In her attempt to provide the fatherless boy with male role models, she encourages Ludo to watch Kurosawa’s masterpiece The Seven Samurai. When Ludo asks about the identity of his father, she refuses to reveal it. Sibylla compares Liberace’s lovemaking to a “drunken medley” and abhors him for being a mediocre writer. Ludo is the result of a one-night stand between Sibylla and the prolific and popular travel writer that Sibylla refers to as Liberace. Sibylla’s miserable girlhood and insatiable hunger for knowledge lead her to London to study classics at Oxford. Her mother wanted to be a singer but, when “one thing led to another,” became a housewife. Her aunt Barbara wanted to be a violinist but ended up a secretary.

Her Uncle Buddy wanted to be an Opera Singer but became an accountant. Sibylla’s father, who “skipped grades the way other boys skip class,” was accepted to Harvard at age fifteen, but ended up at a third-rate theological college, accidentally won 500 dollars, and decided to open a motel. Sibylla casts light on a tragic flaw: every member of her family once showed prodigious talent, but by some unlucky turn of fate each was derailed. It is a Sophoclean tragedy about the travails of unfulfilled potential, handed down through the generations. Take the prologue to the novel, a masterful piece of mythmaking, told by Sibylla. Some parts are more convincing than others, but every excursion is vividly animated and greatly affecting. Dewitt’s writing is digressive, daring, and all its own. Just shy of 500 pages, it is sure to scare off some readers with a shattered, fragmented form and esoteric passages of Japanese syllabaries, German phrases, and Homeric critique. Originally published in 2000, The Last Samurai is now being reissued from New Directions. This is the conundrum facing Sibylla, mother of the child prodigy Ludo, in Helen Dewitt’s exhilarating first novel. So what makes one sibling a genius and not the other? Is it simply that one is endowed from birth with extraordinary talent? And why does every prodigy not a genius make? As for Nannerl, if she is known at all, it is surely only as Mozart’s sister.

These achievements turned him from a prodigy into a genius and secured his name forever against posterity. Mozart went on to compose some of the world’s greatest symphonies, string quartets, and operas. His sister Nannerl received the same training, but did not show such prodigious musical skill. Taught music by his father Leopold at the age of five, he entertained the high courts of Europe with his exceptional ability to play the piano and the harpsichord blindfolded.

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt