NB: this post uses the term “brilliant” almost distastefully often.

It may or may not be the birthday of Helen DeWitt, one of the most original and brilliant authors of her generation. Actually it’s almost certainly not: she was born in 1957 in Maryland but I have been unable to find any reference to her birthday except on Goodreads, which lists her birthday as January 1. That looks suspiciously to me like a placeholder and I don’t believe it (but am open to correction). At any rate, DeWitt seems like someone who would either be too private to reveal her birthday or who would disdain too much outside interest in something so irrelevant to her work.

DeWitt is most famous for writing The Last Samurai (2000), which was lauded by A.S. Byatt as “a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form” (see her review in The New Yorker, Oct. 30, 2000). It tells the story of Sibylla, an impoverished, brilliant single mother raising her brilliant young son with the assumption that you can teach Greek to a four-year-old. In fact, she refuses to teach him Japanese until he has finished reading the Iliad. (Or maybe she requires both the Iliad and the Odyssey. I can’t remember. Anyway, kids, right? Always wanting to master another foreign language before they’ve finished reading the works of Homer. I mean, you have to set expectations or next thing you know there’s Play-Doh everywhere.) Ludo wants to learn Japanese because Sibylla, who refuses to reveal his father’s identity, has used the classic Kurosawa film The Seven Samurai to provide male role models. When Ludo is eleven, he embarks on a quest to find a father of his own choosing.

The book asks what makes life worth living and whether suicide is a reasonable choice for someone who thinks boredom is a fate worse than death. (Ludo knows this is something his mother thinks about.) The novel is a printer’s nightmare, loaded with various foreign language scripts and Fourier analysis, and indeed DeWitt had a nightmarish experience with her copy editor for months during the publishing process. After its huge debut, the book’s imprint was sold and the book went out of print for some years until it was reissued in May, 2016, by New Directions. In the meantime DeWitt, who has herself attempted suicide at least a couple of times (and rather ineptly: she explained in one interview that she tried aspirin back before the Internet was available to help with these things), published Lightning Rods (2012), a satire about an absurd solution to the problem of sexual harassment in the American workplace.

DeWitt is divorced from classics professor David Levene, knows at least fourteen languages, and currently lives in Berlin. She does have a website and I sort of wonder how anyone convinced her to do that, but again, I could be wrong. The Last Samurai is one of my favorite novels and a rigorous, rollicking good read.

Be well on this gray Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.