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. 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. 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). 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. Fires rage as the redwoods burn and in the deep ocean, a pilot whale carries her dead baby on her nose, while sea turtles weep briny tears onto nets of plastic.“B ooks like each other,” observes the narrator of Ruth Ozeki’s fifth novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness. At the sound of a footstep, a young girl freezes, and Andromeda sparkles in the firmament. The plundered moon and all its craters globes and stars and asteroids a jet black crow with a diamond tiara a flock of rubber duckies, spinning through the Pacific gyres. Pyramids of sulfur, rising yellow in the mist. And, oh, the visions we had!Ĭontainer ships glittering on a moonlit night off the coast of Alaska. Some of these sounds were so beautiful they made you laugh out loud and clap your hands with delight, and others were so sad they made tears run down your face. With your supernatural ears, you were able to perceive, with absolute clarity, the sinuous shapes and contours of the sounds that matter makes as it moves through space and time and mind. For the first time you could see the voices of the things you'd been hearing for so long, all that clamorous matter vying for your attention.

“Do you remember our conversation? Do you remember the places we went and the things we saw? The bindery was our access, the point in space that contains all other points, and that night you were a boy unbound, a tiny astronaut, taking your first leap into an infinite and unknowable universe.

The book form of emptiness