Review of the novel The Book of Forms and Emptiness Ruth Ozeki
WRITTEN BY: Petra Amalia Bachmann
Canadian-American author Ruth Ozeki's fourth novel, The Book of Shapes and Voids, speaks without any embellishment and without hesitation about growing up, sadness, powerlessness, mental challenges and social decline, thereby attracting readers of all ages, creating a literary experience that transcends generational boundaries.
What would you say if a sneaker suddenly spoke to you? Or a glass ball? This is exactly what thirteen-year-old Benny Oh is facing after the sudden death of his father. Everyday objects from his surroundings suddenly rattle, chatter, complain. While some are just looking for attention and sympathy, others even get him into trouble. At the beginning of the novel, in retrospect, we learn a very warm story about Benny's once very happy family, a family that has turned into just a memory. The protagonist is followed and haunted by words and sounds, while Annabelle's mother, in her grief, becomes a hoarder and tries in vain to console herself and her son with unnecessary purchases. She can't let things go, while Benny can't silence the voices. In the end, their dirty house ends up cluttered with garbage and things, and the protagonist finds himself in a psychiatric ward, where he is given various diagnoses one after the other and accompanying therapies are changed.
Canadian-American author Ruth Ozeki's fourth novel, The Book of Shapes and Voids, speaks without any embellishment and without hesitation about growing up, sadness, powerlessness, mental challenges and social decline, thereby attracting readers of all ages, creating a literary experience that transcends generational boundaries. In this novel, everything has its own language, everything is made up of words that write Benny's book of life.
The novel is imbued with humor and wit, linguistic and musical plays with absurdity, but also optimism and subtle parodies, and the main feature of this novel is polyphony. So, in the middle of the colorful collage that makes up this novel, sometimes Benny speaks to us in the first person, and sometimes the book itself talks to us, which has a very pronounced mood. Other books talk to Benny, not only the one we hold in our hands. He feels best in the library, where he spends his time reading Borges and hanging out with the marginalized. He is charmed by Alef, a young homeless woman who worships Walter Benjamin and carries a non-binary ferret named PAZ with her everywhere. Along with her, he gets close to Slavoj Bocar, an old drunkard in a wheelchair who claims to be a famous Slovenian poet and a guide to the truth about things. The novel seems to erase the boundaries between reality and imagination, especially when it comes to very peculiar characters. It seems that the characters in the novel are sailing through a world built on ideas while experiencing somewhat unreal adventures together. They drive around the city in a van, explore the library, look for reading materials and papers to write their own stories. In those shared moments, Benny hides from the real world and his own voices. The girl Alef shows the protagonist of this novel a world where there is room for both vulnerability and strangeness, and questions such as what is real and what is normal run through every line of this novel. After all, in his life as presented here, what is even real? Is his whole fragile conspiracy against reality even real? For author Ruth Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist, perhaps the answer is that only transience can be permanent.