Books that are like The Last Samurai

December 18, 2016 4:37 PM

Just finished reading The Last Samurai, and enjoyed its intellectual bent, the way it switched narrators, and slightly improvised feeling structure. Are there any other books that would surprise me like this?

I'll summarize the plot in case someone hasn't read it but can think of an analogue. It's basically a coming of age novel for two characters: a brilliant single mom and her brilliant son. The mother can read a million dead languages but works as a typist and is basically too prickly to exist. The son is even more brilliant. He's obsessive and learns things to try to impress people. The central mystery of the book is the son trying to find his father. Both of the main characters watch The Seven Samurai over and over, which becomes the pattern for the last section of the book. Both of the characters are huge snobs but have a lot of integrity and the book forces you to read lots of things in physics and other languages. It's kind of a depressing book, but there are lots of magical moments too. And it's funny.

So, I swear this isn't an ad for the book! But are there other books like this? Also secondary material on this book would be appreciated.

posted by benadryl to Media & Arts (15 answers total)

WG Sebald and William Gaddis come to mind as formally innovative and aggressively intellectual. Austerlitz and A Frolic of His Own would be good to put on your reading list.
posted by otio at 5:13 PM on December 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

It's different in a lot of respects, but in some key ways Renata Adler's Speedboat reminds me of The (awesome!) Last Samurai.
posted by ferret branca at 5:18 PM on December 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

off the top of my head, both safran foer's extremely loud and incredibly close and krauss's history of love have vaguely similar plots (children looking for parents). the latter (history of love) is more richly structured and might be what you are looking for.

in a very different direction, the idea of physics within a novel reminded me of pynchon's gravity's rainbow.
posted by andrewcooke at 5:32 PM on December 18, 2016

Have you read Infinite Jest?

Some other books TLS made me think of: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

These are books with a very tight and also very intellectual style of narration, and loose or complex structures. None of them sets out to teach you Greek, though.

For books that really try to inculcate a little bit of learning, have you read Gödel, Escher, Bach (not a novel, but fun and tells some stories)? How about Cryptonomicon?
posted by grobstein at 5:35 PM on December 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper reminded me very much of Helen DeWitt's Last Samurai -- they're among my favorite books. Both are about brilliant, tricky women in situations of domestic disarray, and both titles refer to an object that holds them to the person they live with. In the case of Last Samurai it's the film, and in the Wallcreeper it's a semi-domesticated bird. Zink is also terse and hilarious. See what you think!
posted by the_dusty at 5:38 PM on December 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

I might be way off in terms of what you're looking for, but Wittgenstein's Mistress has a strong intellectual bent and the structure is surprising and cool. David Foster Wallace called it "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country."
posted by FencingGal at 6:40 PM on December 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

Perhaps The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugresic?
posted by rdnnyc at 7:06 PM on December 18, 2016

A lot of Richard Powers' books remind me of The Last Samurai in the way they expect the reader to enjoy learning a lot of stuff that ties into the people-doing-things plot in symbolic ways. The Goldbug Variations, maybe?

A. S. Byatt's Possession is another shamelessly intellectual novel where literary artifacts drive much of the plot.

Neither of these are anything like LS in terms of narrative style, though. They're much more conventional in that respect.
posted by No-sword at 8:56 PM on December 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

Wittgenstein's Mistress is the best book ever, but I wonder if any of Markson's other, later works, might be more what you are looking for - they are more overtly "different" in the way they are structured (avoid the early detective stories unless you're looking for hardboiled cliché, in which case they do what they say on the can).
posted by andrewcooke at 5:10 AM on December 19, 2016

The Last Samurai is one of my favorite books of all time, and I've never read anything else like it. That's what makes it so magical for me, in part - it's one of a kind. It's something NEW.

So in that vein, here are a few other books that are also completely different from anything else I've ever read:

Vox by Nicholson Baker
Set This House In Order by Matt Ruff
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip
Room by Emma Donoghue

..and lots more, but that's a decent start.
posted by 168 at 5:36 AM on December 19, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'm with 168 -- one of my favorite books of all time, and unlike anything else, so here is another list of unlike anything else books that are also favorites of mine:


The Goldbug Variations, by Richard Powers (and/or Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, or anything by him but both of those have lovely interweaving narratives that are hallmarks of his writing). (Okay, I'll also mention Plowing the Dark. I love all of his books but I think any of these three are good to start with).

The Map of Love, by Ahdaf Souief (also parallel narratives)

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell (oh boy parallel narratives!)

Some of the ones mentioned above that I would also urge on you: The Sparrow, Cryptonomicon, Infinite Jest, and A Frolic of His Own.

Then, just to throw something wildly inventive into the mix, this year I read Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings, and it's probably my favorite new fiction of the year. It's 600 pages and I read it in 4 days, that's how good it is. It walks a very fine line, but I think O'Connor manages the balance admirably. I recommend reading the author's note both before and after reading the novel. It's kind of mind blowing. My review right after finishing it:

Outlandish and audacious. Filled with morally complex people and with strange dreams and scenes that are wildly imaginative. Thomas Jefferson is an ape in a zoo. Thomas Jefferson is watching a movie with James and Dolley Madison. Thomas Jefferson is riding a subway. Sally Hemings tells her own story here as well and it is heartbreaking. This just scratches the surface. It's almost unbelievable that this wild ride works at all but it does, and it does so marvelously and peculiarly and addictively.
posted by janey47 at 9:45 AM on December 19, 2016

A Brief History of Seven Kililngs is very different in terms of tone and subject matter, but it involves a rather sprawling narrative told in a range of different very distinct voices that create interlocking pieces of a big story. It's about gang warfare and drug dealing based in Kingston, Jamaica and in New York City and Miami, so you have to be willing to read detailed scenes of violence, but it's a really stunning book.
posted by gateau at 10:44 AM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

Helen Dewitt also has another novel, which I haven't read and which sounds quite different, but if you think she's a genius you could check it out: Lightning Rods.
posted by grobstein at 9:56 AM on December 20, 2016

It's been bugging me that I didn't mention that both The Goldbug Variations and The Map of Love are intergenerational parallel stories.

Also, take a look at Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth. It's not like The Last Samurai except in the respect that it is a brilliant beautiful heartbreaking novel. Also, if you like it as much as I did, there's a standalone sequel, called The Quality of Mercy. Both are also available on audible and are well read.
posted by janey47 at 10:01 AM on December 21, 2016

Helen Dewitt also has another novel, which I haven't read and which sounds quite different, but if you think she's a genius you could check it out: Lightning Rods.

I'm late to the party here, but for anybody who might stumble across this thread in the future: The Last Samurai is one of my favourite books. Lightning Rods is a travesty, and I prefer to imagine that it doesn't exist.
posted by nnethercote at 3:04 AM on April 18, 2017