The Book of Form and Emptiness - Ruth Ozeki | Book Review

hey friends welcome back to gronsky books uh today we are talking about the book of form and emptiness by Ruth ozeki I went into this book totally blind knowing nothing but the title The Book of form and emptiness but what does that mean I had no idea but now that I've read it and I do know what the title means it's got me wondering about whether or not you're the type of person who would want to know what this title means before you read the book or not now obviously you're watching this video you're probably the type of person who doesn't mind knowing at least a little bit about a book before you read it uh uh but that probably varies from book to book right then it varies from person to person how much do you want to know where do you draw the line and that line is different for all of us the book of form and emptiness has at its heart a very unique premise one that I'm hesitant to spoil for you at all and it's got me wondering just how much of this I can talk about before you get mad at me for spoiling something you really didn't expect to hear so before I get into even minor spoilers let me just tell you this Benny oh is a 14 year old kid who suffers from what his mother calls emotional problems Benny's mother Annabelle has her own set of unresolved problems the book spends most of its page length exploring each of their problems as they compound and lead the family into crisis now I found these two characters Benny and Annabelle very well rounded out and believable in every way even though I don't struggle with anything that they struggle with even in the slightest I still found them very relatable and there's a handful of Side characters in the book of form and emptiness who feel no less compelling feel naturally formed as if I'd met them in real life now this is my second Ruth ozeki novel the first was a tale for the time being which I loved and it seems to me that ozeki's superpower is creating a small cast of hyper real characters that can Propel a plot forward through a story that doesn't necessarily reflect reality truly a case of Ordinary People thrust into extraordinary circumstances so if you're just here to find out if you should read the book of form and emptiness and you don't want too many spoilers let me just say that if unique narratives are rising out of the emotional problems of a tidy cast of dynamic characters appeals to you then yes read this book and if you still want to hear more and you don't mind a few very carefully considered minor spoilers then stick around after the intro I've got more to say join a hands together and we'll sing a quick sand run it up together till we scrap of land [Music] okay so you're still here that's awesome all right so Benny oh hears voices daily objects like shoes and spoons window panes these things all communicate with Benny or so he thinks is it schizoaffective disorder or is he really hearing these voices coming from these objects early on in the novel Benny asks himself the question what is real and as the book moves through its main plot and all of its various subplots Benny becomes more and more preoccupied with determining the answer to this question what is real are these things really talking to him if they are can they be trusted how can he tell if they're reliable you know now one of the voices that he hears is called the book and the book happens to be the actual narrator in the book of form and emptiness the third person omniscient narrator that we are reading so in a way we the readers are hearing one of Benny's voices as well real or imagined this is also a really great exploration into who the unnamed third person omniscient narrator is that we read in a lot of fiction which is really cool for a book nerd like me and if you're a book nerd I think you're gonna love that too Ruth ozeki's other superpower is that she's got this marvelous way of making us look at day-to-day objects with a whole new perspective this super unique narrator then sometimes switches its focus and directly addresses Benny who then in turn directly addresses the book and in that way he's basically talking to himself or is he is he talking to himself or is he talking to one of the voices which is real or is the voice system manifestation of his own delusions when the book addresses Benny The Narrative shifts seamlessly from third person into second person and then when Benny addresses the book The Narrative shifts again into first person I don't think I've ever read a book that a made better use of the second person narrative it's very tricky to do and be used all first third and second person narratives to such great effect without it being a gimmick now in case you're hazy on your povs here's a just a real quick Refresher the third person narrator is when it says Eric went to the library to find Ruth ozeki's new book the first person narrator would say I went to the library to find Ruth ozeki's new book now the second person narrator is when the narrator addresses a character or the reader directly and it would say you went to the library to find Ruth ozeki's new book and when you pulled it off the shelf you found that Ruth ozeki had written a book about you now it's very trippy and very tricky to pull off but Ruth ozeki switched between these three narratives very deftly and to great effect okay so for the story itself um Benny loses his father Kenji right at the very beginning of the novel this is not a spoiler it happens literally right at the beginning so Kenji dies in a very unhappy accident so that leaves Annabelle and Benny alone and they don't have any other family in the area now I believe this book is supposed to have been set in Vancouver but I'm not a hundred percent it doesn't ever say where the book is set the only thing that it says is that it's the West Coast I could be wrong anyway that it's it doesn't matter where the book takes place which is why she didn't tell us uh what was I saying Annabelle has no friends in the area and as her problems compound and they approach this crisis her mental health deteriorates and she begins hoarding and now the messy state of their house leads them um to other problems like uh they face eviction and some other very serious issues and so Annabelle is in Despair and she's trying to get her house under control and wouldn't you know it she happens to come across this little book called tidy magic a little Japanese Zen book about the magic of tidying up your house tidy magic itself becomes sort of a nested book within a book and I love it when authors do that thing where they write chapters of another book and they put it inside this book and so I I love that is it a Trope I don't know but I love that storytelling device now a little segue here