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‘A polyphonic, often comic, magical-realist collage of a novel’: Ruth Ozeki
‘A polyphonic, often comic, magical-realist collage of a novel’: Ruth Ozeki. Photograph: Danielle Tait
‘A polyphonic, often comic, magical-realist collage of a novel’: Ruth Ozeki. Photograph: Danielle Tait

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki review – the story of Oh

This article is more than 2 years old

Addressing everything from global heating to mental illness, the A Tale for the Time Being author’s latest is big, bold – and narrated by a book

“Books like each other,” observes the narrator of Ruth Ozeki’s fifth novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness. “We understand each other. You could even say we are all related, enjoying a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath human consciousness and knits the world of thought together.” This narrator is itself a book, and its job is to tell the story of 14-year-old Benny Oh and his mother, Annabelle, as they navigate their grief after the death of Benny’s father.

The idea that literature is engaged in a constant dialogue with itself is a beloved trope of authors, and Ozeki’s novel aspires most obviously to kinship with Jorge Luis Borges (and, through him, Umberto Eco and Carlos Ruiz Zafón, whose fictions also employ the library as metaphor). The title – taken from the Buddhist heart sutra – implies a more earnest book than is the case; The Book of Form and Emptiness is a big, polyphonic, often comic, magical-realist collage of a novel that attempts to interrogate the most pressing issues of the age, from global heating and consumerism to mental illness, art and the nature of reality. This is something of an ambitious goal for one book, even a whimsical talking one, and it doesn’t always succeed, but at its heart is a compelling story of human connection and the redemptive power of art.

After his father, Kenji, is killed by a truck, Benny begins hearing voices and realises they are coming from the household objects he had previously supposed inanimate. This soon becomes overwhelming, not least because his mother’s response to bereavement is to develop a problem with hoarding. When a malicious pair of scissors tells Benny to stab his teacher and he turns the blade instead on himself, he is sent to a psychiatric unit where he meets a young artist who calls herself the Aleph. She directs him to the old public library, where, in the company of a homeless Slovenian poet called the B-man, Benny embarks on his hero’s journey to reclaim his own story.

The novel’s greatest flaw is that, like Annabelle’s house, there’s simply too much in there. Ozeki, whose last novel, A Tale for the Time Being, was shortlisted for the Booker prize, writes with great compassion and insight about love and loss; the novel is at its finest when she concentrates on the relationship between Annabelle and Benny. The framing device is less engaging; the “Book” has a tendency towards the sententious.

For all that, Ozeki is a talented storyteller; she is interested in the power (and limitations) of the written word to exert positive influence on the world at a time when we most need it.

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki is published by Canongate (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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