the book of form and emptiness ruth ozeki

When he can no longer concentrate at school, he is first diagnosed with ADHD then, after he has stabbed himself with some particularly snarky Chinese scissors, as suffering “the prodromal phase of schizoaffective disorder”.īy page 50, Ozeki has sold us on the articulate object, and begun to establish a complex neurodivergent subjectivity. After a year of the voices, Benny’s own attempts to self-organise seem doomed. But in the end, without Kenji to energise them, neither his son nor his widow can tidy their lives. Strewn over her bed, Kenji’s old shirts, it seems to his son, are already “trying to self-organise into a quilt-like form”. Annabelle prepares to make a “memory quilt” out of his clothes. For both of them, Kenji’s face grows less easy to see. Where he can’t shut the voices up, she can’t let go of anything where objects verbally harass him, for her they gather dust. They fail to establish a new family culture. They still love each other but they fight. Soon, nothing is working for Benny and Annabelle.

Half-eaten yoghurts whine at him from the back shelf. Even the unloved leftovers in the refrigerator can speak, in “the groans of mouldy cheeses, the sighs of old lettuces”. Whether “metallic and grating” or “pleasantly inhuman”, they clamour for his attention, and they often want to tell him about their pain, their histories of misuse and abuse. Later, he begins hearing voices from inside everything. So he runs away, following a voice that calls his name from “somewhere deep inside the building”. At the crematorium, all Benny can think to ask his mother Annabelle is: “You going to burn his clarinet too?” Even though the body in the coffin is not really his father, Benny concludes, he still can’t bear to see it “thrown into a fire”. Every single thing is, in some sense, writing a book.īenny Oh is still a boy when his father Kenji, a Korean-Japanese jazz musician at the time a little the worse for wear from drink, is run over by a chicken truck in an alley behind their house on the edge of Chinatown. In this, her fourth, everything possesses – everything is made up of – language. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker prize. A merican-Canadian author Ruth Ozeki is a film-maker, a Zen priest and a teacher of writing.

The book of form and emptiness ruth ozeki