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"A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things, by the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time Being After the tragic death his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house-a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous. At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world, where "things happen." He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many. And he meets his very own Book-a talking thing-who narrates Benny's life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter. With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki-bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking"--… (meer)
Een vrij eenvoudig verhaalstramien wordt meer dan de moeite waard door de flarden magisch realisme en door de bekoorlijke schrijfstijl - doorspekt met korte flashbacks die het verhaal stofferen en boeiend maken - 490 bladzijden waar je traag en intens kan van genieten. Geen pageturner. ( )
Ik weet het, 2 sterren is erg mager en misschien zelfs onverdiend. Want dit boek is echt wel goed geschreven, met een heel inventief spel van dialoog tussen de vertellende stem (blijkbaar het boek zelf) en hoofdfiguur Benny Oh, een onzekere puber die de ‘stemmen van dingen’ hoort. Ozeki heeft er een interessante cocktail van gemaakt, met aandacht voor relevante maatschappelijke aspecten zowel aan de kant van Benny als van zijn moeder (voor die laatste kan je alleen maar sympathie voelen). En het is ook lekker vlot geschreven. Maar het modieuze ‘Zen’-sausje, via het selfhelp-boek Tidy Magic, en de magisch-realistische aspecten deed me afknappen. Ik vrees dat ik niet tot het doelpubliek hoor. ( )
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 [...]
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
(Pro captu lecoris) habent sua fata libelli. (According to the capabilities of the reader) books have their own destinies. -Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library."
Opdracht
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
For my dad, whose voice still guides me.
Eerste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
A book must start somewhere. One brave letter must volunteer to go first, laying itself on the line in act of faith, from which a word takes heart and follows, drawing a sentence into its wake.
Citaten
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Things are needy. They take up space. They want attention, and they will drive you mad if you let them.
Music or madness. It’s totally up to you.
Stories never start at the beginning, Benny. They differ from life in that regard. Life is lived from birth to death, from the beginning into an unknowable future. But stories are told in hindsight. Stories are life lived backward.
That’s what books are for, after all, to tell your stories, to hold them and keep them safe between our covers for as long as we’re able. We do our best to bring you pleasure and sustain your belief in the gravity of being human. We care about your feelings and believe in you completely.
Fantasies, being something that we books excel at. The real stories—the ones that happen—belong to you.
Dreams are like doors. They’re like portals to another reality, and once they’re open, you better watch out.
When you read these words on a page, what happens to them, when they become you?
I really want you to know that I’ve thought very seriously about what’s happened to me, so you won’t just write me off as a random lunatic who imagines he’s some kind of ambassador for the things of the world. It’s not like I think I was chosen. It’s not like I wanted to be the spokesperson for the fucking toaster oven, even if it thinks I am.
We were the ecclesiastical caste, the High Priests of the Made, and in the beginning you even worshipped us. As objects, books were sacred, and you built temples for us, and later, libraries in whose hushed and hallowed halls we resided as mirrors of your mind, keepers of your past, evidence of your boundless imaginations, and testimony to the infinitude of your dreams and desires. Why did you revere us so? Because you thought we had the power to save you from meaninglessness, from oblivion and even from death, and for a while, we books believed we could save you, too.
He ironed his sheets so he could have an untroubled sleep, and besides, sheets liked to be ironed, and so he liked ironing sheets. He didn’t ever iron things that didn’t want to be ironed, only things that liked to be flat, but it wasn’t just that. There was another reason, too. He liked to iron because the iron loved the ironing board, and the ironing board loved the iron, and they got lonely when they were apart. They were made for each other, and it felt good to give them a chance to be together....
A repository housing the bound testimony of mankind’s mortal fears and immortal yearnings ought to be a solid, reassuring sort of place—harmonious and reliably symmetrical, built in such a way as to make even the most disquieted patron feel safe and secure. But architects and city planners, concerned with ensuring their own immortality, have other ideas. They see the Library as a legacy project, and books as mere props, a motley assortment of mismatched objects that mar the clean lines of their design aesthetic. They are no friends to books.
Information like this had a life of its own, and once it entered her mind, she couldn’t unknow or forget it. She knew so much about what was happening in the world, even as she grew more isolated from it.
Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.
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. And, oh, the visions we had! Container ships glittering on a moonlit night off the coast of Alaska. Pyramids of sulfur, rising yellow in the mist. 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. At the sound of a footstep, a young girl freezes, and Andromeda sparkles in the firmament. 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 into nets of plastic.
“It is the nature of a teacup to be broken. That is why it is so beautiful now, and why I appreciate it when I can still drink from it.” He looked at it fondly, took a last sip, and then placed the empty cup carefully back on the tray. “When it is gone, it is gone.”
Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it’s every person’s task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.
American homes were big and generous, like the countryside and the people, too, with all their big, generous hopes and dreams. It was very beautiful, but there was a dark side to this hopefulness, which was apparent in the abandoned juicers, ab crunchers, outgrown clothes and broken toys that were crammed into garages, and closets, and under their beds. All that hope and remorse and disappointment. It was too much for the poor objects to bear.
There, they engage in their own form of conjoining, merging their DNA with her memory and experience, and bringing another of ourselves into being. Soon, she will wake, shake herself, chide herself for dozing off again and get back to work, to the arduous job of transcribing, word by word, a new book onto the page. Those books she’s read are the co-parents of the book she writes, and she will act as midwife to its birth. And then, when she’s finished and the book ventures out into the world, the readers take their turn, and here another kind of comingling occurs. Because the reader is not a passive receptacle for a book’s contents. Not at all. You are our collaborators, our conspirators, breathing new life into us. And because every reader is unique, each of you makes each of us mean differently, regardless of what’s written on our pages. Thus, one book, when read by different readers, becomes different books, becomes an ever-changing array of books that flows through human consciousness like a wave.
I guess with the Internet, they decided words don’t need to be bound anymore. Personally, I don’t agree. I think words prefer being committed to paper. They need boundaries. Without some discipline and constraint, they can just go and say anything they please. But I suspect I’m a bit old-fashioned.
Laatste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
A book must end somewhere, Benny- Shh, you whisper. Listen...
"A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things, by the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time Being After the tragic death his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house-a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous. At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world, where "things happen." He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many. And he meets his very own Book-a talking thing-who narrates Benny's life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter. With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki-bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking"--
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Google Books — Bezig met laden...
(4.12)
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