The Last Samurai

by Helen DeWitt

Overview

Called “remarkable” (The Wall Street Journal) and “an ambitious, colossal debut novel” (Publishers Weekly), Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai is back in print at last

Helen DeWitt’s 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was “destined to become a cult classic” (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights in twenty countries, so “Why not just, ‘destined to become a classic?’” (Garth Risk Hallberg) And why must cultists tell the uninitiated it has nothing to do with Tom Cruise?

Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo’s shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.) Lacking male role models for a fatherless boy, Sibylla turns to endless replays of Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn’t know: his father’s name. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew. He’ll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. He may not live to see twelve. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811225502
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/31/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	576
Sales rank:	62,948
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Helen DeWitt was born in a suburb of Washington, DC. Daughter of American diplomats, she grew up mainly in Latin America, living in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador. She went to Oxford to study classics for a BA and D.Phil. She left academia to try to write a novel, moving eventually to London and acquiring UK citizenship. She had some 100 fragments of novels when she began work in 1995 on the novel that was published as The Last Samurai in 2000. The book caused a sensation at the Frankfurt Bookfair 1999, going on to be translated in 20 languages (DeWitt reads some 15 languages to various degrees of fluency). On the reissue of The Last Samurai by New Directions in 2016 it was hailed by Vulture Magazine as The Best Book of the Century. She is also the author of Lightning Rods, a Mel Brooksian satire on sexual harassment, and Some Trick, a collection of stories. She has been based in Berlin since 2004, but also spends time at a cottage in the woods of Vermont improving her chainsaw skills.

 

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 4

19, 18, 17

1 March, 1993

19 days to my birthday.

I am reading Call of the Wild again. I don't like it as well as White Fang but I have just finished White Fang again.

I am up to Odyssey 19.322. I have stopped making cards for all the words because there would be too much to carry around but I just make cards for words that look useful. Today we went to the museum and they have a picture of the Odyssey, it is supposed to show the Cyclops but you can't actually see him. It is called Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus. Ulysses is the Latin name for Odysseus. There was a card on the wall saying you can see Polyphemus on the mountain but you can't. I told the guard they should change it and he said it was not up to him. I asked who it was up to and he said maybe the head of the gallery. I tried to get Sibylla to take me to see the head but she said he was too busy and it would be more polite to write him a letter, she said I could write him a letter and practise my handwriting. I said why don't you write a letter. She said he had probably never had a letter from a five-year-old before, if I wrote a letter and signed it Ludo Aged Five he would pay attention to it. I think this is stupid because anybody could sign a letter Aged Five. Sibylla said true, one look at your handwriting and he won't believe you're a day over two. She seemed to think this was hysterically funny.

2 March, 1993

18 days to my birthday. I have been on the planet 5 years and 348 days.

3 March, 1993

17 days to my birthday. We rode the Circle Line today because we couldn't go back to any museums. It was tedious in the extreme. One funny thing that happened is that a lady got into an argument with Sibylla about two men who were about to be flayed alive. Sibylla explained that one of the men dies of heart failure at time t and the other at time t + n after having someone peel off his skin with a knife for n seconds and the lady said pas dev and Sibylla said I should warn you that he speaks French. Then the lady said non um non avanty il ragatso and Sibylla said not forward the boy. Not forward the boy. Not. Forward. The boy. Hmmm. I'm afraid I don't quite understand, you clearly have a command of Italian idiom which I cannot match and the lady said she thought it was not a suitable subject for discussion in the presence of a small child and Sibylla said oh I see, and that's how you say it in Italian. Non avanty il ragatso. I must remember that. The lady said what kind of example do you think you are setting and Sibylla said would you mind if we continued this discussion in Italian, I feel that it is not a suitable subject for discussion in the presence of a small child or as they say in Italian non avanty il ragatso. After she got off the train Sibylla said she should not really have been so rude because we should be polite to people however provoking and I should not follow her example but learn to keep my inevitable reflections to myself. She said it was only because she was a bit tired because she had not been getting much sleep and otherwise she would never have been so rude. I am not so sure but I kept my inevitable reflections to myself.

