But the one question that eludes an answer is that of the name of his father: Sibylla believes the Japanese film obliquely provides the male role models that Ludo's genetic father cannot supply, and refuses to be drawn on the question of paternal identity. He reads Homer in the original Greek at the age of four before moving onto Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse and Inuit studying advanced mathematical techniques (Fourier analysis and Laplace transformations), and, as the title hints, endlessly watching and analysing Akira Kurosawa's cinematic masterpiece The Seven Samurai.
Helen DeWitt's extraordinary debut novel The Last Samurai centres on the relationship between Sibylla, a single mother of precocious and rigorous intelligence, and her son Ludo, who, through his mother's singular attitude to education, develops into a prodigy of learning.
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