199 words about The Last Samurai

Released before and bearing no relation to the Tom Cruise movie that stole its name, The Last Samurai dramatizes the relationship between two of the most enjoyable people I’ve ever encountered in fiction: a woman named Sibylla and her son, Ludo. Written in a dense but never-confusing mixture of dialogue, internal monologue, literary description, abstract chapter formatting, and like scientific notation, the story’s primary action is the seemingly warp-speed development of Ludo’s mind. Sib pours everything in: Kurosawa, The Odyssey, advanced physics, etymology, love, exasperation. I came to miss Sib in the second half of the book, as Ludo (spoiler, I guess) confronts a series of men who either may or may as well be his father. But I took some solace in knowing that Ludo missed Sib, too — that his search for a father figure was undertaken out of love for his mom, the samurai who trained him — and knowing that, in a sense, the book was its own happy ending for Sib, given the biographical similarities between her and the book’s author, Helen DeWitt. I wanted her to eventually write a book like The Last Samurai: idiosyncratic, brilliant, and ultimately, if very narrowly, optimistic.