Helen DeWittRecensioni

I bought and read this because it had appeared on a New York Times list of “22 of the Funniest Novels Since ‘Catch-22’” earlier this year, and while it held some promise early on, it rather quickly became too one-note and couldn’t sustain itself over 273(!) pages.

DeWitt’s writing is wickedly satirical and I liked the sprinkling of actual wisdom about the business world amidst its outrageous and absolutely filthy premise. The book peaks early in a chapter called Special K, with its observations about needing to accept things for what they are, human guilt and the urge to dominate, and how those things relate to sales, while dropping in humor like “You take a bunch of guys and maybe for some of them The Man was Elvis, and for some of them it was Jimi Hendrix, and for some of them it was Kurt Cobain, but the thing they all have in common is that they would never sing, ‘Everything is beautiful in its own way’ unless someone held a gun to their head (and maybe not even then).”

The trouble is that the variations on the premise were as uninteresting as they were unappealing, and there were so many retrograde ideas floating about in here that I suppose were meant to be funny, but which seemed rather close to being accepted as truisms. The performance of “alpha males” does improve, some of the women in these degrading positions go on to highly successful careers, politicians who use the service now follow through with their campaign promises, etc. The variations in pigmentation among Caucasians that would compromise anonymity is completely ignored, as if “white” is a single thing, but for African Americans it’s called out. The “Mexicans and Nicaraguans” are equated with the “very cheapest materials” in a competitor, whereas the inventor’s titular service only uses the “highest quality of staff.”

Now that’s probably all meant as part of the satire, but as those kinds of views are unfortunately still held and the satire doesn’t go even further in these directions as exaggeration or provide a challenge, it doesn’t always seem to be mocking them. Regardless, it wasn’t very enjoyable reading over its second half. This would have been much better as a short story or a novella.

Just this quote, on men:
“One of the things that can put on a strain on a relationship, after all, is that men tend to equate a relationship with sex on demand.”½

2022. A great story. I don’t want to spoil anything. It doles out pieces of information in a delicious and surprising way, leaving one guessing until the end, and that’s the way it should be read. When it started out about fantastically rich people, I couldn’t imagine why I’d want to read it, but it turned out it was packed with little twists. Just read it. It doesn’t take long.

[b:The English Understand Wool|59468833|The English Understand Wool|Helen DeWitt|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1660942303l/59468833._SY75_.jpg|93673007]'s take on the writing/publishing game is easily one of my top books for this year for writing, topic, size (67pp), plot and wit "like a dry cork," as a blurb pointed out. Dewitt is at her best.

A light, dry, chilly short story about a teenager called Marguerite who is from a privileged background. The satirical jabs about the publishing industry are fun; the voice is entertaining, but the main character fails to entirely convince.

The stories in this collection remind you repeatedly that Helen DeWitt is fiercely intelligent. Many of her protagonists are also fiercely intelligent. And it would be fascinating to witness her sitting down with them at a dinner party, but rather too frightening for one to attend. Many of these stories are from her early days in Oxford and efficiently take that as their setting. Others are set about the world and unsurprisingly involve characters with a profusion of languages. The subjects of the stories range wildly but all involve some sort of intellectual problem that needs resolution or at least confrontation. You will either find such esoteric manias thrilling or distressing.

The writing is always crisp and sometimes pointed. It can border on the introspective but interiority of this form is typically also expressive in some fashion. Probably best not to worry too much about it; just go along with the story and it will work itself out.

Easy to recommend but probably not for everyone.

This is a delicious little amuse-bouche of a book. Must have been quite fun for DeWitt to imagine and design a comeuppance for the crassly exploitative publishers of bestselling memoirs in the form of an unusual teenage girl. Easily read in around an hour.

Marguerite’s maman is a woman of high standards. She goes to Scotland to purchase a bolt of fine tweed. But she takes that tweed to London to have it made into clothes. Linen is purchased in Ireland but is cut for clothes in Paris. There are other strictures to her routine and Marguerite has taken all of them on board. So the sudden disappearance of Marguerite’s “parents” is less traumatic than might be expected. Even that these characters had made off with $100 million dollars of Marguerite’s real inheritance is not troublesome for her. She had, after all, been given a perfectly splendid education, and expressing dismay now would certainly display mauvais ton.

Helen DeWitt’s creation is an absolute delight. So measured and controlled. And, despite her youth, so wise. Even the brevity of the book is not distressing. An excess would, in Marguerite’s understanding, be mauvais ton.

Definitely recommended. Enjoy!

Disappointing. It's a satirical work about an entrepreneur's perverse business scheme to enhance the productivity of the high testosterone cowboys in the corporate America but the book just didn't add up to be that enjoyable.

The rather singular Sibylla is the product of rather curious parents. Although we don’t see her early life here, we can only imagine it to be, well, rather singular. Eventually she blags her way into Oxford university and is suitably astounding. But at some point she finds herself in need of money, which initiates a series of events (I’m skipping over a bit here) which culminate in the birth of her son, Ludo. (Actually that now seems like rather a lengthy elision.)

