Ruth Ozeki

If you let it—if you listen—a book could change your life.

The Book of Form and Emptiness

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.

Magdalena

"what's important is not finishing a task but rather just doing it, completely. Doing connects me to this moment, this weed, this patch of moss. This moment is my real life. I am not seperate from this moment, or from the floorboards, or the trees, or the monks, or the weeds. And then the weeds grow back, and that's okay too.

From the get-go I was already very fond of the premise of this book because it very much seemed similar with my experience after losing my mom when I was eleven. My dad developed a hoarding problem and other mental health issues in his life started creeping back in that I'm sure my mom helped ease and regulate by herself since we were just kids back then. My sister recommended this to me because she knew I'd relate to it the same way she does but felt that she was not yet ready to deal with her own grief so she asked if I wanted to read her book first.

After about a month, I finally did! This review and my thoughts regarding this book is purely personal and since I don't want to write any spoilers I'll just leave it as is. Reading books about grief and loss makes me feel less alone and this book led to many conversations with my sister about our own experience in the family. I'm glad I have my sisters with me to share my sorrow with. It keeps me sane. This isn't a perfect book, and at times, it did drag on a lot. But doesn't our own silly little brains do that as well? It felt intentional!

adriftzoey

From the get-go I was already very fond of the premise of this book because it very much seemed similar with my experience after losing my mom when I was eleven. My dad developed a hoarding problem and other mental health issues in his life started creeping back in that I'm sure my mom helped ease and regulate by herself since we were just kids back then. My sister recommended this to me because she knew I'd relate to it the same way she does but felt that she was not yet ready to deal with her own grief so she asked if I wanted to read her book first.

After about a month, I finally did! This review and my thoughts regarding this book is purely personal and since I don't want to write any spoilers I'll just leave it as is. Reading books about grief and loss makes me feel less alone and this book led to many conversations with my sister about our own experience in the family. I'm glad I have my sisters with me to share my sorrow with. It keeps me sane. This isn't a perfect book, and at times, it did drag on a lot. But doesn't our own silly little brains do that as well? It felt intentional!

Really wanted to love this book but it became a pain to finish

Valerie Yang

What does your book says about your life?

Nate

Ryan Mateyk

Hey queen! Girl, you have done it again. Constantly raising the bar for all of us and doing it flawlessly.

maitha mana

Shortly after Benny's father dies tragically, him and his mother spiral out of control. Benny starts to hear voices of objects around him, meets imaginary friends, and his mother develops a hoarding obsession. A pleasant read full of tribulations :)

Shohini Gupta

+ Extremely good concept in terms of how characters interact / conceptual interaction between Buddhist philosophy and schizophrenia 

+ Makes you feel a lot of things for the characters consistentlh (mostly despondent) as it unfolds 

+ takes mental health patients seriously 

- too long; many places where it could’ve moved faster

- exposition on buddist and Marxist philosophies are heavy handed (characters rant - I personally dislike that as a device rather than showing it via their actions) 

i loved a tale for the time being but this one was just a bit too cliche which surprised me because the synopsis made it sound really interesting and unique. 

julia

I enjoyed the journey but not my favorite Ozeki

3.5
It was kind of a mess, but an enjoyable one!

I picked this book up with so much hope and now finish it with big disappointment.

It was to be expected, I knew I wasn't liking the book when I hit the middle of it. Where to even begin?

I hated the fact that the Slovenian character's dialogue was written in a way to mimick the accent.

This thing between Benny and "the Aleph", turn around the ages and it is problematic for everyone, but since the girl is the older one, is Ok? The girl is older, troubled and a drug addict, hanging out with a 14 year old who is still grieving his father's death.

I enjoyed the talk about books, everyone who loves them can enjoy that part, but the "Marie Kondo" plot line is still kind of in the middle for little pay-out in my opinion.

Isabela Ospina

I picked this book up with so much hope and now finish it with big disappointment.

It was to be expected, I knew I wasn't liking the book when I hit the middle of it. Where to even begin?
I hated the fact that the Slovenian character's dialogue was written in a way to mimick the accent.

This thing between Benny and "the Aleph", turn around the ages and it is problematic for everyone, but since the girl is the older one, is Ok? The girl is older, troubled and a drug addict, hanging out with a 14 year old who is still grieving his father's death.

