This Three Year Old Reads Ancient Greek...

What are you doing with your time??? It's The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt!!

What age do you think is the right one for a child to learn ancient Greek? Or Icelandic? Arabic? Hebrew? How about Japanese? An English child, that is. I started Latin at the age of 13 and promptly dropped it at 14. Shameful!

The young hero of Helen DeWitt’s brilliant novel, The Last Samurai, picks up the Greek at the age of 3. He swiftly moves on to the rest. Dictionary Japanese isn’t enough for him either. He masters "Street Japanese” too. This is Ludo.

His mother, Sibylla, is the daughter of two thwarted geniuses too: an atheist Darwinist for a father who gave up a full ride at Harvard (at 15 no less) to attend a mediocre seminary instead—in the name of giving the other side a fair shake—and a gifted pianist for a mother, whose own father thought she had better become a secretary. The pair of them ended up running a motel business.

Sibylla runs off to study the classics Oxford as soon as she gets the chance, after faking a transcript and a reference or two. Once she gets there, she spends upwards of 50 hours translating an obscure German text, only to discover that the central argument is “patently, blatantly insane” and decides to give it up.

Shortly thereafter, she meets a successful (though daft & shallow) writer out at a party and goes home with him. Determining that sleeping with him would be more tolerable than conversing with him (Sibylla doesn’t suffer fools), she sleeps with him. Thus, Ludo.

By the time Ludo is 3, in addition to begging Sib to teach him Japanese (though she knows only a little herself), he’s also begging to know who his father is. To stall the Japanese, she gives him a long list of texts to read first—The Odyssey, books 1-8 of Metamorphoses, the whole Kalilah wa Dinah, 30 of The Thousand and One Nights, I Samuel, the Book of Johan, the cantillation and 10 chapters in Algebra Made Easy. Stalling on the paternity proves more difficult.

To simplify, she thinks that Ludo’s father, who she refers to as Liberace, is stupid. Worse than stupid, really. Sadder. And to accept help from a man like that? To expose the next Einstein (if that is what he’s to be) to that? Impossible. You could argue it’s not fair of her to make that choice on Ludo’s behalf, and she’d probably agree with you. One of her dearly held (oft tested) beliefs is that circumstance of birth should not consign the child (with a will of their own) to the will of the parent.

However, when our little genius does find out who his father is, he agrees with mom. So one is forced to concede that Sib was probably right all along. But wait, wait, wait. Why does Ludo (age 3) want to learn Japanese in the first place? Well…

Sibylla decides that instead of introducing him to a subpar paternal specimen, she will introduce him to Kurosawa’s cinematic masterpiece, Seven Samurai. That way he will have 17 examples to follow: eight characters, eight actors and Kurosawa himself.

I have not seen Seven Samurai, and though it would probably be helpful to have the context, it’s not necessary. It’s most important to understand that the second ~half of the novel echoes a portion of the film during which the samurai are being recruited. You see, after Ludo meets his disappointing father, he sets out to recruit…a different, better father. This is the epic adventure of the novel, both in the sense that Ludo is out in the world on his own, but also because each of the potential fathers he selects has lived a life of grand adventure.

Helen DeWitt is a genius and the way she weaves so many disparate stories together and keeps the reader (this reader, at least) completely enthralled while jumping from obscure music theory to obscure color theory to obscure intricacies of various bureaucratic systems to obscure Chinese kite flying traditions…well it simply boggles the mind. The structure feels completely original, with Sibylla narrating initially, keeping a record for posterity in case Ludo does turn out to be the next Mozart. Once he turns five, entries from his new journal (a birthday present) are interspersed. Once he turns six, he takes over completely.

It is in the early pages that we are exposed to the enchantment of Sibylla. Without those sections, it might be difficult to be enchanted with her. It is also in those early pages that we are exposed to one of the central questions of the novel: to what extent is what we become as people (or as geniuses, in Ludo’s case) owed to fate? To what extent can it be engineered?

She considers the advice of various other parents of geniuses. Yo-Yo Ma’s father, for example, says that breaking difficult tasks down into small pieces and waiting to provide the next piece of the puzzle until the child has mastered the first is the key to success. A nice ideas, but Ludo proves to be far too impatient for these methods. She strays from providing sweeping advice to other parents in her record, but she does share her method for teaching Ludo the ancient Greek. It involves highlighters of many different colors.

