The Book of Form and Emptiness

July 15, 2021
A boy who hears objects talking and his mother, who can't stop hoarding things, work out their destinies in a meditative tribute to books, libraries, and Zen wisdom. Everything starts going awry for Benny Oh the year he turns 12, "the same year his father died and his mother started putting on weight." It's not just pounds that Annabelle adds; she obsessively accumulates things--kitchenware, snow globes, it doesn't really matter what--to fill the void left by her husband's death. Meanwhile, the voices Benny hears in everything from coffee cups to windowpanes become so insistent that he unwisely reveals his unwelcome ability at school and winds up in a pediatric psychiatry ward. There he meets a girl called The Aleph, whose enigmatic notes lead him post-hospital to the local library and a quest for meaning directed by The Aleph and a homeless hobo who was "a super famous poet back in Slovenia." As she did in A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Ozeki counterpoints faultless contemporary teenspeak with an adult third-person voice--in this case, intriguingly, the voice of Benny's Book. "You do your job, and I'll do mine," Benny tells the Book, and their interaction drives the story. The Book connects Annabelle's hoarding to the looming ecological catastrophe slowly being triggered by human beings' carelessness and waste; the voices Benny hears, it suggests, are calls to recognize our kinship with the other beings on our planet. Annabelle is getting a similar message from a book that jumps into her shopping cart: Tidy Magic, "written by a real Zen monk." Ozeki's insertion of Zen teachings into the narrative is slightly contrived, but she underscores the urgency of her spiritual message by ratcheting up the physical-world tension for her characters, as Annabelle's stockpiling puts her at risk of being evicted from her home and having Benny placed in foster care. Benny's final assertion of agency provides a moving, albeit hasty, wrap-up for a novel that staggers somewhat under the weight of everything the author wants to say. Overstuffed, but serious readers will appreciate Ozeki's passionate engagement with important ideas.

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July 26, 2021
Zen Buddhist priest Ozeki’s illuminating postmodern latest (after the meditation memoir The Face: A Time Code) explores themes of mourning, madness, and the powers of the imagination. Benny Oh, a 13-year-old boy, begins hearing voices after his jazz musician father dies in a tragicomic accident involving a truck full of chickens. The voices launch Benny on a quest of self-discovery at the library, where he meets a slovenly poet-philosopher called “the Bottleman” and his stunning, anarchic protégé, “the Aleph,” a young woman obsessed with Borges and the Situationists. The duo cause Benny’s life to become more chaotic and yet more thrilling as they encourage him to embrace his inner madness. Meanwhile, Benny’s mother, Annabelle, whose job for a media-monitoring agency requires her to clip and catalogue print newspaper and magazine articles, and who now works from home, starts hoarding, and the house’s clutter becomes increasingly overwhelming. Sometimes this reads like a simple coming-of-age tale, but Ozeki playfully and successfully breaks the fourth wall—Benny, embarrassed by a passage about him being bullied, says to “the Book,” “Can we just skip this, please?”—and she cultivates a striking blend of young adult fiction tropes with complex references to Walter Benjamin, Zen Buddhism, and Marxist philosophy. This is the rare work that will entertain teenagers, literary fiction readers, and academics alike. Agent: Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Agency.

Starred review from August 1, 2021
"Has it ever occurred to you that books have feelings, too?" As does every object in supersensitive Benny Oh's world. They also have voices, and how they plague him after the death of his Japanese Korean jazz-musician father, Kenji. A young teen, Benny is left with Annabelle, his big, blond, utterly bereft mother. Her dream was to become a children's librarian; instead, she labors as a media monitor. In a subconscious attempt to fill the void Kenji has left, she hoards things, filling their humble Pacific Northwest duplex with clamor and clutter, which is torture for Benny. He lands in a psychiatric ward, which leads to his infatuation with an intrepid teen artist who is devoted to her mentor, an aged, homeless Slovenian philosopher-poet. All three misfits find sanctuary in the public library. Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being, 2013) draws on her Zen Buddhist attentiveness as she writes with bountiful insight, exuberant imagination, and levitating grace about psychic diversity, our complicated attitude toward our possessions, street protests, climate change, and such wonders as crows, the moon, and snow globes. Most inventively, Ozeki celebrates the profound relationship between reader and writer. This enthralling, poignant, funny, and mysterious saga, thrumming with grief and tenderness, beauty and compassion, offers much wisdom. "Books are works of love, after all."

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August 1, 2021
"Has it ever occurred to you that books have feelings, too?" As does every object in supersensitive Benny Oh's world. They also have voices, and how they plague him after the death of his Japanese Korean jazz-musician father, Kenji. A young teen, Benny is left with Annabelle, his big, blond, utterly bereft mother. Her dream was to become a children's librarian; instead, she labors as a media monitor. In a subconscious attempt to fill the void Kenji has left, she hoards things, filling their humble Pacific Northwest duplex with clamor and clutter, which is torture for Benny. He lands in a psychiatric ward, which leads to his infatuation with an intrepid teen artist who is devoted to her mentor, an aged, homeless Slovenian philosopher-poet. All three misfits find sanctuary in the public library. Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being, 2013) draws on her Zen Buddhist attentiveness as she writes with bountiful insight, exuberant imagination, and levitating grace about psychic diversity, our complicated attitude toward our possessions, street protests, climate change, and such wonders as crows, the moon, and snow globes. Most inventively, Ozeki celebrates the profound relationship between reader and writer. This enthralling, poignant, funny, and mysterious saga, thrumming with grief and tenderness, beauty and compassion, offers much wisdom. "Books are works of love, after all."

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from August 27, 2021

In this latest work from Booker Prize finalist Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being), young teenager Benny Oh is coping with the death of his Korean Japanese, jazz clarinet--playing father. As his white mother, Annabelle, descends into clutter, Benny starts hearing things speak--they seem desperate to express themselves. Benny finds quieter voices at the library and also encounters his own Book, which explains to Benny that it doesn't make him do things but is there to capture his story in all its fullness; this can at times provoke arguments between them. (The Book as protagonist is of course the book we are reading.) The Book also dismisses authors as nothing more than celebrity midwives with fingers. So even as it movingly relates Benny's struggles to reckon with his voices, helped by homeless Slovenian poet/philosopher Slovaj and a waiflike but tough young outsider calling herself the Aleph, and Annabelle's struggles to hold onto her son, this is also a story about how stories work. At the same time, the narrative--indeterminately set but with a slight West Coast feel--considers issues from consumerism and environmental disaster, to mental health and our relationship with Made and Unmade objects. Arcing over all is Benny's big question: How do we know what is real? VERDICT Rich to overflowing and utterly engaging, Ozeki's work wants us to listen to the world.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

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