The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt

Ludo is four when we meet him. He has all the usual foibles of someone that age - when he wants something, he wants it NOW. He has no volume control, and he's stubbornly insistent on bringing along favorite objects when he leaves the house. What Ludo wants to bring along in the stroller is a massive Homeric dictionary, so that he can look things up while he reads the Odyssey. He's reading the Odyssey because his mother Sibylla has said that she won't teach him Japanese until he's finished it. Sometimes Sibylla tells the story, sometimes Ludo, as the two negotiate raising a genius on the minimal wage Sibylla earns from typing in old issues of magazines. As he grows older, Ludo's learning outstrips his mother's not inconsiderable mental skills, and he turns his mind to solving the puzzle of who his father is, influenced heavily by the strategic skills he learns from The Seven Samurai, a movie his mother watches incessantly. This book is a joy to read, absorbing, fascinating and unpredictable. Its characters, even the peripheral ones, are intricately sketched in and DeWitt's writing throughout pushes you onward to a finish that is satisfying in every way, except that the book is then over.
Posted by supersusie at June 11, 2004 10:06 PM