*****

Chapter 5

We Never Go Anywhere

Early March, winter nearly over. Ludo still following scheme I do not understand: found him reading Metamorphoses the other day though he is only up to Odyssey 22. Seems to have slowed down on Odyssey, has only been reading 100 lines or so a day for past few weeks. Too tired to think of new places to go, where is there besides National Gallery National Portrait Gallery Tate Whitechapel British Museum Wallace Collection that is free? Financially in fairly good position as have typed Advanced Angling 1969-present, Mother and Child 1952-present, You and Your Garden 1932-1989, British Home Decorator 1961-present, Horn & Hound 1920-1976, and am now making good progress with The Poodle Breeder, 1924-1982. Have made virtually no progress with Japanese.

Another argument about Cunliffe. L: Why can't we go to the National Gallery again?

I: You promised you wouldn't go through doors marked Authorised Personnel Only.

L: It didn't say Authorised Personnel Only. It said Staff.

I: Exactly. In other words people who worked there, because the people who work there want to get on with their work without being disturbed by people who don't work there. If at some stage you decide to reject the theory of a Ludocentric universe do let me know.

We go to Tower Hill to catch a Circle Line train. The Circle Line is experiencing delays, so we sit down & I discover that Ludo has smuggled Kalilah wa Dimnah into the pushchair. He takes it out and starts reading, turning the pages quickly -- the vocabulary is pretty easy and repetitive, should really have picked something harder but too late now.

A woman comes up & stares & admires & comments, How on earth did you teach so young a child?

She says she has a five-year-old herself & presses me for my methods which I explain, such as they are, & she says surely there must be more to it than that.

L: I know French and Greek and Arabic and Hebrew and Latin and I'm going to start Japanese when I finish this book and the Odyssey.

[What?]

L: I had to read 8 books of the Metamorphoses and 30 stories in the Thousand & One Nights and I Samuel and the Book of Jonah and learn the cantellation and do 10 chapters of Algebra Made Easy and now I just have to finish this book and one book of the Odyssey.

[What!!!!?] My admirer says that's wonderful & that it's so important for small children to have a sense of achievement, & then drawing me slightly aside says that all the same it's important to keep a sense of proportion, one needs to strike a balance, dangerous to carry things to extremes, moderation in all things, not that she means to interfere.

By the looks of things I have about three days' grace before I start teaching Japanese to a child with no sense of proportion whatsoever.

My admirer is still hovering & hesitating, having struck a blow for moderation she says something or other about her own child who is no genius.

I say What about French, she might like to learn French

& she says I know it sounds awful but I haven't the time.

I say she is probably expecting too much, why not teach her just one word a day & let her colour it in in a book wherever she finds it, the secret of success is to complete a single simple task on a daily basis.

Is that what you did? she asks looking awestruck at Kalilah wa Dimnah (which is completely ridiculous as it is a very easy text, far too easy in my opinion).

No, I say. But it is still the best method.

Two Circle Line trains came and went and a District Line train pulled in and pulled out on its way to Upminster. She said But how did you get him to do all that work and I explained about the five words and the Schwan Stabilo highlighter & she said Yes but there must be more to it than that, there must be more to it than that --

so that I could not help thinking of things I would rather not think about, such as how hard it is to be nice and how hard it was going to be to be nice.

She seemed to be really interested because now a Barking train came and went and still she was here. She said what she meant was for example she had studied Latin herself, well if you teach a child French the simple task could be a word whereas in an inflected language the grammar was so frightfully complicated surely beyond the grasp of a four-year-old child.

I said I thought small children liked matching things up, it was not that big a deal, I just explained that the words had to match and he could see that they matched, though of course it probably made more sense when he got used to the idea.

She was smiling sympathetically. What a nice thing to explain to a four-year-old child.

I had not planned to give him a whole declension on the first day as I knew very well what Mr. Ma would think. L seemed to be having such a good time colouring in words with his highlighter, though, and it is always such a relief when a small child finds something to do that it is happy to go on doing, that I wrote out some tables for him (including the dual), with the comforting reflection that Mr. Ma was not there to see it. I told him he could colour in any of the words that he found & then I went back to John Denver leaving Iliad 1-12 on the chair.

Four or five hours went by. After a while I looked up and he was doing something on the floor. I went over to him and he smiled up at me. He had gone back to the beginning of Iliad 1 in my Oxford Classical Text, and he had highlighted his five words and all occurrences of the definite article all the way to the end of Iliad 12, so that every page had blocks of green scattered over it.

He said Where is Volume Two? I need to finish this.

I said patiently after a short pause I don't know where it is, I was looking for it earlier, and I added patiently Perhaps you should learn some more words and go back over Volume I again instead. You could use a different colour. If you need more practice you can go on to Volume II.

