by Helen DeWitt
A single mother and her linguistically precocious son repeatedly watch The Seven Samurai to look for male role models and learn Japanese.
Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
About Nancy Chapple
The Last Samurai is a story of the first years of a precocious child named Ludo and his mother Sibylla, both linguistic geniuses. A single mother, she struggles to provide him with the right stimuli and guidance. The book is brilliant, witty, depressing.
Any book has to find a way to draw us in, and here it starts with: my father was, my mother was, I was glad to get out of my hometown and make it to Oxford – and then I got pregnant from a guy I couldn’t abide. We’re inside a unique story.
"I thought ideally it should be a name which could work whether he was serious and reserved or butch ... The problem was that I liked David better than Stephen, and Steve better than Dave, and I couldn’t get round it by calling him Stephen David or David Stephen because a series of two trochees with a v in the middle would sound ridiculous. I couldn’t call him David and Steve for short; that would be quaint." That’s our narrator: wry, cerebral, obsessed with language.
Sibylla stays home to take care of her small son, typing old issues of periodicals into the word processor: Crewelwork Digest, Carpworld, British Home Decorator, etc. Inspired by The Seven Samurai, a film Sibylla has chosen to provide him with some male role models, Ludo begs his mother to teach him Japanese. She evades the issue by giving him a huge reading list to complete beforehand: The Odyssey (in Greek of course), Thousand and One Nights, 10 chapters of Algebra Made Easy, and more. Did I mention that Ludo has now reached the age of 5?
Our narrator’s stream-of-consciousness writing is frequently interrupted by the obnoxious questions of a genius child, demanding explanations to understand the world around him. Though Ludo is phenomenally brilliant, he’s also a normal little boy, with a tendency to get cranky and a need to take naps and so forth. Sibylla’s language skills are amazing (Greek, Hebrew, Japanese), but her 5-year old son’s something else. She needs all of her energy to keep up with him. For instance, Sibylla and Ludo develop a method of taking texts apart: transcribed word, its English meaning, grammatical analysis thereof. Complete passages of the book are constructed this way, in e.g. Greek and Japanese.
Ludo is simply dying to know who his father is, and Sibylla will only tell him "a travel writer." As he picks up on every possible clue to determine who it could be, he takes over the narration of the book. A bridge is built to the Seven Samurai as he seeks out his genetic and surrogate fathers in a series of encounters with men he’s chosen.
In absolutely no way, shape or form does the book resemble a cheerful American how-to book, e.g."How to Handle Your Precocious Child." Our narrator was quite young, unformed, sure only of what she wanted to get away from (her oblivious father and miserable mother; the US; most people she had encountered). She cannot abide logical fallacies and utterances that are not thought through: "He 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."
The book is not short and it doesn’t move in a straight line. The intellectual excursions into the minds of people confronted with unorthodox dilemmas are diverting and do relate to the larger story – and yet, you have to bear with DeWitt.
An expat by choice, I identify with the narrator: Sibylla and I have a bit of built-in distance to the country where we now live, and we both made more of a step away from what we had than towards something. And then there are the thoughts about language in this book: "It is truly something and something which the something with the something of this something has something and something, so something also this something might something at first something." This is Sibylla working to teach herself German. As a language lover, I was stunned by the linguistic and philosophical excursions.
Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: The Last Samurai
Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2002
Reviewed by Nancy Chapple:
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