Word: samurais
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...literature as in life, a fine line often separates the ambitious from the merely pretentious. In her dazzling debut novel, The Last Samurai (Talk Miramax Books/Hyperion; 530 pages; $24.95), Helen DeWitt walks this line with the utmost confidence. Describing the book, however--a work that covers decades, spans oceans, has sections in Japanese, Greek and Old Norse, and touches on chess strategy and Laplace transformations, whatever they are--may be tricky, so hang on tight...
...provide comic relief in an otherwise haunting, melancholy work. The novel is almost free form, with shifting narrative voices and scholarly digressions on whatever happens to fascinate Sibylla or Ludo at any given moment. Enveloped in their cocoon of lonely eccentricity, mother and son watch Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai over and over, and fragments from the film float through the novel like a refrain in a minor key. Eventually, Ludo begins a quest of his own, not to recruit samurai but to track down a father, any father. "I felt ashamed, really ashamed of all the years...
...Harvard, we are supposed to get a liberal education. For most of us, this means learning about the occasional Samurai, Bonobo or Greek Hero. But for many, this also means learning about the premiere performances of five of the world's greatest pieces of classical music...
Bring back the Dream Team. Reassemble the legal samurai who pettifogged Bill Clinton through the Monica Lewinsky mess. Frog-march the presidency through months of exhausting litigation. It will tear the nation apart. The stock market may head south and keep going...
...would take four guts fail/pass. And maybe I'd be happy for a while. But tutorials made me shiver, with every paper they delivered. Bad news on my transcript, I still had three cores left. And I can't remember if I cried when I got lotteried from Samurai. But something touched me deep inside the day midterms arrived...