He quietly pays attention to the things that make her happy: a presentation by the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician Dr.
When he finds a freshly handwritten will on Sibylla’s desk, Ludo knows that he has to do something. She’s bored-and Ludo knows that Sibylla considers boredom a fate worse than death.
She begins sleeping in late and slacking off at work. Through his intelligent young eyes we see some truths about Sybilla that weren’t apparent before: She’s depressed. The narrative switches to the perspective of Ludo about halfway through the book, when he begins journaling. If he can’t have a real father, then how about seven fictional fathers? Searching for a stand-in father figure, Sibylla turns to a classic: Akira Kurosawa’s “masterpiece of modern cinema” Seven Samurai. Unfortunately, his father’s identity is the only information that Ludo truly wants and can’t learn on his own. Sibylla refuses to introduce Ludo to his father, or even reveal his name, on the grounds that he’s an idiot who would corrupt Ludo’s thriving brilliance and try to put him in school: an idea that both mother and son find repulsive. This works disastrously well: Ludo is studying physics and reading Aristotle while other children his age are learning their ABCs. It quickly becomes apparent that Ludo is perfectly capable of learning on his own, so he is given a set of highlighters and free reign of Sibylla’s sizeable book collection. To Sibylla’s annoyance, strangers on the subway constantly comment on the impressive books that her toddler is reading: “Isn’t he a bit young?” and “The Greek etymology is so helpful for spelling” are her least favorites. By age 6 he has read the entire Iliad and Odyssey in Greek and is learning Japanese, which is only one of the dozen languages he will know by the time he’s 11.
Meanwhile, she begins homeschooling her young son Ludo, who shows all the signs of being a true prodigy himself. Brilliant, cynical and desperate to not move back to the US, she’s become a single mother after a mediocre one-night stand with an equally mediocre writer, and is now struggling to make ends meet as a typist for a British publishing house. The story follows the journals and written correspondence of Sibylla, an American woman in London who happens to be a genius. The Last Samurai is Helen DeWitt’s colossal debut novel, originally published in 2000, and reissued this May by New Directions.
0 kommentar(er)
