The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

 

Interesting, frustrating, elliptical novel about a gifted child and his gifted disturbed mother.

Lots of text in foreign languages - Greek! Latin! etc. 

An American single mother in London raises her child and will not tell him who his father is, except to elliptically suggest he was a great scholar and an adventurer.

The two obsessively watch and re-watch Kurosawa movies - and the boy becomes (sort of ) convinced that he is training to become a Samurai warrior, and his ultimate trial and Samurai quest will be in finding his father. He confronts numerous candidates.

Weird, wacky, sort of wonderful, and sort of brow-beating: this book.