The Last Samurai
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 Samuraiis 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