But this should not dissuade you from reading it! You do not need to understand irregular Arabic verb forms to be utterly taken in by the tale she's telling.
There's also a fair amount of stuff in there about various languages and some mathematics and music, and some of it's quite technical. It's a wonderful book about a boy and his mother and about genius and heroism and goodness. The scope of it, the emotion, the stories-it must have taken everything she had. That's not to say she tried to cram the whole world into 500 pages, it's just to say that she put herself into this book. Helen DeWitt put everything into this book. The film was fine, I don't have anything against it, but the stories could not be more different, except that they both have to do with Samurai, in one way or another. Let me start off by saying, because I'll be posting this to my blog, that this book has nothing to do with the film starring Tom Cruise. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death. He'll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn't know: his father's name.
(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. 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. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. 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? Helen DeWitt's 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was "destined to become a cult classic" (Miramax). Called "remarkable" (The Wall Street Journal) and "an ambitious, colossal debut novel" (Publishers Weekly), Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai is back in print at last
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