He said All right. Can I have ten words this time?

I said Natürlich. You can have as many as you want. This is tremendously good. I thought it would be too hard for you.

He said Of course it's not too hard for me.

& I looked again at the coloured page and I said

And DON'T YOU DARE colour in ANY OTHER BOOK without ASKING ME FIRST.

That was all I said, & it was too much. A chittering Alien bursts from the breast to devour your child before your eyes. He looked down at the page,

& I returned to my work and he returned to his work.

I had tried to be patient and kind but this was not very nice.

A week went by. I have heard it said that small children have no powers of concentration. What in God's name is to keep a small child from concentrating on something? L anyway was a monomaniac. He would leap out of bed at 5:00 in the morning, put on four or five sweaters, go downstairs to get out his eight Schwan Stabilo highlighters and get to work. At about 6:30 or so he would rush upstairs to report on his progress waving a fluorescent page in my face and I disapproving of the type of parent who fobs a child off with Wonderful Wonderful would murmur Wonderful and then disarmed by a face like a new penny ask questions. Elephant stampede up and down stairs for a couple of hours & time to get up.

A week as I say went by. One day I snatched a few moments from typing to read Ibn Battuta & L came up and just looked. He didn't say anything. I knew what this meant: it meant for all my good intentions I had not been very nice. So I said: Would you like to learn it? And he naturally said he would so I went through the whole procedure again, and I gave him a little animal fable to read in Kalilah wa Dimnah. And now each night I would look up the next twenty words in each book and write them down for him so that it would not be so boring for him at 5:00 in the morning.

Four days went by. I tried to be careful but you can't always be careful and one day I went to look something up in Isaiah. I got out my Tanach and he came over and looked and that was that.

Copyright© 2000 Helen DeWitt

Editorial Reviews

Helen DeWitt's first novel, The Last Samurai, did not go unnoticed when it was published in 2000: it was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award as well as for the UK's prestigious Orange Prize; in the New Yorker, A. S. Byatt called the novel a "triumph." And yet the book more or less vanished from the shelves of American bookstores, to the point where we can now be grateful to New Directions (which also published DeWitt's second novel, Lightning Rods, in 2011) for bringing it back into print.

At first, The Last Samurai is narrated by Sybilla, a young American who is struggling to raise her son, Ludo, in London. Having landed an improbable job retyping the text of magazines with titles like Practical Caravanning and Tropical Fish Hobbyist for a "project into 20th-century language," she distracts Ludo by feeding his insatiable appetite for knowledge: already, at age five, he knows Greek and Latin, a smattering of Hebrew and Arabic, and some elementary number theory. Ludo's father is not in the picture, so Sibylla gives him a wealth of surrogate fathers in the form of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film, Seven Samurai.

This is a whimsical premise, and what follows is in some ways a whimsical book — think Tristram Shandy as told by a broke single mother — but Sibylla's passionate commitment to language and to Ludo gives the novel so much intensity that you can't refuse to take it seriously. There are any number of virtuosic fictions in the world, and any number of narrators who are eager to lead us around their mental cabinets of wonders, showing off long words and odd facts; but The Last Samurai is one of those rare books that seems genuinely to care whether you (or Ludo, or someone) learns something from it.

And in fact there's a surprising amount of knowledge on offer here: if you follow Ludo's education with a little patience, you stand a chance of mastering the Greek alphabet and getting an idea of how Greek counting numbers work; you might also pick up a few words of Japanese, and a kanji or two, not to mention an intimate familiarity with the central scenes of Seven Samurai. For all its pedagogy, though, DeWitt's novel is hardly dry. Sibylla's intensity, and her high standards for what counts as rational behavior lead her into some extremely funny situations, as when, leaving the bed of a travel writer (Ludo's father, it turns out) whose drunken advances she was too polite to resist, she writes a note glossing part of the Iliad:

kisesas, moving [masculine nominative singular aorist participle] de and [connective participle] káre head protí. . . musthésato addressed [3rd person singular aorist middle indicative] ón his thesón soul/spirit/mind/heart [masculine accusative singular]

You can't help but wonder what the single masculine person accused by this note thought when he woke up. Probably the boor didn't understand what Sibylla has been teaching us for 125 pages at this point: that language is a beautiful thing, capable of moving our heads and our hearts, if only we pay it close attention.

