Ruth Ozeki’s new novel, The Book of Form & Emptiness, is an often moving story about two people struggling over the unexpected loss of a third. It’s also an ostentatious self-commentary about how we tell and receive stories through books. Ozeki’s best-known work, A Tale for the Time Being (2013), was intensely interested in the dynamic interplay between two people — a teenage diarist living in Tokyo, writing about her life, and a writer living in Vancouver who reads about that life after she finds the diary. Leaving behind that clear binary for something more multiplicious, Ozeki’s latest work is as much about itself as it is about Annabelle and Benny, a mother and son living precariously in a contemporary West Coast American city. Their husband and father Kenji, a loveable musician with a persistent drug problem, is killed by a truck transporting live chickens at the onset of the story. Without his unifying and vitalising presence, his wife and son must reckon with their weak hold on each other and on life more generally. This sends them in very different directions. Benny begins to hear the voices of inanimate objects, as when a bird flies into a window at school and he takes in the window’s lament over this experience. Already a sensitive, lonesome teenager, Benny is met with scepticism when he tries to explain what’s happening, as much from the already floundering Annabelle as from his teachers, counsellors and, in time, the doctors he encounters once he’s medicated and hospitalised. Thereafter, he finds more efficacious sources of understanding and support from a cerebral and sharp-tongued older girl, Alice. She’s a runaway addict-cum-artist and activist known as the Aleph, and she associates with the B-Man, an aphorism-dropping wheelchair-bound alcoholic eastern European Marxist poet. The two of them squat in and around the downtown public library and befriend Benny, leading to experiences both exhilarating and terrifying. Meanwhile, Annabelle, a grieving hoarder confronting eviction, pending job loss, rising medical bills and a distanced, unstable son, unexpectedly discovers solace in a Zen Buddhist monk’s guide to good living through tidy housekeeping. All of this would make for a convoluted story made nevertheless engaging by the unapologetic earnestness of Ozeki’s treatment of her characters’ struggles. But Ozeki isn’t interested in just telling a story. The novel’s conventional segments are interleaved with monologues by Benny and by the book itself, in the voices — respectively — of a snarky and questioning teen with low self-esteem and an empathetic, encouraging therapist with immense self-esteem. The author sets high standards for this conceptual daring, with repeated quoting and riffing on Walter Benjamin’s writing about books and libraries, and on Borges’s ideated puzzle-making with identity and story. But such signalling and citation only expose the cloying banality of Ozeki’s own claims and insights, which include adolescent bibliophile profundities like “Yes, we’re your book, Benny, but this is your story. We can help you, but in the end, only you can live your life.” Ozeki has considerable storytelling energies; these were evident and rightly acclaimed in her prior work, and likewise feature in the best parts of The Book of Form & Emptiness. It’s too bad that, in this case, her affecting story is overwhelmed by the novel’s affectedly empty observations about itself. ...

Benim Balığım YaşayacakRuth Ozeki · Parodi Yayınları · 2015743 okunma

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