The Last Samurai

The Last Samurai
Helen DeWitt

Once I had to spend 16 days in Finland with very little money, waiting for a visa to Russia. I whiled away much of the time in the English book section of the public library. As I had no library card, I could not take books out, so I sat in hard wooden chairs and read books cover to cover, averaging two a day. This was one of them.

Unfortunately I have not the time nor necessity to read books cover-to-cover in a single sitting now, but still I re-read The Last Samurai in only three days. I couldn't help it; I love this book.

Are you ready to be surprised? This book is not about Samurai. It did not inspire any films. Not the Tom Cruise one, not any other one. Sorry. It's about a single mother from a family of thwarted genius, raising her son as well as she can to explore his interests and proclivities. Since she does not want him to grow up with no male role models, she makes him watch the Japanese film The Seven Samurai (on which the classic American film The Magnificent Seven was based) repeatedly. And in between he teaches himself Greek at age 4, Japanese at 5, starts in on Algebra and aerodynamics before kindergarten, and generally makes it difficult for his mother to continue computerizing back issues of obscure magazines such as Carpworld. The boy, called Ludo, turns a precocious eleven and starts thinking of applying to Oxford and trying to find his father.

Such is the storyline. The style, well! DeWitt dispenses with traditional punctuation like quotation marks, which gives the book a stream of consciousness quality, but it is not so annoying that I cannot read it. The story of Ludo and Sybilla (his mother) is interspersed with their summations of interesting people they admire ("He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men."), comments on syntax and language structure (Japanese, Icelandic, Inuit...), passages from aerodynamics texts, and Sybilla's dry, sarcastic humor ("Tall Men in Tight Jeans! I haven't seen this in years! ...Not ONE but SEVEN tall men in tight jeans! It's simply MAGNIFICENT!").

It is possible that I like this book because everyone it in is as obsessive and strange as I am. It is also witty, original, and makes me laugh. Hard enough that people stare at me on the metro. Care to give it a whirl?