The last Samurai著者Helen Dewitt

The Last Samurai (2000) is a debut novel by Helen Dewitt.

The book focuses on the relationship between Ludo, a young boy, and Sibylla, the single mother of the boy. Ludo is a child prodigy. He sarted playing the piano at three, reading Ancient Greek at four, and goes on to learning Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse, Inuit, and advanced mathematics. Despite this, lack of father figure is an issue and Sibylla plays him Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai to stand in for male influence in his upbringing. Ludo's combination of genius and naïveté guide him in a search for his missing father, whose identity Sibylla refuses to disclose — a search that has some peculiar byways and unexpected consequences.


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Product Description
An intellectual tour-de-force, playful, multilayered, and wonderfully readable, "The Last Samurai" is full of stories of remarkable exploits, tables of Japanese grammar, snatches of Greek poetry, passages of Icelandic legend, and ingenious math problems. It is also the tale of a six-year-old child prodigy's search for a father, or even a man heroic enough to be his father, gradually revealing a new and unexpected dimension of love.