A good reality will parry the blow.

I don’t recall how I first heard of Helen DeWitt’s Last Samurai; I don’t have any longer that first copy (a Tina Brown Talk Miramax edition, I say, with an air of vaguely smugness); I think one of the many many times I lent it out it never made its way back, or I hope that’s the case, and it’s still vagabonding about, from hand to reading hand. (I’ve got a Chatto & Windus edition these days, which imprint was founded in 1855, then bought by Random House the year I graduated high school, then unceremoniously dumped under Vintage Books somewhere in the drafty halls of Penguin UK.) —I trust, at any rate, that the esteem in which I hold DeWitt is well known about these parts, and so you’ll understand I’ve just put in an order for Lee Konstantinou’s The Last Samurai Reread, about which I’ve only just found out.