Customer Reviews

LAST SAMURAI, THE

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3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This book is joyful and thrilling. The intimate and familiar story of a single mother struggling to raise a young son is made original and even epic by the sheer elasticity and power of author Helen DeWitt's imagination. Mother and Son, Sybilla and Ludo, both possessed of gifted and versatile minds, are obsessed with the Kurosawa classic, The Seven Samurai (a film I always felt forced to appreciate until I read this book). Syb uses the film to provide the male role models the boy doesn't have in his life, and Ludo uses it to develop his own version of a Samurai test with which he plans to find the best father possible for himself. Armed with the refrain that 'a good samurai will parry the blow' he sets out to test and win over men of samurai mettle who might recognize his merits. The true joy of reading the book comes in the fact that even though mother and son are both geniuses, multi lingual and well versed in history, literature, math and sciences, thier pursuits in learning and discovery seem exciting and comprehensible. What at first description might sound intellectually intimidating (Ancient Greek, Old Norse, Ptolemaic Alexandria, Fourier Analysis and a blow by blow with variations on the theme of the Rosetta Stone) are made accessible and often hilarious by the dazzling ingenuity and finesse of the wonderful Dewitt. Reading it made me feel I had suddenly come across a vast unrealized potential in myself for the power of creative thought and the ability to comprehend complex ideas. All this disguised in a book of fabulous adventure and tremendous longing.

I'd heard a lot about DeWitt's erudition before this book came out and was expecting something a little more bracing. This book is a joyful lark! I laughed heartily from page one. It is obvioulsy the work (judging from DeWitt's bio on the cover flap) of someone who, when freed from the requirements of academic writing, took real pleasure in research and writing and trying to convey her joys to the world at large for their own sake. While someone who is familiar with Icelandic sagas or the history of Alexandria, or who has studied classics like Dewitt might enjoy the references, it is those of us who barely made it through highschool french who will really get the most enjoyment out of discovering the Japanese language alongside Ludo, the young protagonist, or worrying through obscure german academic texts with his dissappointed mother. All this gives the impression that the book is a very readable language textbook, which couldn't be more misleading. Dewitt has the ability to transport you instantly across the world in vivid little stories about the characters that Ludo and his mother draw into the book. I found myself looking back to discover that the journey I had just taken across the central asian desert to visit unknown tribes turned out to be only a few pages long. Some of these little episodes have enough material for ten novels. Hurray for Helen Dewitt!

Like the single mother heroine of this novel, I'm an American in London raising a small child. What an inspiration to read this challenging and hilarious book in which the beleaguered mother tries to properly educate and influence her young son in the absence of worthy role models. I waded through the Greek and Japanese thinking, hey, maybe I should try introducing this stuff to my two year old (DeWitt's got a point there), or maybe try learning it myself. It was exciting to read. And unlike some novels that dangle a little Latin in front of you without benefit of translation on the assumption that if you don't know it you won't admit it, this book never leaves you out in the cold. It draws you in to its wonderful multiple worlds. The boy simply longs for a father to take him on an adventure--and, with samurai bravura, he is suddenly crossing the frozen tundra on a dog sled, playing chess with a prison guard, discovering a fabled silent tribe, impersonating foreign diplomats, and expertly eating only the edible bugs. The stories are breathtaking and ingenious. I loved every fluid moment. But especially, I loved the mother--her brilliance, her despair, her doggedness, her past. Thanks Ms. DeWitt for creating such an inspiring female character. It made me long to leave the circle line to raft across the Pacific

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a prodigy. His musical genius was recognized at the age of three. His father oversaw his musical education and supported him throughout his early life. Certainly, Mozart's life would have been dramatically different without the guiding hand of his father.

In Helen Dewitt's dazzling novel, The Last Samurai, four-year-old Ludo (the name is Latin for "play, mock") is a prodigy of a different sort. He excels not exclusively in one field, but in whatever he chooses to pursue. By the age of six, Ludo had read the Odyssey and Iliad in Greek, Kalilah wa Dimnah in Arabic, the Book of Jonah in Hebrew, and countless novels in English. He had long been finished with algebra. Learning Japanese became an easy hurdle. Ms. Dewitt brings to life a remarkable child who astounds nearly everyone he meets with his display of intellect at such a young age.

But Ludo wanted something that every other child had: a father. Ludo's mother, the complex but likeable Sibylla, tried to augment the child's lack of male role models by frequently watching Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Seven Samurai. Nevertheless, Ludo longed for a father.

At the age of eleven, Ludo finally discovered his father's identity and went to see him, but found him lacking. He then interviewed five different men, with the hope of finding just the right person to become his surrogate father. The six men (his father and the five others) each had to pass a unique test like the samurai in Kurosawa's movie. All six failed. Ms. Dewitt's genius as a storyteller is evident in her ability to avoid a hackneyed plot of single mother/genius son by incorporating Seven Samurai into the narrative, both through quotes from the movie and through the use of similar events.

