This so infuriates Sibylla that she decides to educate him herself. When he turns six, Ludo’s diary chronicles his encounter with the curiosity-killing school system, which can only conceive of him as a disruptive influence. I take this to mean that Sibylla is slowly losing her voice, slowly becoming mute. The novel now begins to shift the perspective away from Sibylla’s consciousness to Ludo’s. In Part 2, the five-year-old Ludo begins to write a diary. This exposes them to wildly uncomprehending questioning from their fellow passengers and condemns poor Sibylla to staying up half the night to type Practical Caravanning. To escape their cold apartment, Sibylla and Ludo ride the London Underground’s Circle line for whole days on end. By the age of four, he watches Kurosawa’s film The Seven Samurai almost as compulsively as Sibylla herself. She begins to lecture Ludo on the rational advantages of suicide.Ī demanding child, Ludo pesters his brilliant mother to teach him Greek, Japanese, and mathematics. Sibylla’s socioeconomic isolation, and the extreme boredom of having to earn her living typing and tagging text from magazines with titles like Advanced Angling and The Poodle Breeder, makes her depressed. A one-night stand with a smug and self-important writer (she only had sex with him because she couldn’t find a polite way to say no) results in her son, Ludo, whose name, not coincidentally, means “I play” in Latin. When she discovers that academia fails to value the difference between mindless learning and true intellect, she decamps.

Born into a long line of unrecognized geniuses, she has made her way from the American Midwest to a research fellowship in classics at Oxford. The Last Samurai opens with the travails of Sibylla. Like the French Oulipo writers (who set themselves mad tasks: compose a novel without the letter e!), DeWitt is fascinated by creativity voluntarily imposing strict yet random rules on itself. A game of skill is a free yet rule-governed activity: we enter into it willingly, yet once inside, its rules bind us. Central to the novel is the metaphor of games, mostly in the sense of games of skill and chance (bridge, piquet). And underneath the games always the question: Is existence worth enduring?įormally, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai is a potent brew of old-fashioned storytelling, high-wire modernist interior monologue, and postmodernism: its experimental layout includes capital letters, broken-off sentences, lists of numbers, and words in many different alphabets.

The poverty and loneliness of the authentic artist. The wonders and the cruelty of the world.

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt