The Last Samurai
Author(s): Helen Dewitt
Helen DeWitt's 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was "destined to become a cult classic" (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights in twenty countries, so "Why not just, 'destined to become a classic?'" (Garth Risk Hallberg) And why must cultists tell the uninitiated it has nothing to do with Tom Cruise? Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo's shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.) Lacking male role models for a fatherless boy, Sibylla turns to endless replays of Kurosawa's masterpiece Seven Samurai. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn't know: his father's name. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew.
He'll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. He may not live to see twelve. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.
Product Information
"A triumph-a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form." -- A. S. Byatt - The New Yorker "The Last Samurai is an original work of brilliance about, in part, the limits of brilliance." -- Time "The book has been a great source of motivation for me. I must outdo Ludo, because he is younger than I am but smarter than I am. My father says that this is ridiculous, as Ludo is a fictional character. But this is precisely my point: how can I let a character who isn't even real outdo me?" -- Daniel (age 14)
Helen DeWitt is the author of a "remarkable first novel" (Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Review of Books), The Last Samurai, which has been translated into twenty languages. She lives in Berlin.
General Fields
- :
- : New Directions Publishing Corporation
- : New Directions Publishing Corporation
- : 0.5
- : 30 May 2016
- : 203mm X 132mm X 35mm
- : United States
- : books
Special Fields
- : Helen Dewitt
- : Paperback
- : 813.6
- : 576