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HELEN DEWITT
Though she says The
Last Samurai began as a simple book, DeWitt admits that "I love implausibility. So if I suddenly find I've come up with a wildly implausible plot, I have the sense that something is right about that"
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Crafting a New Tower of Babel
By Elizabeth Gleick
Open Helen DeWitt's debut novel, The Last Samurai, to a random page, and you may think you've stumbled upon some sort of guide to the Tower of Babel. There are bits of Greek and Japanese and Inuit. And, more than once, like weird typographical errors, a list of stops on the London Underground. This is babble with a purpose, though, which is all revealed in the fullness of a very satisfying — not to mention rapturously received — novel about a single mother and her genius son.
DeWitt knows her linguistic playfulness pushes the boundaries of what is ordinary and acceptable in fiction. She knows she risks trying her readers' patience. But, she says, "I had this proselytizing zeal." If she'd had her way with her editor, her book would have been even more multilayered; for instance, she wanted to include photo stills from The Seven Samurai, the Akira Kurosawa film that is integral to her story. "There was also originally something about counting in Arabic," she says, and bursts into peals of laughter. "I feel I exercised such restraint."
Restraint, though, does not come naturally to the 43-year-old author. She says she has 50 to 100 unfinished books sitting around — some of them 120,000-word drafts, others a few chapters. She had a "terrible" time selling Samurai, and Plan B was to write "much more commercial things — not much point in finishing those." Not after Samurai, which has been sold to more than a dozen countries and optioned for the movies. |