Ludo might be described as exceptional, having started learning Ancient Greek at the age of four. But by comparison to J.S. Mill, he was already a late bloomer. For me, however, it’s really Ludo’s mother, Sibylla, who is more fascinating. Because it’s her effort of will, and unacknowledged brilliance, that opens the doors for Ludo. He merely has to walk through. Of course when the story turns to Ludo’s quest for his father, or possible father, Sibylla’s presence in the story gets sidelined somewhat. That was probably inevitable, but it makes the last third of the novel somewhat less interesting. (Though perhaps it’s more interesting for other people.)

Helen DeWitt’s writing is engaging and full of charm (though that rather makes it sound superficial, and it’s definitely not that). I loved the intense treatment of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and even though I couldn’t read the Japanese or the Ancient Greek passages, I did not find that problematic. (Just a bit personally disappointing.)

So easy to recommend.

Having just seen Seven Samarai (again), this was recommended to me. Her writing is both funny and strange. DeWitt weaves stories of adventurers, dreamers and brilliant men throughout her odd book about a single mom raising a genius child with Kurosawa to guide her. Hmmm...

I believe that I gave this clever, metafictional novel a fair shot, but I wearied of references I could make little sense of and long passages presenting arcane information on linguistics and dead languages (among MANY other things). I was more irritated than impressed by all Dewitt’s tricks. I know this book is something of a modern classic, admired by many, but I was drowning in the metafictional elements. Inventive the novel may be, but at a certain point, enough is enough. Some time ago, I revoked my membership in the clean-plate club; I no longer complete books where the struggle and boredom dwarf enjoyment. I’m doubtful I’d bother with this again and I’m disinclined to read anything else by Dewitt.

Let me start off by saying, because I'll be posting this to my blog, that this book has nothing to do with the film starring Tom Cruise. The film was fine, I don't have anything against it, but the stories could not be more different, except that they both have to do with Samurai, in one way or another.

Helen DeWitt put everything into this book. That's not to say she tried to cram the whole world into 500 pages, it's just to say that she put herself into this book. All of it. I have to believe that. The scope of it, the emotion, the stories--it must have taken everything she had.

It's a wonderful book.

It's a wonderful book about a boy and his mother and about genius and heroism and goodness. There's also a fair amount of stuff in there about various languages and some mathematics and music, and some of it's quite technical. But this should not dissuade you from reading it! You do not need to understand irregular Arabic verb forms to be utterly taken in by the tale she's telling. And it's completely satisfying.

A final word of advice if you have the book on your shelf and are thinking about cracking it open: after about 50 pages, you will want to know what else DeWitt has written, and you will Google her name and discover, to your dismay, that she has written only one other book and that this book is only available as an ebook on her website. Then you will find some interviews with her, or you will find her blog, and you will discover that she has not been treated kindly by the publishing biz. Don't read these things. For weeks after I read that stuff, all I could hear in my head when I opened to my bookmark was the voice of the writer, Helen DeWitt, who has been beaten up by a business gone crazy in its death throes, and not the voice of her narrator.

Don't let this happen to you. Read the book in full. Let it take you in. Then write a nice review of it, or buy it for a friend who likes a good story, or write a glowing letter to Ms. DeWitt thanking her for writing it.

It's that good.

Utterly charming story about a woman who was raised by her kidnappers to be a resourceful and smart woman. I know that doesn’t sound charming but it is.½

Had to really struggle to finish this. I liked a couple of the stories, but mostly I just didn’t understand them very well. I think I’d need to be smarter and better educated to really comprehend much of it. There’s definitely a sense of humor there, and it was frustrating to feel too stupid to really get it. Oh well...

As I said, I picked this up because I loved her novel The Last Samurai. This turned out to be very short, more of a short story even, rather than a novella. But it is nevertheless very good.

The story is narrated by a young girl who we learn has been engaged to write a memoir. We learn the reasons she has been asked to write a memoir at such a young age over the course of the story. From the beginning we learn that she has had an unconventional upbringing in Marrakech. She has lived a fabulously wealthy lifestyle, frequently traveling, staying only in the best hotels (Claridges in London, Georges V in Paris), where the best pianos are placed in their suite so she can keep up with her piano lessons. The title refers to the trips to the Hebrides to purchase the handwoven tweeds for the tailor in London. (Linen must come from Ireland, silk from Thailand). It's all a pleasant frolic as the young narrator outwits those surrounding her who are trying to take advantage.

Recommended.
3 1//2 stars½

What to say about a book written by someone who is so smart she make David Foster Wallace look like a remedial grade-school student?

It's a frustratingly brilliant book in that there is so much information that the brain and eye skip over because of difficulty, and make re-reading page-by-page nearly essential because it feels like the book is imparting secret truths about life.

