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Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
It’s very seductive out of the gate, and might have seriously misled me when I was younger and more invested in precocity. Nowadays I’ll cop that there are more interesting things about John Stuart Mill than his having read the Anabasis at four, or six, whichever it was. When it falls apart, it’s just for the usual reason of novels being long and outlasting the sal volatile of their conceits.