I enjoyed the talk about books, everyone who loves them can enjoy that part, but the "Marie Kondo" plot line is still kind of in the middle for little pay-out in my opinion.

Kathy Luo

Just not my cup of tea, which is unfortunate because I really did want to like it. Not sure how a book can be like nothing I've ever read yet astoundingly cliché at the same time.

Main issue was that it was too long for what little actually happens. Characters stay flat for almost the entirety of 500+ pages--the two default reactions are "get mad" (Benny) and "get sad" (Benny's mom). It's a shame these emotions weren't explored with more complexity because there could've been so much development with the layers of conflict going on--parent-child, interracial, mental health, etc. Instead we only get the surface of each before we are fed some "live, laugh, love" line and move on to the next inconsequential event. (Not even going to get into how little I cared about the love interest, who is essentially just an edgier cousin of the manic pixie dream girl.)

Beautiful writing could've made up for this, but the language is also very, very average. That can work, but not for a book that is so intent on exemplifying art and beauty. The rare treads into lyricism feel forced, and the dialogue often came off like an adult trying to be hip like the kiddos these days. I actually had to check the genre to make sure I wasn't reading a book geared towards younger readers.

Lastly, I found the second person narration from the Book to be unnecessary, and at its worst, legitimately cringey. I was skimming these chapters by the time I was halfway through because I couldn't bear another TED Talk about how much books want to help us find our "voices," if only we would give them the chance--and this is speaking as someone who in fact *does* love books and considers herself pretty sentimental. 

TLDR; this book seemed to want me to feel something, but at least in my case, it failed by trying too hard in all the wrong places and too little where it actually needed to.

Karis Ryu

this was good and for 50% of it i could see what oseki was trying to do. but, sometimes it just was too long and took WAY too long to get to certain points. the plot got very repetitive and the book talking was a bit too meta for me. glad I read it, but unsure why the Waterstones employee rated it SO highly. 

Kitty Carter 

Anyaconda

** spoiler alert **
           I'm a bit disappointed. Tale of a Time Being is one of my favorite books. This one was too long and it felt a bit icky on how it dealt with homeless people. The end wasn't really well resolved in my opinion and it felt a bit too much like a miracle-healing for both Benny and Annabelle instead of perseverance, learning to cope and healing. The progress and development was too slow for my liking.
My favorite character was definitely the marble: weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!

I'll still try the author's backlist and new books, but this was a bit of a dud.

The Book of Form and Emptiness focuses on Benny Oh and his mother, Annabelle, dealing with their loss of Kenji, their father, and husband in their own ways. For Annabelle, this creates a hoarding problem, and for Benny, he hears voices (which is only accentuated by his mother's hoarding).

This is such a unique and powerful story about grief, resilience, creativity, mental health, and the psychological differences the loss of a loved one can cause. The contrast between Benny and Annabelle and how they adapt to their new family dynamic is heartfelt and compelling.

The audiobook for this is fantastic! Kerry Shale really captivates you while you listen, with little intonations and characterisations that make Benny and Annabelle come alive and really highlight the differences during their grief. There are parts of this story that felt a little stretched out and long, and I could see myself struggling to get into it and finish it, but thanks to the wonderful narration I felt compelled to continue listening and found the whole experience more enjoyable.

Victoria Justice

The Book of Form and Emptiness focuses on Benny Oh and his mother, Annabelle, dealing with their loss of Kenji, their father, and husband in their own ways. For Annabelle, this creates a hoarding problem, and for Benny, he hears voices (which is only accentuated by his mother's hoarding).

This is such a unique and powerful story about grief, resilience, creativity, mental health, and the psychological differences the loss of a loved one can cause. The contrast between Benny and Annabelle and how they adapt to their new family dynamic is heartfelt and compelling.

The audiobook for this is fantastic! Kerry Shale really captivates you while you listen, with little intonations and characterisations that make Benny and Annabelle come alive and really highlight the differences during their grief. There are parts of this story that felt a little stretched out and long, and I could see myself struggling to get into it and finish it, but thanks to the wonderful narration I felt compelled to continue listening and found the whole experience more enjoyable.