Whatever you might think of Sybilla's parenting techniques, The Last Samurai is one of the great novels about raising a child, and being a child, to have been written in the last half century or so. (Other books that might be on that list: Knausgaard's My Struggle, which DeWitt's novel resembles in some ways; Steven Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse, which it resembles in others.) And like other novels about childhood, it has a hidden drumbeat: Ludo is growing up. When The Last Samurai begins, he is a brilliant five-year-old brat, shouting out the names of hypothetical many-footed cephalopods in Greek; by the end of the novel he is nearly twelve and actively in search of his missing father. By means of a kind of narratorial judo (a martial art Ludo studies) which you don't often get to see in fiction, he takes charge of telling the second half of the book, and it picks up speed as he interviews one unlikely candidate for fatherhood after another. The range of DeWitt's talents as a writer may be on display here — although I wouldn't be surprised if she had other ranges of talent, hidden behind the first, like mountains behind mountains — as she renders deft portraits of two journalists, a painter, a bridge champion, a pianist, and an astronomer, all of them more or less entrenched in London's upper crust but few of them any match for the fierce Ludo, who has taken his samurai upbringing to heart.

Ludo's ascendancy leads The Last Samurai farther and farther from Sibylla; in the last third of the novel we get what amount to self-contained tales about an Irish prodigy in Central Asia, an artist who bathes, literally, in lamb's blood, and a gambler who relies on the number 28. There's a bit of Bolaño's stunt- flying in these stories — and maybe more than a bit of the French genius and madman Raymond Roussel, whose Locus Solus goes about as far with the self-contained tale as you can go. DeWitt's dazzling miniatures tumble kaleidoscopically one after another, but a diptych of images that emerges from them is increasingly clear, and sad, and exhilarating. One half is a portrait of Ludo, becoming more and more independent; the other is of Sibylla, who has spent her life trying to get away from her own oppressive childhood in the States, but who can't quite seize for herself the freedom which she is so wonderfully capable of passing on to her son. DeWitt's hyperkinetic playfulness is a long way from the hyperrealism of Knausgaard, or the more tightly controlled knowingness of Elena Ferrante (another great writer about childhood, whose books The Last Samurai does not resemble at all); but it has an emotional reality and a fierce vitality of its own, which deserve to be rediscovered.

Paul La Farge is the author of two novels: The Artist of the Missing and Haussmann, or the Distinction.

Reviewer: Paul La Farge

"[...] a Molotov cocktail of a book, an incendiary experience for readers that breaks through the mundanity of life, work, and love to achieve greatness."

Off the Shelf

"A triumph—a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form."

The New Yorker - A. S. Byatt

"The Last Samurai is an original work of brilliance about, in part, the limits of brilliance."

Time

"The book has been a great source of motivation for me. I must outdo Ludo, because he is younger than I am but smarter than I am. My father says that this is ridiculous, as Ludo is a fictional character. But this is precisely my point: how can I let a character who isn’t even real outdo me?"

Daniel (age 14)

"The Last Samurai is an original work of brilliance about, in part, the limits of brilliance."

Time

It's tough to say who's more of a genius: young Ludo, the Odyssean hero of The Last Samurai; his teacher/mother, Sybilla; or his creator, first-time novelist Helen DeWitt. Ludo is a feisty six-year-old with a talent for languages who, inspired by Akira Kurosawa's classic film Seven Samurai, sets off in search of his father. A totally unique contribution to contemporary literature, DeWitt's debut is a powerful tale of self-discovery that is at once intellectually challenging and profoundly moving. And while The Last Samurai proves at times to be a difficult read, it is an experience that will linger in your mind and heart long after you've finished the book. Highly recommended.

bn.com

...a brilliant debut novel...keeps things moving at an exhilerating clip...DeWitt is formidably intelligent but engagingly witty...she is a joy to read.
ѿ(September 17, 2000)

Washington Post Book World

Dazzling...an original work of brilliance...

Time Magazine

The Last Samurai may be the find of the season. I loved the confident velocity as well as the promise of heady unconventionality. The spell sustained itself. Within pages I found myself caught up in the strangest and most gratifying intellectual novel I've read since Norman Rush's Mating and Nicholas Mosely's Hopeful Monsters...crisp and vivid...The Last Samurai is very much the story of an education, an arduous discovery of self...
—(September 24, 2000)

The Boston Globe

One of the outstanding first novels of 2000...inventive...a wonderfully drawn portait of a complicated relationship between a mother and her brilliant young son...

