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Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic DeWitt, H. 2000 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"Ludo, age six, is a prodigy. His mother, Sibylla, raises him alone and tries hard to keep his voracious intellect satisfied, while she struggles to make ends meet. With her exasperated guidance, he teaches himself Greek, so that he can read The Odyssey, before moving on to study Hebrew, Arabic, Inuit, and Japanese. And both Sibylla and Ludo share a passion for Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which they watch repeatedly, absorbing its lessons of samurai virtue. Soon Ludo embarks on a quest to find his father, and approaches seven men to test their mettle. Each of them - prominent, powerful, or flawed in his own way - has to rise to a unique challenge." "The Last Samurai is full of stories of remarkable exploits, snatches of Greek poetry, passages of Icelandic legend, and ingenious math problems. But it also has a rare emotional depth, as Ludo's search for a father, or even a man heroic enough to be his father, gradually reveals a new and unexpected dimension of love. And at the book's heart is the relationship between mother and son, which is moving and memorable in its fusion of solidarity, frustration, and tenderness."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author Notes
Helen Dewitt was born in 1957 in Takoma Park, Maryland. She grew up mainly in South America. She started a degree at Smith College in 1975 and dropped out twice, the first time to read Eliot and Proust, the second time to go to Oxford to study classics and philosophy. She received a B. A. at Lady Margaret Hall and a doctorate at Brasenose, then spent a year as junior research fellow at Somerville before deciding to give up academic life in 1989. She now lives in England.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
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 efforts are enlightening, 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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Ludo is a boy with an insatiable intellectual appetite, growing up in England in the 1980s. With his mother Sibylla's help, he learned to read at age 2 and mastered several languages by the time he was 4. As a single mother, Sibylla struggles to make a living at home, typing back issues of special-interest magazines. Mother and son are both fans of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which they watch several times a week over many years. In spite of his very advanced education, Ludo is still a boy and longs to know the identity of his father, which Sibylla, critical in a condescending way toward much of the world, has withheld from him. Gradually, the narrative voice switches from Sibylla to young Ludo, endearing at first in his naiveteand later in his persistence. At 11, Ludo identifies and approaches seven potential father figures--among them a travel writer, a painter, a journalist, and a Nobel Prize^-winning astronomer. Eventually, his search and his encounters with some unusual characters lead him to a deeper understanding of both himself and his mother. There are stories within stories, layers upon layers in this fresh, fast-paced, wonderfully imaginative book. If it is a showcase for DeWitt's intellectual prowess, containing snippets of works in numerous foreign languages and many references to mathematics, music, and classic literature, it is also much more than that. It is a touching story of a child's maturing love and illuminates the ways in which a parent's issues can overtly or covertly affect the life of a child. Delightfully original, with foreign rights already sold in 14 countries, this novel will generate high demand. --Grace Fill
Library Journal Review
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.DPatricia Gulian, South Portland, ME (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.