Jessica Geddis 

** spoiler alert **
           Honestly, wasn’t a huge fan of the book to begin with, but looking back now I realise that it makes sense. The characters are written beautifully, first of all. I suppose I didn’t quite see the depth at the start. Annabelle is probably my favourite - a flawed yet truly innocent character at heart. I didn’t care much for Benny, believe it or not, until the end. I think it was more due to the fact I didn’t like him as a person, and that I disagreed with a lot of things he thought and did. Despite this, the philosophy included was interesting, or at least to me. The Alpeh’s rants, Aikon, B-man… they all seemed to open up a different perspective of something seemingly simple. They all held truth and sense, though. This book also did very well with making the reader question the reality of things, ranging from The Aleph to Slavoj, it made you wonder if everything that happened was a product of some sort of drugged haze or Benny’s tangled mind. And still after I’ve finished, I wonder whether or not the voices were actually real (in a magic sense), or if they were due to Benny’s trauma from his father’s death.

Some of the relationships were quite… questionable, which is mostly the reason why I gave this book 4 stars instead of 5. I don’t like the relationship between The Aleph and Benny. It edged too far into fantasy and idolatry rather than true love. That being said, I honestly don’t think Benny is in love with the Aleph. At least, not in the traditional sense. I think he loved the idea of her, instead. It was also quite uncomfortable reading the kiss scenes, the first being Benny almost forcing himself upon Aleph and the second just being weird, considering a scene before she stated Benny was too young for him. At one point, I started to question the character’s involvement with Benny: why were they there? It felt like Slavoj and The Aleph were almost manipulating Benny, with the notes in the PEDIATRY (psych ward), and the forced drinking. I think it was only truly confirmed for me Annabelle met the two and had a positive reaction.

Regarding the reading, I managed to read it pretty smoothly, though I will admit I skipped a lot. The book could’ve been quartered if all of the unnecessary information and descriptions were taken out of it. Sure, write nice descriptions about the library, but don’t make it two pages long. Moreover, I feel that the book told a lot more than it actually showed, which is understandable seeing as it’s from a sentient book’s POV, but still. After a while, you kind of disconnect to the story and find that you don’t really care about what’s happening in the scenes. Near the end, I just began to get sick of the lengthy-ness of it and skimmed through A LOT when reading. I just wanted to see a straight, to the point, conclusion. And honestly? I didn’t get that. I believe it’s up to interpretation, and in essence it was a happy ending with everyone happy, but what happened to the book? Did it disappear now that Benny was happy? Did it disappear because of Benny’s death? Maybe I’m looking to much into the second part, but nonetheless I feel like I still have a few questions.

Stephanie Highfield 

Just wonderful. A little bit Murakami, a little bit Jasper fforde (what is a book? What is real?). This is one I will be thinking about for awhile.

Katie Chua

like a tale for the time being, i felt the ending was rushed, but maybe like a tale for the time being, i might like it more with a re-read and time passing. apart from that, ozeki crafted a compelling and compassionate story interlaced with a myriad of topics (zen buddhism, mental health, possessing/consumerism, grief and loss, crows, reading/book studies, jazz, and so much more). she's got a lot of ideas, and i find her a fascinating author, for she always tries something new and interesting with her work.

“Heart-breaking and heart-healing—The Book of Form and Emptiness is a triumph.” —Matt Haig, New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library A brilliantly inventive novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things One year after the death of his beloved musician father, thirteen-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. 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.

A Novel

Fraser Simons

Fundamentally, this book is interested in two things (imo): Agency, and how we construct our reality. It does this in several ways. On the surface, this is a story about Benny Oh and his mother, Annabel. We go from love story printed in memory, viewing Annabel and her husband’s courtship, right on to the death of the husband and Benny having mental health issues and a struggling Annabel doing absolutely everything she can to provide for him, make and hold a home, mourn her husband, and try to divine who she is amongst these challenges and her rejiggering of identity. 

But it’s also a story about stories. Who gets to construct them and what the nature of a story actually is. In doing so, it begs the age old question: What is reality? 

Benny hears objects and descends into spirals of mania depending on what they objects tell him, but also how people react to him. One voice warns him of danger, another seems to be his self loathing given voice, and another an internal, ostensibly, inner poet. 

And then there is the book, which in a kind of post-modern step, is the “thing” narrating Benny’s life and story, and the thing we consume. It breaks the fourth wall at times, given separate chapters entirely, and will expound of the nature of what it is we are consuming—or else simply function as storycraft itself, dropping exposition or foreshadowing or quipping about the genre or trope happening.

