Ruth Ozeki - The Book of Form and Emptiness

After the tragic death of his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house - a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.
At first Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world, where 'things happen'. He falls in love with a mesmerising street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many.
And he meets his very own Book - a talking thing - who narrates Benny's life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.
With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz to climate change to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki - bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking.

Comment: In 2018 I've read a book by this author which I absolutely adored. It was sad and sometimes heartbreaking, but a very good story which grabbed from start to finish. Once I got aware this new book would be released, I was immediately curious about the blurb and I've agreed with a friend to do a buddy read once the paperback was out. 

I've finished it a couple of days ago and, sadly, I must say it wasn't as magical as I hoped it would be.

In this story we meet Benny Oh, a young boy entering his teenage years, and his mother Annabelle right after they loose Kenjy, Benny's father. Kenjy was a talented but not acknowledged enough musician and he had some issues with his lack of success. As soon as the story begins, Kenji is killed in an accident and now the rest of his family must move on, but Annabelle has a job which enables her hoarding tendencies and Benny suddenly starts being able to ear the voices of objects. This makes doctors label him a mentally ill boy and he spends time in a mental hospital. When he comes out, however, the voices remain despite medication, and Benny meets friends at the library, a place where he feels he can have some peace, but is there any hope for him to be able to cope with who he is?

This author is a very talented writer. I thought this after reading the other book but I liked it, so it is always easy to say this, but now that I have read this second book by her, I stand by my opinion, she is a good writer and her way of telling things works out well for me, her writing is moody, suggestive and allows for the story's atmosphere to be special, to make me want to feel or think specific things, related to the story or just because I let my mind go other places.

However, the characters in this story didn't captivate me as much as the ones in the other book. I liked Benny and his mother well enough, they are fascinating characters on their own, but the path they go in while the story develops wasn't as interesting to me as I wish and, to be honest, there were chapters where it felt as if a lot was repetitive and focused on details I feel weren't that amazing, leaving behind - in my opinion - other elements which could have made for a more captivating tale.

The story is mostly told from Benny's and Annabelle's POV, but we also have the POV of the Book, which is seen as the Book of Benny's Life, sort of, and several aspects are shared with the reader as if there is a ongoing dialogue between Benny and his Book or as of Benny is aware of the Book talking and saying things to the audience. I know it can sound a little weird to imagine, but it does work once one gets used to it. For me, the problem was that it got to a point I simply wasn't as impressed with the story anymore and the special little things passed me by.

In his road to understanding himself, Benny decides to preserve his mental sanity by skipping school where bullying and the voices of everything, mostly the negative ones, keep bombarding him with things he can't deal with. He finds solace at a library, where his mind can rest more easily with the stories in the books or simply the quietness of the space. He finds Alice, who calls herself Aleph, she used to be a patient at the hospital he was at as well, and they become friends and Benny develops a crush on her. I confess I disliked the parts/scenes when Benny interacts with her and other secondary characters because I didn't find them appealing and I feel their interactions didn't really help Benny improve.

When I say this, I mean that I failed to notice if Benny actually went through the expected self help journey he needed to get over whatever obstacle he faced. I fear the author might have intended this at the end but between the lack of attention I had by then and the confusion of certain situations, I just didn't find that to be believable nor justified enough. I feel the things Benny faced, the people he met and even the complications Annabelle had on her life were done in compelling ways, in such a compassionate way that I couldn't help feeling richer in spirit by having read through their story. This feeling happened to me with the other book by the author, for instance.

I'm fully aware this is supposed to be a more conceptual story, more along the philosophical line and there is plenty each reader can get from this, the author certainly used a lot of bases, from classical to modern art expressions to convey an idea/message, but I wish I could have had a stronger connection with Benny. This would have helped me to appreciate the story more, even though I did like the Zen/Buddhism notions of how to deal with life, the conversations about books having power, about the importance of words, among other interesting themes. 

In the end, though, I guess the important aspect is how a story makes you feel, whether is the cleverest or the simplest of tales, but here somehow, part of that mix didn't convince me enough.

Grade: 6/10

Ruth Ozeki - A Tale for The Time Being

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in a ways she can scarcely imagine.
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.
Full of Ozeki’s signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

Comment: This book got on my radar because it was one of the chosen titles of a book club I used to

be part of. I only joined the group later on but the comments about this book were many and I liked what people said. I added it to my pile but it has been around 5 years already... still better late than ever.

This is the story of Nao, a young American girl whose Japanese parents had to go back to Japan after Nao's father lost his job. These three people have little to do with Japanese culture but they are forced to go back anyway. 

When the story begins, Nao introduces herself and starts telling her story.

There's a second main character, a grown up woman called Ruth, who lives in Cortes Island, north to Vancouver. After the 2011 tsunami in Japan, many people lost everything and some debris has ended on the other side of the Pacific and this is when Ruth discovers something in the beach. Later on, while talking to her husband, they realize it's a bunch of papers and a diary, which Ruth starts reading. And so, the two tales connect and slowly, we start seeing what was really going on with Ruth and Nao's lives...

This is a very intense story of dual narrators. We have Nao's story, which we get from her own POV and also Ruth's side of things, which we read in third person.

I'm not certain why the author chose to force us to connect with Nao so promptly and not with Ruth but for me this barely mattered because the story was very powerful.

Nao is a young girl that saw her whole change in the blink of an eye. She is facing many complicated moments because her father can't find a job and is severely depressed to the point of trying to commit suicide. Nao's mother seems to be more absent in how important she could be to the story but it's Nao herself that is the key of everything. She is a very sad, lonely girl who gets bullied at school and through her fear and the terrible things she endures, we see glimpses of a wonderfully bright girl who just can't seem to get enough. 

I found Nao's sections to be amazingly poignant, but also difficult to go through at times. It's really unbearable to think about the pain, the suffering, the humiliations people everywhere face daily and we simply won't know...

Nao has a very peculiar family history and one summer she gets to stay at a temple with her nun great grandmother Jiko, who teaches her a lot, especially about her son Haruki, one of the kamikaze pilots during WWII. These details were deeply researched, I could tell, and were very emotional. In fact, if there is one word I could use to describe the book is emotional because in almost every page there is a detail, a sentence, a scene that just grabs you and won't let go.

Ruth's sections were also interesting to read for me although I've read some readers saying it wasn't so for them, but I liked how more mundane Ruths life appeared to be, even if she lived in a sort of isolated island with her husband who we get also suffers from some mild mental disorder. Ruth is novelist whose memory is being affected so I got the notion she didn't mind the isolation although we can tell she hates it at times. Still, there was a lot to take in by reading through Ruth's perspective and I liked how she tried to know more about Nao and even tried to help her any way she could, despite the time and distance.

Along with philosophical discussions and quantic presentations, the reader slowly unravel what is really happening to both Nao and Ruth and the lessons they learn as they get to communicate with one another: Ruth by reading Nao's diary and Nao by writing it to someone out there.

I liked this style, it was very interesting to know little things at a time about both main characters and their lives and hopes.

This could be described as a complex plot because there's a lot of information included which isn't that easy to follow but it does make the story richer.

Closer to the end, things reach their peak and I confess I was very worried about Nao. It's never that obvious to the reader if Nao is alive at the end or not but the journey towards the last chapter is so emotional like I said, to full of amazing thoughts, I just loved the experience of reading this book.

Grade: 9/10