Seattle Times

DeWitt's ambitious, colossal debut novel tells the story of a young genius, his worldly alienation and his eccentric mother, Sibylla Newman, an American living in London after dropping out of Oxford. Her son, Ludovic (Ludo), the product of a one-night stand, could read English, French and Greek by the age of four. His incredible intellectual ability is matched only by his insatiable curiosity, and Sibylla attempts to guide her son's education while scraping by on typing jobs. To avoid the cold, they ride the Underground on the Circle Line train daily, traveling around London as Ludo reads the Odyssey, learns Japanese and masters mathematics and science. Sybilla uses her favorite film, Akira Kurosawa's classic Seven Samurai, as a makeshift guide for her son's moral development. As Ludo matures and takes over the story's narration, Sibylla is revealed as less than forthcoming on certain topics, most importantly the identity of Ludo's father. Knowing only that his male parent is a travel writer, Ludo searches through volumes of adventure stories, but he is unsuccessful until he happens upon a folder containing his father's name hidden in a sealed envelope. He arranges to meet the man, pretending to be a fan. The funny, bittersweet encounter ends with a gravely disappointed Ludo, unable to confront his father with his identity. Afterward, the sad 11-year-old resumes his search for his ideal parent figure. Using a test modeled after a scene in Seven Samurai, he seeks out five different men, claiming he is the son of each. While energetic and relentlessly unpredictable, the novel often becomes belabored with its own inventiveness, but the bizarre relationship between Sibylla and Ludo maintains its resonant, rich centrality, giving the book true emotional cohesion. Foreign rights sold in Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the U.K. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

DeWitt's first novel revolves around Sibylla, an American displaced in London, and her young son Ludo, both geniuses. Sibylla earns a bare living typing for mundane periodicals like Carpworld and International Cricketer, grudgingly squeezing her assignments between viewings of Kurosawa's classic film, Seven Samurai. Ludo, who has been reared on this film, decides to use the challenges it presents to find his own mysterious father. When he is disappointed with the real thing, he searches for a more acceptable candidate. The last half of the book is very readable and beautifully written, as Ludo discovers that perhaps the perfect father is nonexistent. Overall, however, the excessive display of erudition obstructs DeWitt's wonderful use of language and imagination. After spending too much time either trying to understand her rhetoric or skipping pages loaded with arcane languages or mathematical theories, readers may find it difficult to persist.--Patricia Gulian, South Portland, ME Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

Exuberant . . . DeWitt is eager to display her intellectual and artistic gifts. It is easy to be carried along by the tempo of her prose . . . At its best, the writing is playful and engaging.
—New York Times Book Review

Myla Goldberg

A triumph— a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form, which has more to offer on every reading but is gripping from the very first.

New Yorker

In a witty, wacky, and endlessly erudite debut, DeWitt assembles everything from letters of the Greek alphabet to Fourier analysis to tell the tale of a boy prodigy, stuffed with knowledge beyond his years but frustrated by his mother's refusal to identify his father. Sibylla and five-year-old Ludovic are quite a pair, riding round and round on the Circle Line in London's Underground while he reads the Odyssey in the original and she copes with the inevitable remarks by fellow passengers. Sibylla, an expatriate American making a living as a typist, herself possesses formidable intelligence, but her eccentricities are just as noteworthy. Believing Kurosawa's Seven Samurai to be a film without peer, she watches it day after day, year after year, while in the one-night stand with Ludo's father-to-be, she wound up in bed with him for no better reason than it wouldn't have been polite not to, although subsequently she has nothing but scorn for his utterly conventional (if successful) travel books. Ludo she keeps in the dark about his patrimony, feeding him instead new languages at the rate of one or two a year, and, when an effort to put him in school with others his age wreaks havoc on the class, she resumes responsibility for his education, which, not surprisingly, relies heavily on Kurosawa's film. As Ludo grows up, however, he will not be denied knowledge of his father, and sniffs him out—only to be as disappointed with him as his mother is. Hopes of happiness with the genuine article having been dashed, Ludo moves on to ideal candidates, and approaches a succession of geniuses, each time with a claim of being the man's son. While these effortsareenlightening, they are also futile—and in one case tragic—until Ludo finds his match in one who knows the dialogue of Seven Samurai almost as well as he does. Unabashedly over the top at times but, still, a saga that gives rise to as much amusement as it does sober reflection. A promising start, indeed.

Kirkus Reviews