This, initially, feels like a spinning wheel but does come together, I felt. Mostly because I like what it is examining, though it centres the trials and tribulations predominant Benny goes through. What I liked the most about this was the the vector of discussing mental health. We don’t really know, in the end, how much surrealism is in here because we are actively looking at what reality even is. The mental health professionals interacting with Benny assume everything he says is not valid because he does speak to objects sometimes. But not everything he converses with is. For instance, he falls in love (maybe) with an older girl whose artist name is The Aleph, but is both the embodiment and a simulacrum of the story by Borges of the same name. Yet because he calls her by that name, people assume she is not real. 

And in some ways she isn’t, right? After all, we, ourselves are constructs of understanding through the vector of telling ourselves the story of… ourselves. So we need input from other people in other to see ourselves and adjust our story to be something approaching accurate to other people. But what happens when the people who have agency over aspects of your life—who have the authority to put you in a mental ward, kick you out of your house, or otherwise assert a kind of dominance over you when you’re vulnerable—give you information as they see it, benefiting them. The story of capitalism and the story of The American Dream, which you do not fit into? 

Our society likes to think of stories as entertainment; a product of capitalistic anti-intellectualism and the inability to really ascertain “value” in art. And yet this book… within the book, narrating this, tells us that stories are the primary forces of constructing identity and our social reality. That a book, or narrative, story, etc. is maybe the primary animal on earth; the apex predator that colonizes our minds and propagates itself within us, disseminates itself using us as a vector. 

Or, at least, that’s what I heard? What did you hear?

(A small edit here: if you consume the audiobook, while the narrator is quite good he also speaks in dialect and changes cadence for everyone—which is good, overall—but I hate it when narrator do dialect, especially for other ethnicities, such as Asian, which this person does. And also makes Annabel sound really sort of airy and dopey and lispy and overly feminine, so I almost gave this 4 stars, actually. Something to consider).

Mira McMahon

Hmm. I love Ozeki’s writing but there were some scenes that felt gratuitous. I don’t think we needed THAT many play by plays of Annabelle’s day. BUT I did like seeing the mother son relationship and both sides of their story together. Theres some really clever commentary built into the story about books and other Made things. Will note that the Aleph was a bit too manic pixie dream girl for my taste. Probably closer to a 3.5. May come back to change to 4 stars eventually.

One year after the death of his beloved musician father, thirteen-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 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, he falls in love with a mesmerising 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. The Book of Form and Emptiness blends unforgettable characters, riveting plot and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz to climate change to our attachment to material possessions. This is classic Ruth Ozeki – bold, humane and heartbreaking.

Ramani P

This book is a pleasure to read and it made me think of grief, relationships and consumerism in a whole new light. I highly recommend it. 

Anika | @chaptersofmay

A complex, emotionally charged, and truly enrapturing novel. This is the kind of fiction that requires complete focus and commitment, but it’s so worth getting lost in. 

After the death of Kenji Oh, his son, Benny, and widow, Annabelle, struggle to cope with the loss. While Annabelle battles depression and begins to hoard everything she can find, Benny starts to hear voices from the items piling up in his home. But there’s a third character, The Book, a narrator which Benny interacts with throughout each chapter. I loved this sense of awareness from both The Book and Benny, despite how confusing it can be at first. 

Ozeki’s refreshing and inventive narrative is backed by her lively but realistic writing. She portrays grief and trauma in different ways through Benny and Annabelle, but with such wonderful and elevating prose. This unique method of storytelling allows the author to explore mental health, philosophy, loss, and motherhood, while the plot continues to lure in its reader.   

The relationship between Benny and Annabelle is the heart of this book but there are also many times where The Book of Form and Emptiness feels like an ode to the solace of art, books and reading. Benny escapes to the library for calm and comfort in the same way a reader will escape to books for entertainment and insight. I didn’t expect this compassionate layer to this book, but it’s impactful and a delight to read. 

With a touch of magical realism, a plot inspired by philosophy, and a beautifully crafted characters, The Book of Form and Emptiness is a perplexing yet gratifying addition to contemporary fiction. 


The Book of Form and Emptiness

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