I've read two books that are very similar to tidy magic one of them is the life-changing magic of tidying up by Marie kondo which I'm pretty sure tidy magic is very heavily based on or at least takes a lot of inspiration from and the other one is goodbye things by let me check my notes by fumio suzaki now obviously when I read these two books I didn't abide by every word if you look at the shelves behind me I think both of the authors of those two uh Zen books about decluttering your house would say that this collection is a is excessive but I don't care these books spark joy in my life and I don't want to get rid of them and whether you have a huge bookshelf in your house or you have another collection of something else we all kind of have our thing right maybe it's a lot of plants or maybe you click bells or spoons or maybe you have a whole lot of photo albums from the 80s and 90s or something that you don't want to get rid of right but unless you're living that RV life or that that van life right or you're just a master of minimalism I think most of us have something like this in their house and I think that's okay now when I read the life-changing magic of tidying up and goodbye things I took a lot from those books I downsized a lot of needless crap out of my house and it felt fantastic but I'm not going to let go of everything and I don't think anybody should have to any anyway I know I said it was a segue but I do get distracted so back to the book of form and emptiness there are two other wonderful characters worth mentioning in this review one is called The Olive and one is called the bottle man the olive is a young teenage girl with some substance abuse problems she's an artist and she befriends Benny kind of early on in the novel and the olive is sort of the caretaker of the bottle man she's she's also friends with this this bottle man he's a Eastern European poet he's an older man he's got a prosthetic leg he's in a he's wheelchair bound he lives on the streets he's an alcoholic and he's a bit of a philosopher and it's through these two characters where the full meaning of the book comes into focus and I don't want to give too much away but I will say that the olive it's not a real name she took her name from a Jorge Luis Borges story called The Olive and the olive is in mathematics is a how do I say this it's a single point from which all other points in the universe can be seen without any kind of distortion and it can be comprehended without any kind of Confusion And so she's taken that principle on as as her name okay now the bottle man like I said he's a fit of a philosopher and at one point in the book he starts talking about the the age-old discussion of what is a whole and he's framed it in the light of the library return slot the little hole in the wall right what is a slot um it is what it is not it is defined by its absence from the wall it is a thing without any form it is an empty thing it is what it is not this is a kind of a snarky philosophical point that may or may not have any actual relevance in our real life but I'm not a philosopher so I don't know but this is something that philosophers actually discuss as you can see here um I don't remember where I pulled this up from you can read it on the screen but this is this is a real thing this is a real discussion this is foreign I don't know man you can you can read this if you want by the way I linked the Borge story The Olive in the description there's a PDF there that you can read it's not necessary for you to understand the book of form and emptiness um but it is interesting and it's a clever bit of intertextuality that um ozeki employs I just wanted to point out one really kind of neat thing is that he opens that story with a quote from Hamlet that says I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of Infinite Space which happens to be foreign which happens to be the quote that Ian McGowan uses to frame his book nutshell his re his modern retelling of Hamlet a book that I have recently reviewed on this channel so I just thought that was that was kind of neat I'm getting distracted again sorry okay so the Olive and the bottlemen are really good characters like I said before these these Side characters um feel like they've been snatched out of real life and again both the Olive and the bottlemen have their own substance abuse problems and these problems feel very real one of the details that I appreciated ozeki slipping into the book is that the olive while she struggles with her own substance abuse issues is trying to save the bottle man from his own drinking trying to save somebody else from drowning while she herself is drowning it is a really common phenom going on that you see among addicts I've seen it myself it just added a lot of very similar milititude very similar very similitude I can't say that word I could never say that word off the top of my head but you know what I'm trying to say it just added a lot of very similitude to these characters and I appreciated the effort that ozeki put in not to just paint somebody with substance abuse problems as just some background character trait but it was Central to who they are and it wasn't just neatly tied up at the end of the book these are real demons and they felt real on the page one last thing I want to say about the book of form and Emptiness is that this is a love letter to books and to libraries I don't think that many of us need a book that dabbles in magical realism to tell us that books are magic books teach us about the world we live in while they transport us to other worlds they teach us about ourselves while they put us in the heads of others I mean what's more magical than that in libraries bind tens of thousands of books together in the stacks just as a book binds its hundreds of pages together between its covers and if I can get a little more sentimental on you a library is a Gathering Place for the community it brings people together just like it brought Benny and The Olive and the bottlemen together in unlikely circumstances where books are vital artistic outlets for many of us the library is a vital community space for many of us as well and the fact that books and libraries exist at all in this world is magical to me anyway that's all I've got for this one a big thanks to Ruth ozeki for giving me a lot to think about this week as I return to my job at the public library uh kind of a neat piece of synchronicity there um almost like magic see you around

Channel: Gronskei Books

Views: 291

Keywords: Ruth Ozeki, book review, reading vlog, form and emptiness, tale for the time being, borges, schitzoaffective, hearing voices, mental health, marie kondo, tidying up

Id: 78S7_ddcMh0

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 04 2023