The Last Samurai

This is a peculiar and awkward book but I really liked it. It really made me question why my child can't already read Japanese and do complicated maths - maybe I just don't have high enough expectations for what children can learn! How hard can it be to learn one Kanji every day?

We start with the mother's viewpoint and although she's clever and strange she is also trapped by her immigration status, by being a single mother and by her outlook on life. Later we get more from her sons point of view, who is by all measures a genius and educated beyond his years. But both of them lack human understanding and emotional intelligence.

I found this mix really fascinating and entertaining - there are lots of funny conversations and it's a very show more self consciously clever book. Ludo's search for his father is a little longwinded in places, and breaks the earlier flow a bit, the structure feels a bit uneven and odd. But it's very original and really thought provoking too. show less

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

Hands down this is one of the best novels I have read in several years. Helen DeWitt has written a tour de force, a brilliant, funny, sometimes tragic tale about a single mother and her precocious young son, Ludo, whom she also endearingly calls The Phenomenon.

The Last Samurai follows the education and adventures of Ludo. His mother Sibylla meagerly supports the both, typing out copy for popular hobby magazines of mostly obscure pursuits. Home schooled, modeled after JS Mill and Yo Yo Ma , Ludo, by the age of 4, is familiar reading in both Greek and Latin and by the age of 11 has added Hebrew, Arabic, French, Japanese and several other languages. He and his mom spend most days on the London tube’s show more Circle Line, with shopping bags of esoteric texts in mathematics, physics and the humanities. People are often mystified by Ludo’s fund of knowledge and his clever conversations.

Sybill often comments on Ludo’s facile mind and her view of education:
“there was no shame in ignorance but in the refusal to learn.”
“He [Ludo] is capable of logical thought…it makes him appear exceptionally intelligent. The fact is that most people are illogical out of habit rather than stupidity; they could probably be rational quite easily if they were properly taught.”

Frustrated by her own life journey: “how cruel that we must wake each time to answer to the same name, revive the same memories, take up the same habits and stupidities that we shouldered the day before and lay down to sleep”; she often lets Ludo explore the city by himself believing that experience and instilled confidence are important aspects of education.

Sybill, obsessed with the Kurosawa film, Seven Samurai, continuously watches the film with Ludo, hoping he will find ideal male role models amongst the depicted samurai fighters.

Ludo continuously inquires as to “who is my father” to which his mom does not reply yet he eventually finds a hidden envelope marked “not to be opened until my death” and discovers that his father was a travel writer. Not knowing his name Ludo takes off on a crash course reading of travel writers imagining that Thor Hyderthol or Bruce Chatwin might be the man he is looking for.

Ludo finally discovers his father is Val Peters, a travel writer of mediocre talent whom he visits one day under the guise of collecting for charity. Invited in they have a brief yet moving encounter about books, languages, education, Ludo leaving with 2 autographed books but choosing not to inform him that he is his son.

Ludo concludes that he will hunt out his own father, he’ll pick one who lives up to the standards of a samurai, one who demonstrates courage, guile, compassion and humanity. A series of men are chosen each with an unusual backstory: an Oxford trained linguist who searches the globe for distinct forgotten dialects; a Nobel Award winning astronomer with a TV show on which is a boy, a mathematical savant, he discovered in the Amazon jungles; a world famous painter who made his mark diving in a bathysphere so he might discover and then depict the genuine blue colors of the deep sea; a professional gambler, bridge player and
bon vivant whose game skills sees right through Ludo’s ruse.

Indeed all unusual men:
“People who generalize about people are dismissed as superficial. It’s only when you’ve known large numbers of people that you can spot the unusual ones-when you look at each one as if you’d never seen one before, they all look alike”.

Ludo’s search for the hero father figure appears in a section of the book entitled. “A Good Samurai Will Parry the Blow”. As Ludo approaches each famous man he steels himself by repeating a line form the Kurosawa movie, “I drew my bamboo sword and raised it, I drew it back in a sweeping motion…” summoning the courage to say the line “I am your son”. Curiously most of the men believe him, each one having had a tryst encounter, a memorable night, an affair which could have easily produced a son. Due to their own wishes to have a son and Ludo’s unusual level of intelligence and cleverness they believe it is so. Astonished, Ludo then has to convince each man that indeed they are not his biological father.

Near the end of the book he encounters a famous journalist who after years of captivity and torture has safely returned to England On the cusp of taking his life, Ludo engages him in discussion about Sybill’s struggles with suicidal thoughts, with The Samaritans a group that helps people in distress. Red Devlin though is haunted with trauma wishing that “the world would be quite a pretty place if the only people tormented by atrocities were those who committed them”.

If I could, I would give The Last Samurai 6 stars! One of the best novels I have ever read. A book about a genius created by a brilliant, witty writer. A book spewing imagination, intelligence, humor and tragedy.

In DeWitt’s own words, her Afterword, she asserts that perhaps Ludo was not a genius, “that like JS Mill thought that he had no special aptitude or intelligence, only the advantage of an unusual education; we still don’t know whether he was unduly modest.”

