilliant writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER HELEN DEWITT TITLE IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 0786866683. Seller Inventory # 24103

Synopsis:

A child prodigy with a talent for languages and an insatiable thirst for knowledge, Ludo shares with his single mother, Sibylla, an obsession with Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, absorbing its lessons in Samurai virtue, and embarks on a quest to find his father, approaching seven men to test their worthiness. 75,000 first printing.

Review: Helen DeWitt's extraordinary debut novel The Last Samurai centres on the relationship between Sibylla, a single mother of precocious and rigorous intelligence, and her son Ludo, who, through his mother's singular attitude to education, develops into a prodigy of learning. He reads Homer in the original Greek at the age of four before moving onto Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse and Inuit; studying advanced mathematical techniques (Fourier analysis and Laplace transformations), and, as the title hints, endlessly watching and analysing Akira Kurosawa's cinematic masterpiece The Seven Samurai. But the one question that eludes an answer is that of the name of his father: Sibylla believes the Japanese film obliquely provides the male role models that Ludo's genetic father cannot supply, and refuses to be drawn on the question of paternal identity. The child thinks differently, however, and eventually sets out on a search for his lost father, a search which leads him beyond the certainties of acquired knowledge into the complex and messy world of adults.

The book draws on themes topical and perennial--the hothousing of children, the familiar literary trope of the quest for the (absent) father--and as such, the book divides itself into two halves: the first describes the education of Ludo, the second follows Ludo in his search for his father and father figures. The first stresses a sacred, Apollonian pursuit of logic, precise (if wayward) erudition and the erratic and endlessly fascinating architecture of languages, while the second moves this knowledge into the preterite world of emotion, human ambitions and their attendant frustrations and failures.

This is a book about the pleasure of ideas, of the rich varieties of human thought, the possibilities that life offers us and, ultimately, about the balance between the structures we make of the world and the irredeemable chaos that the world proffers in return. Stylistically, the novel mirrors this ambivalence: DeWitt's remarkable prose follows the shifts and breaks of human consciousness and memory, and captures the intrusions of unspoken thought that punctuate conversation, while providing tantalising disquisitions on, for example, Japanese grammar or the physics of aerodynamics. The Last Samurai is a remarkable, profound and often very funny book. "Arigato DeWitt-sensei"--and after reading this, you'll want to look it up too. --Burhan Tufail

Bibliographic Details

Title: THE LAST SAMURAI - Rare Fine Copy of The ...
Publisher: New York City, NY: Hyperion/Talk/Miramax, 2000
Publication Date: 2000
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
Signed: no
Edition: 1st Edition.