![]() It’s Ludo’s curiosity, in particular, that gives the novel its momentum: he is a child prodigy whose brilliance at once thrills and terrifies his mother. Its parade of erudition is at once dazzling and surprisingly entertaining, and also inspiring, because it’s in the service of intellectual curiosity and love of knowledge, not accomplishment or grades or prizes. It’s about quests and heroes and, of course samurai. It’s a celebration of genius and an attack on mediocrity, a paean to the human capacity to create and learn and think and reason and a lament for the seductions of banality. ![]() It’s also about the accidents that determine the lives we lead, regardless of who we might be, and about the choices and values and loves and hates and languages and books and ideas and music and art and movies and people that constitute those lives and make them worth living–or not. ![]() ![]() The Last Samurai is the story of a single mother, Sybilla, and her son, whom she calls “Ludo”–though on his birth certificate it says either ‘David’ or ‘Stephen,’ ‘one or the other.’ It makes sense that Sybilla would consider it pointless to be certain, because one of the things this novel is about is precisely how we figure out and then live up to who we think we are. ![]()
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