Amongst those truths: the brilliant almost never end up where you think they will, opportunity is often more important than innate intelligence, formal education is less important that one thinks though interaction with extremely smart people is crucial to development, culture is reflected through language and language impacts culture and individuals in interesting ways, music and cinema each are their own sorts of languages, and a dozen more.

The change in perspective in the second section is a bit jarring at first, but stick with it, please. I assure you it is worth it.

This book made me laugh out loud AND feel too stupid to be alive. A rare combination indeed!

"It's tough to say who's more of a genius: young Ludo, the Odyssean hero of The Last Samurai; his teacher/mother, Sybilla; or his creator,first-time novelist Helen DeWitt:"

I cant say I agree with the enthusiastic blurb writer.
To me a genius is someone who writes a book that makes you feel something.

This wasnt it.At most it created a sense of boredom.

It was impossible to read this,it was like being hit by a text flood of pretentiousness.There was no thread to follow just statement after statement of things that you didnt really know how they fit together.

Also if you want to have a boy as your narrator at least make his narrating sound like a young boys instead of a 50-year old professor.

I think this was written for a certain select few.Maybe there are some hyper-intellectuals out there who goes "aha" after reading this book,all it made me say was "huh?"

½

Ew.

Interesting premise--"ideas man" sells service to businesses of providing staffing of female temps for anonymous deluxe glory-hole sex to relieve excess testosterone and lessen sexual harassment--very dryly realized. Mostly focused on corporate culture and marketing. Nice that the author delves into the logistics and details of arranging such a service in contemporary workplaces, but for every question or obstacle she addresses there are dozens more that come to mind that are ignored or dealt with glancingly.

I listened to the audio book. I'm not sure how to sum up the experience. I think the author wrote a funny book that includes slews of salesman (sic) self improvement tropes. It is provoking and pointed particularly now during the Me Too era. It's also significantly dated - office workers, office jobs and office technology are all in different places thank the gods.

A Swiftian type satire about how to deal with men and there libido in the workplace. Heavy handed, of course, perhaps a bit too dragged out.

Someone’s mother once said “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Well, I was never one to take unsolicited advice. I think many reviewers are afraid of appearing shallow by stating the truth: THIS BOOK IS SIMPLY AWFUL. I quit at page 196. It’s probably been a decade since I haven’t finished a book – I think it was Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. Actually, I am now remembering quitting From Hell by Alan Moore more recently.

Dewitt's book rambles on and on, skittering over endless senseless topics; it is cloaked as an “intellectual, tour de force, playful, multi-layered, but wonderfully readable” (according to the jacket flap so it must be true.) She interrupts her vignettes, with even less meaningful interludes. If there was a central theme, it was lost on me. I love one reviewer’s comment: “No wonder she never finished college. She can’t seem to think in a straight line.” Her disdain for traditional education, especially for the gifted, is repeated ad nauseum, which I am quite sure was her own personal experience. And why does she think “&’s” are so cool? An utterly unnecessary affectation. Do yourself a humongous favor, skip this one.

Novels that deliberately pitch themselves as "for smart people" often draw much more attention to the author than to the story itself (the works of James Joyce being the most extreme example), so I was delighted to read this really entertaining novel that integrated a tremendous amount of advanced linguistics, music, film, physics, and other "just go look it up" subjects into the plot in a way that both showed off DeWitt's intelligence yet still had those qualities that make for a satisfying novel instead of a particularly long Wikipedia session. It begins from the point of view of of Sybilla, a smart but unambitious single mother who gets knocked up after a one-night stand, and her attempts to raise her child prodigy son Ludo. Ludo comes off as mildly Aspergery, and he's absolutely determined to learn out who his father is over his mother's objections that she can raise him by herself. As he becomes the primary character and finally discovers and is then disappointed by his true father's thoroughgoing mediocrity, he decides to visit several candidates to be a surrogate father to him, inspired by the assembly of the characters in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which his mother rewatches endlessly. The pleasure of the novel is not just in watching Ludo grow up over time, but in how his life exemplifies so many things: the joy of learning, the challenges of fitting in, the power of chance, the struggles of making sense of life, the enrichment we get from art, the difficulties of fatherhood, how potential is achieved (or not), and the question of what separates knowing a bunch of facts from an actual education. Among many many other things, DeWitt explicitly references John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, which I had just read, and Mill's quest for wisdom is well-echoed here.

I’d never heard of this book until a Vulture list named it the best book of the 21st century so far. Can’t say I agree but it’s funny: e.g., an eccentric cackles as she calls her 6yo son jinsai (Japanese for man-made disaster), her polymath son claps back it’s a shame matricide is taboo. People who concern themselves with the notion of genius may enjoy (e.g., literary critics, academics, people that tell you they’re a member of Mensa), but those with a sense of humor will like it even more for the cutting satire thereof.