As Ludo wandered the streets of London aimlessly, he stumbled upon an unlikely friend, who realized that both he and Ludo could benefit from each other's talents. This man eventually came to represent everything Ludo wanted in a father. After searching for a male role model, this find was serendipitous. Like Kurosawa, Ms. Dewitt's final "samurai" is an unexpected choice. The book makes you long for the movie; the movie brings you right back to this delightful book.

The Last Samurai is a heart-warming tale of a boy who has infinitely more than his peers and yet lacks the one thing they take for granted. The book is generously sprinkled with morsels of humor and maintains a swift pace. The Last Samurai is a remarkable experiment in point of view; Ms. Dewitt transfers dexterously among Sibylla's writing, Ludo's diary, Ludo's first-person accounts, and third-person excerpts about various characters from the past.

Ms. Dewitt's writing style evokes a feeling of childish delight, but the reader soon realizes that her words carry much deeper symbolism. She adeptly handles passages usually formidable to writers. Her statements are rarely direct; she is instead the master of the "implied." Her casual writing adds a mask of simplicity to her book-a mask that peels away layer by layer to reveal a gem of a story at its heart.

Ms. Dewitt's opus is poised to take its place as a classic. Only time will tell whether she becomes to literature what Mozart was to music and Kurosawa was to cinema.

This is certainly a hard book to summrrize, and definitely isn't for the impateient reader, with stories within stories, a ten year timespan, obscure scholarly references, and a narrative shift midway from an adult woman to her progidy son. Set in London, the story follows a single mother of wild intelligence who brings up Ludo, a boy of prodigal talents in languages, math, and anything else he puts his mind to. The title comes from Kurosawa's masterpiece "The Seven Samurai" which the mother has an almost obsessive reverence for, watching and rewatching it constantly as a mystic might repeat a mantra to reach enlightenment. She feels the film's characters serve as much better male role models to Ludo than his biological father ever could be, and thus refuses to tell him his identity. The second half of the book concerns his self-directed ramblings, as he follows the example of the movie and seeks out seven men to test their worthiness as possible fathers. Once this switch to Ludo's voice is made, the book becomes far more succesful and enjoyable as it leaves the world of ideas and abstraction (and distraction) for the real world of flawed people and messy lives.

Both halves are librally peppered with excerpts and quotations from the languages and subjects Ludo learns, sometimes leading to stories within stories. Some might find this challenging, but the truth is, while the subjects Ludo studies are certainly challenging, the story is not at all so. When this multilayered approach is attempted in fiction, it usually leads to an over-richness of prose, one is bludgeoned with erudition and fancy writing (like, say, A.S. Byatt's Possession). DeWitt manages to avoid this for the most part, keeping each tale enjoyable in its own right and never losing track of Ludo's story. It's an admirable acheivment, especially impressive for a first novel. Be warned however, the first few chapters kind of bounce around, and it takes a while to get into the heart and flow of things.

The real success of this novel is its ability to draw upon an array of complex philosophical and literary allusions at the same time as it produces rounded, engaging characterizations of its two main characters - Sibylla and Ludo. If I can put it in this way, this book is all about balancing opposites. Its main themes are binaries - for example, East meets West; men and women; parents and children; the intellect and the heart. This novel is as much about the danger of over-educating child prodigies such as Ludo as it is about nurturing them to achieve their potential, whatever that may be. And just as Ludo's voice begins to take over the narrative from his mother, so must he find his own voice and purpose in life.

The narrative is discontinuous and stretches from accounts of Sibylla's early family life (her father was a brilliant prodigy whose potential was not properly harnessed by his own severe father), through her own troubled university career, to her son Ludo's quest to find a father-figure amidst several options. Sibylla's connection with Ludo is warm, touching and often very funny. If Ludo occsaionally appears alien and distant to us, it is because he is, after all, a prodigious intellect whose future is as uncertain as the past which he tries to retrieve in his search for his absent father.

It's so refreshing to read a book that taxes the mind without taxing one's patience. There are numerous little rewards along the way for those who wish to find them: the name 'Sibylla' evokes the 'Sibyl', the name attributed in Roman mythology to old women who could foresee the future; thus Sibylla in DeWitt's novel tries to map out Ludo's future by teaching him a variety of languages and fortifying his seemingly inexhaustible intellectual resources with more discipline. And I loved the way that Ludo travels along the Circle Line subway reading Homer's 'Iliad' and looking for a father. This mirrors the manner in which Homer's hero, Odysseus (in 'The Odyssey') searches for his wife and son on his epic voyage home from the Trojan War.