She wrote a story about a fatherless boy, a clever little guy whose mother exposed him to dozens of languages and books on mathematics, physics and the humanities. She writes, “its much harder to imagine what one might have been with better chances, greater challenges. Since there is no age at which the opportunities offered Ludo are the norm, we don’t know whether he was a genius or not-only that he is an oddity in a society with very low expectations.” show less

The rather singular Sibylla is the product of rather curious parents. Although we don’t see her early life here, we can only imagine it to be, well, rather singular. Eventually she blags her way into Oxford university and is suitably astounding. But at some point she finds herself in need of money, which initiates a series of events (I’m skipping over a bit here) which culminate in the birth of her son, Ludo. (Actually that now seems like rather a lengthy elision.)

Ludo might be described as exceptional, having started learning Ancient Greek at the age of four. But by comparison to J.S. Mill, he was already a late bloomer. For me, however, it’s really Ludo’s mother, Sibylla, who is more fascinating. Because it’s her effort of show more will, and unacknowledged brilliance, that opens the doors for Ludo. He merely has to walk through. Of course when the story turns to Ludo’s quest for his father, or possible father, Sibylla’s presence in the story gets sidelined somewhat. That was probably inevitable, but it makes the last third of the novel somewhat less interesting. (Though perhaps it’s more interesting for other people.)

Helen DeWitt’s writing is engaging and full of charm (though that rather makes it sound superficial, and it’s definitely not that). I loved the intense treatment of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and even though I couldn’t read the Japanese or the Ancient Greek passages, I did not find that problematic. (Just a bit personally disappointing.)

So easy to recommend. show less

Let me start off by saying, because I'll be posting this to my blog, that this book has nothing to do with the film starring Tom Cruise. The film was fine, I don't have anything against it, but the stories could not be more different, except that they both have to do with Samurai, in one way or another.

Helen DeWitt put everything into this book. That's not to say she tried to cram the whole world into 500 pages, it's just to say that she put herself into this book. All of it. I have to believe that. The scope of it, the emotion, the stories--it must have taken everything she had.

It's a wonderful book.

It's a wonderful book about a boy and his mother and about genius and heroism and goodness. There's also a fair amount of stuff in there show more about various languages and some mathematics and music, and some of it's quite technical. But this should not dissuade you from reading it! You do not need to understand irregular Arabic verb forms to be utterly taken in by the tale she's telling. And it's completely satisfying.

A final word of advice if you have the book on your shelf and are thinking about cracking it open: after about 50 pages, you will want to know what else DeWitt has written, and you will Google her name and discover, to your dismay, that she has written only one other book and that this book is only available as an ebook on her website. Then you will find some interviews with her, or you will find her blog, and you will discover that she has not been treated kindly by the publishing biz. Don't read these things. For weeks after I read that stuff, all I could hear in my head when I opened to my bookmark was the voice of the writer, Helen DeWitt, who has been beaten up by a business gone crazy in its death throes, and not the voice of her narrator.

Don't let this happen to you. Read the book in full. Let it take you in. Then write a nice review of it, or buy it for a friend who likes a good story, or write a glowing letter to Ms. DeWitt thanking her for writing it.

It's that good. show less

What to say about a book written by someone who is so smart she make David Foster Wallace look like a remedial grade-school student?

It's a frustratingly brilliant book in that there is so much information that the brain and eye skip over because of difficulty, and make re-reading page-by-page nearly essential because it feels like the book is imparting secret truths about life.

Amongst those truths: the brilliant almost never end up where you think they will, opportunity is often more important than innate intelligence, formal education is less important that one thinks though interaction with extremely smart people is crucial to development, culture is reflected through language and language impacts culture and individuals in show more interesting ways, music and cinema each are their own sorts of languages, and a dozen more.

The change in perspective in the second section is a bit jarring at first, but stick with it, please. I assure you it is worth it. show less

A really striking story about a single mother raising an incredibly talented child in a very unconventional way. The mother is also incredibly gifted and unusual. The novel asks you to imagine the extraordinary things we could achieve if we abandoned Sesame Street for kids and gave them access to Greek and deep maths and the ancient great works and classical music. The book is written with much reduced punctuation which somehow makes it more intimate and immediate. Strongly recommended.

Novels that deliberately pitch themselves as "for smart people" often draw much more attention to the author than to the story itself (the works of James Joyce being the most extreme example), so I was delighted to read this really entertaining novel that integrated a tremendous amount of advanced linguistics, music, film, physics, and other "just go look it up" subjects into the plot in a way that both showed off DeWitt's intelligence yet still had those qualities that make for a satisfying novel instead of a particularly long Wikipedia session. It begins from the point of view of of Sybilla, a smart but unambitious single mother who gets knocked up after a one-night stand, and her attempts to raise her child prodigy son Ludo. Ludo show more comes off as mildly Aspergery, and he's absolutely determined to learn out who his father is over his mother's objections that she can raise him by herself. As he becomes the primary character and finally discovers and is then disappointed by his true father's thoroughgoing mediocrity, he decides to visit several candidates to be a surrogate father to him, inspired by the assembly of the characters in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which his mother rewatches endlessly. The pleasure of the novel is not just in watching Ludo grow up over time, but in how his life exemplifies so many things: the joy of learning, the challenges of fitting in, the power of chance, the struggles of making sense of life, the enrichment we get from art, the difficulties of fatherhood, how potential is achieved (or not), and the question of what separates knowing a bunch of facts from an actual education. Among many many other things, DeWitt explicitly references John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, which I had just read, and Mill's quest for wisdom is well-echoed here. show less