The Last Samurai
Novel by Helen DeWitt
Ask a group of writers and critics to pick books for a replacement canon, and it shouldn’t come as a shock that the one most of them name may be a novel about the character of genius. it's also, more precisely, a completely unique about universal human potential.

Like many epics, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai charts the education of its hero and proceeds by means of a search narrative. A boy undertakes rigorous training and goes in search of his father. What makes it a story of our time is that the boy lives in an insufficiently heated London flat with one mother. What makes it singular is that his training begins at age 4, when he starts to find out Ancient Greek , before quickly moving on to Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Finnish, etc. That’s to not mention his acquisition of mathematics, physics, humanistic discipline , music, and an eccentric taste for tales of world exploration.

Is this boy, Ludo, a genius? Sibylla, his mother, is of two minds about it. She recognizes that she’s done something out of the standard by teaching the child The Iliad so young, following the instance of J.S. Mill, who did Greek at age 3. She knows he’s a “Boy Wonder” and she or he encourages him in every thanks to follow his omnivorous instincts. But she also believes that the matter with everybody else — literally everybody else — is that they haven’t been properly taught and have gone out of their way, most of the time, to avoid difficult things, like thinking. Otherwise we’d be living during a world of Ludos.

So a completely unique that appears on the surface to be elitist — concerned because it is with great works of art, scientific achievement, and excellence generally — is really profoundly anti-elitist at its core. DeWitt’s novel is infused with the assumption that any human mind is capable of feats we tend to accompany genius. But the novel’s characters, especially Sibylla, are aware that youthful talent are often thwarted at any turn. She knows it happened to her parents — a teenage-whiz father who was accepted to Harvard but made to travel to seminary by his Christian father; and a musical prodigy mother who never went back to Juilliard for a second audition — and to herself. regardless of the world had future for Sibylla changed forever the night Ludo was conceived.