When telling the story of Ludo’s conception, Sib admits that she considered the adoption route. The reader quakes to imagine what might have happened had Ludo ended up in the care of some normie. Someone who couldn’t teach him ancient Greek at the age of three upon being asked. But it’s also clear that some part of his genius is inherent—in the blood.

All of the language and the grammar and the math and the music point to order and patterns in the world. Things that repeat, things that make sense, unimpeachable logic. Even DeWitt’s expert narrative recurrences suggest that some higher power or order has laid the board and is moving the pieces. But then, the pure circumstance, the luck good and bad, the wild lives, the roll of the dice, the jump off the cliff’s edge—these things suggest something more unruly. Something more human.

For a novel that spends so much of its time being almost clinically academical, the humanity shines through. Ludo is a genius, and he’s on a quest of epic proportions. But he’s also just a boy, and without ever hitting you over the head with it, DeWitt shows you that. I recall in particular one moment towards the very end of the novel when Ludo complains that Sibylla will not let him watch Ace Ventura. Of course a twelve year old boy wants to watch Ace Ventura, even one who can read just about any ancient text in its original language.

Circularly, by showing this, DeWitt aims to prove that even a boy who’s just a boy, should be able to lead a heroic life—one of massive accomplishment and knowledge, and excitement. Should be able to, and should be encouraged to.

Which brings me around to some online discourse that was recently brought to my attention via this piece & this piece. To summarize, it was announced that Christopher Nolan is working on a film adaptation of The Odyssey. Yes! The same Odyssey that Ludo had to read in its entirety before Sib would teach him Japanese. The reaction to this news on X (formerly Twitter) was apparently (no chance I’m on X (formerly Twitter)) total shock that The Odyssey is an epic poem ‘written’ (read sung) by Homer in ancient Greece. Some person named Matt Ramos who is apparently very famous in Twitch (?) circles couldn’t believe it. I’m obviously out of my depth here, but you get the gist.

His “HOLY SHIT” zweet naturally set off a small cultural firestorm. People were shocked that he was shocked. The education system is failing our children. The Odyssey is cannon! Everyone should know it. From there, other people took offense to the idea of a literary/cultural cannon. Some of them, who I really MUST believe were only pretending to be so stupid for views & clicks were outraged that the self-centered Americans would expect people in other countries to have read something that’s written in English. Sigh.

Worse almost were the people who cried, what’s the point!? Why read the Odyssey anyway? Particularly now, when I can get ChatGPT to tell me what happens in it? It sends a shiver down my spine, truly. Read it to CHALLENGE yourself as

BDM

suggests, or read it because the STORY is an INCREDIBLE one per

Lyta Gold

.

As far as I’m concerned, I don’t understand how, when faced with the OPPORTUNITY to read one of humanity’s seminal texts (yes!), can anyone sit there and act like that’s not worth their time. Why are people so eager to give up their brains entirely? Reading The Odyssey makes you smarter.

I’m sure I could drudge up a bunch of studies that show that reading makes you smarter in various ways but I’m too lazy. I know it to be true. Aside from general intelligence and language/comprehension skills, through reading The Odyssey grants you an inside track on the literal bajillions of references to it. It grants you a deeper understanding of the trillions of pieces of art that have been inspired by it. That is COOL and WORTHWHILE. Exerting effort towards being a smarter and better informed person is cool and worthwhile.

Mulling all of this over, I thought about Helen DeWitt. In her afterword, she lays out her thoughts on the matter pretty clearly: our expectations are too low. The opportunities offered to Ludo are not the norm, but they should be. On top of that, as a society, we undervalue the humanities more and more because they’re not ‘practical,’ but practicality is not God. We should be encouraging our children, and ourselves, and our friends, and all the people we spend time with, to be smarter. Not in a snobbish way, but in a heroic way.

If you don’t feel like starting with The Odyssey on your journey to becoming a smarter person, try The Last Samurai. It is so outrageously good, I truly cannot recommend it enough. Funny, sweet, captivating, inspiring, 1000000/10. I read it in between Christmas and New Years and my family can attest that I completely ignored them for three days straight.

Love you, bye!

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