You would think that a first-time author would fumble and turn these kinds of additional touches into longeurs. But The Last Samurai is a genuine pleasure to read from the first page to the last. DeWitt delivers her lessons as the best teachers do - that is, by capturing her audience's attention and then beguiling her readers with unpredictable tricks and turns along the way. One of the most important of these lessons follows thus: that no human survives without immersing herself or himself in the wonders that the world around us offers. And none of us can access these wonders without first paying attention to ourselves - our self-identies, our minds and our hearts.

A single mother, herself a dropped-out academic (as is the author, whose first novel this is), and her genius son live in near poverty in London. He is so advanced that no regular school will do for him, so he teaches himself while the two of them spend days riding the Central Line of the London underground. She does not tell him who his father is. And he goes in search of a suitable father. The tale has many references to Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai", which the two of them are obsessed with, and indeed the boy looks at seven different men whom he might like to have as a father. Ultimately, though, the story is about the relationship with his mother and the development of his own identity.

The discursive form of the book is delightful; there are long tales about the various "fathers". And when, at the very end, young Ludo hears, from an open window, someone playing the bejeezus out of Alkan's "Festin d'Ésope" I knew I'd found a writer I could read more of.

The book's title refers to Akira Kurosawa's film, The Seven Samurai. If you haven't seen the movie, it won't impede your pleasure of reading this novel, though you'll probably be eager to rent a copy afterwards. Don't let the title or the reference fool you. The book has nothing to do with war lords or feudal Japan. Instead it revolves around Sybilla, an American living in London and an unwed mother, raising her son, Ludo, alone. Sybilla is exceptionally intelligent and her particular passion is for languages. In fact, she makes the study of linguistics seem fascinating, exciting and almost sexy. Ludo, is a genius, picking up numbers and alphabets and languages almost faster than Sybilla can teach him. Short of money, mother and son spend the winter months riding London's Circle Line reading Greek. The identity of Ludo's father is rather an embarrassment to Sybilla and to compensate for Ludo's lack of a father in his life, Sybilla has him watch a video of The Seven Samurai over and over again hoping that the characters in the film will serve as surrogate male role models for him. The first half of the novel is Sybilla's. She's a fascinating character that while brilliant makes some odd personal choices and seems to be missing common sense as she reveals the events stumbling towards her present circumstances. Her exhaustion at barely keeping one step ahead of Ludo's ever expanding brain is palpable. The second half of the book shifts to Ludo's perspective at the age of twelve and focuses on his quest for his real father and some idealized substitutes. This part of the journey is both more painful and more poignant. What's strange is that he narrates with the voice of an adult but from the experience of a 12 year old boy. His dedication to his quest is fierce and the results are mixed. He tests some possible fathers by telling them that he is their son producing varied reactions both dramatic and comic. DeWitt's prose is bright and clear, unfolding an engaging tale of a mother and son and the fathers that might have been. This is a remarkable first novel by DeWitt and was one of my favorite reads of last year.

I've read the one- and two- and three-star customer reviews of this book and remain totally convinced of my own assessment. The book is so witty and original and moving as to make even the professional reviews sound plodding by comparison and any criticisms beside the point. Anyone who winces when the President of the United States says "nu-cu-lar" when he means "nuclear" should read this book: it is a valentine to learning, reason and imagination. Dewitt pulls off the considerable feat of introducing non-geniuses--like me--into the mind of two geniuses--the mother and her son--and making us believe it. Reader flattery out of mind, though, this is a wonderful, inventive, streamlined pleasure of a book, as resonant as it is entertaining. If I read another as good--from any period--this year I'll consider myself quite lucky.

Author DeWitt expresses her admiration, at one point, for "the type of person who thinks boredom a fate worse than death." And she obviously writes for this type of reader as she performs amazing literary and scholarly acrobatics in this unique and energetic novel which never flags--and certainly never bores! Although DeWitt incorporates many esoteric subjects here--Japanese language, Greek verbs, Icelandic verse, Fourier's analysis, Arabic, astrophysics, and tournament chess, bridge, and piquet, among other things--she does this so entertainingly that they enhance, rather than obscure, the human story at the heart of the novel, even for readers like me with little interest in many of these subjects.

Sybilla is the hard-working, single mother of Ludo, a 6-year-old genius who gobbles up even the most complicated subjects, seemingly overnight. Despite his precocity, however, Ludo is a very engaging and in many ways, typical, child, and the relationship between mother and son is mutually warm, respectful, and endearingly protective. Both Sybilla and Ludo are fans of Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, and this forms the framework of the novel when Ludo decides to test seven fascinating and brilliant men Sybilla has known to see which, if any, of them might be his unknown father.

This book has everything. It is funny and sad and disarming and challenging--simultaneously amusing and poignant, and thought-provoking. The many layers which emerge as Ludo engages in his quest should keep readers, critics, and book clubs intrigued and entertained for years. But the book is at heart an absorbing human story--of identity, of aspirations and achievement, and, ultimately, of the love and connection which makes our personal journeys worthwhile. A wonder-filled achievement from beginning to totally satisfying end. Mary Whipple