Helen DeWitt

'Original...witty...playful...a wonderfully funny book' James Wood ‘Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I’ve ever read’ Mark Haddon 'A triumph – a genuinely new story' A. S. Byatt ‘Destined to become a classic’ Garth Risk Hallberg Eleven-year-old Ludo is in search of a father. Raised singlehandedly by his mother Sibylla, Ludo’s been reading Greek, Arabic, Japanese and a little Hebrew since the age of four; but reading Homer in the original whilst riding the Circle Line on the London Underground isn’t enough to satisfy the boy’s boundless curiosity. Is he a genius? A real-life child prodigy? He’s grown up watching Seven Samurai on a hypnotising loop – his mother’s strategy to give him not one but seven male role models. And yet Ludo remains obsessed with the one thing his mother refuses to tell him: his real father’s name. Let loose on London, Ludo sets out on a secret quest to find the last samurai – the father he never knew.

The Last Samurai

Helen Dewitt

Eli Alvah Huckabee

chicolini

Helen DeWitt's extraordinary debut, The Last Samurai, centers on the relationship between Sibylla, a single mother of precocious and rigorous intelligence, and her son, who, owing to his mother's singular attitude to education, develops into a prodigy of learning. Ludo reads Homer in the original Greek at 4 before moving on to Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse, and Inuit; studying advanced mathematical techniques (Fourier analysis and Laplace transformations); and, as the title hints, endlessly watching and analyzing Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, The Seven Samurai. But the one question that eludes an answer is that of the name of his father: Sibylla believes the film obliquely provides the male role models that Ludo's genetic father cannot, and refuses to be drawn on the question of paternal identity. The child thinks differently, however, and eventually sets out on a search, one that leads him beyond the certainties of acquired knowledge into the complex and messy world of adults. The novel draws on themes topical and perennial--the hothousing of children, the familiar literary trope of the quest for the (absent) father--and as such, divides itself into two halves: the first describes Ludo's education, the second follows him in his search for his father and father figures. The first stresses a sacred, Apollonian pursuit of logic, precise (if wayward) erudition, and the erratic and endlessly fascinating architecture of languages, while the second moves this knowledge into the world of emotion, human ambitions, and their attendant frustrations and failures. The Last Samurai is about the pleasure of ideas, the rich varieties of human thought, the possibilities that life offers us, and, ultimately, the balance between the structures we make of the world and the chaos that it proffers in return. Stylistically, the novel mirrors this ambivalence: DeWitt's remarkable prose follows the shifts and breaks of human consciousness and memory, capturing the intrusions of unspoken thought that punctuate conversation while providing tantalizing disquisitions on, for example, Japanese grammar or the physics of aerodynamics. It is remarkable, profound, and often very funny. Arigato DeWitt-sensei. --Burhan Tufail

prob earned a spot in my top 10 books ever

katrina montgomery

Marcus Rosen

Anything I could write here would be criminally boring, but I must write something because this is a life-saving book for the right people. Open Sesame.

Sybilla would rock it on Reddit 100%

Book still rocks. In fact, got better?

'Original...witty...playfulaa wonderfully funny book' James Wood 'Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I've ever read' Mark Haddon 'A triumph - a genuinely new story' A. S. Byatt 'Destined to become a classic' Garth Risk Hallberg Eleven-year-old Ludo is in search of a father. Raised singlehandedly by his mother Sibylla, Ludo's been reading Greek, Arabic, Japanese and a little Hebrew since the age of four; but reading Homer in the original whilst riding the Circle Line on the London Underground isn't enough to satisfy the boy's boundless curiosity. Ishe a genius? A real-life child prodigy? He's grown up watching Seven Samuraion a hypnotising loop - his mother's strategy to give him not one but seven male role models. And yet Ludo remains obsessed with the one thing his mother refuses to tell him- his real father's name. Let loose on London, Ludo sets out on a secret quest to find the last samurai - the father he never knew.

Anthony Sabourin

I was on the internet read a screenshot of some text that was attributed to Andrei Tarkovsky, and it said re: a work of art that is a masterpiece, that 'touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act (...) within that aura (...) in those moments, we recognize and discover ourselves, the unfathomable depths of our own potential, and the furthest reaches of our emotions." This book is that kind of masterpiece. As a whopping bonus, it uses form and language in a way that is propulsive, buoyant, and, like, it's fun! It's fun to read. You will read it and enjoy reading and will feel alive. An immensely generous book.

(on god I read a bunch of 1-star amazon reviews that whined about plot, and if you come out of this experience with only that to say, what a joyless way to read, to live, to be).

Donald

Arnav Shah

Luke Kanies

Foucoult’s Pendulum for classicists and language nerds. I have no idea what made it so alluring, but I could not put it down.

Impossible to describe. So much is about how they thought and how Ludo learned, it was process, not just action, which made it intimate, in depth, and compelling.

Daryl Houston

What a weird, fun book. I don't really know what else to say.

Janna

I’m in two minds about this book because it succeeds in being a dazzling display of intelligence while at the same time demonstrating that intelligence for the sake of it doesn’t amount to much at the end of the day, which is no mean feat. But in being a dazzling display of intelligence, it also becomes irritating and repetitive — half the prose is verb conjugations in a number of different languages, or tangential excerpts and stories about random individuals who are difficult to care about. Those individuals later come to play a part in the novel but the pay-off is small because the part they play is just as repetitive and exhibitionist. 

And it gets in the way of a story that has great heart. The book is about Sibylla and her son Ludo, a child prodigy who reads prodigiously and searches for a father figure. Refusing to reveal to him the identity of his father, Sibylla constantly plays Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai instead to give him male role models. Ludo thus decides to test a handful of men, as the samurai are tested, to see if they are worthy to be his father. Great concept. Ludo is also wonderfully characterised as being so oblivious to social mores that he is able to secure an audience with a host of important men where most of us would have given up. 

But the thing that really matters is the way in which the narrative shifts from Sibylla to Ludo; we learn first that Sibylla is incredibly erudite and at a loss as to how to raise a prodigy, and then we learn through Ludo’s eyes that she is generally just terrible at raising children or being anything other than academically intelligent. Since the plot gravitates towards Ludo's quest, she remains fairly one-dimensional. More could have been made of Ludo’s disillusionment with his mother, along with each paternal candidate, as well as how a child is screwed up by those who purport to raise him (or not). Maybe this is to be inferred but it’s better brought front and centre, particularly when what obscures it is often little more than pyrotechnics.

Gary Homewood

The first half is narrated by a single mother looking after her precociously intelligent young boy, reading Greek on the Circle Line. The second half from the point of view of the now 12 year old boy searching for his father. Digressive meditations on the nature of intelligence, art, music, language, with the Kurosawa film as a leitmotif, Murakami without the magic realism?

The Last Samurai

Reviews

Highlights