What Does the Book Say?
Review of The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki (USA: Viking, 2021)
By Rebekah Lim
Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness begins with an ending. Specifically, the end of Kenji Oh’s life and the relationships he shared with his wife Annabelle and son Benjamin, addressed as Benny in the novel. It is abrupt and uncalled for, a loss that happens all too soon. To rub salt into the wound, Kenji dies through almost laughable circumstances; after he passes out from getting high, a truck carrying live chickens runs over him in a back alley.
What is left in the wake of his beloved father’s death is Benny’s alienation from the world he used to know. His mind becomes an enigmatic maze in which readers lose themselves and often find themselves asking: who is speaking now? In Benny’s labyrinthine grief, books begin to speak to him, literally. His condition is diagnosed variously as “schizoaffective,” “selective mutism,” and “psychogenic,” but such therapeutic lingo fails to convey the avid refuge that Benny finds in books, or the pangs of loss when he chances upon old vinyl records that remind him of his father.
In reaction, Annabelle descends into overprotectiveness and cognitive dissonance as she loses her grip on reality. In addition to her own grief, she has to make sense of her son’s avoidant behaviour, social isolation, and emotional detachment from her. Her saving grace? She hoards newspapers, in fact, anything Kenji- or Benny-esque she can lay her hands on that bears any semblance of her more joyful past. That, and her self-help book Tidy Magic, which conveniently appears whenever she becomes overwhelmed by reality. Lonely and resentful, she too finds a friend in a book.
Kenji’s absence is resounding as Benny and Annabelle are forced to continue their lives without him. Since readers know of him only from the stories he has left behind, he comes alive in flashbacks, anguished memories, and fleeting moments instead. One ghostly instance occurs when Annabelle realises the magnets on her fridge have been rearranged by someone:
Could the dead Kenji have done it? Like Annabelle, the reader would like to believe so. “[T]he linguistic confusion seemed to offer even more proof that [he] authorised it. His English was never great… and sometimes his words were even more beautiful for all their mistakes.” We see Kenji through Annabelle’s eyes: endearing and quirky at times. These little moments shed light on who he was, and how refrigerator magnets may speak more of him than any narration ever can.
Annabelle and Benny are not the only ones struggling with loss, Books too are equally troubled with having lost their place as “the ecclesiastical caste, the High Priests of the Made.” They have to fight to remain seen, heard and revered as vessels of stories and truth. The overarching ‘Book’ has something to say about grief too. Alongside other books that have lost their power over humans, it expresses its resentment powerfully:
“Our trust in you is deteriorating… This is your fault. Your unquenchable desire, the dire that sparked us into being, is our unmaking… No sooner are we made than we are discarded, left to revert into unmade, disincarnate stuff. You turn us into trash, so how can we trust you?”
Although the books in Ozeki’s novel are certainly not omnipotent, their omniscient presence nonetheless hints at how books have a say in the stories that we craft and claim as our own. As described by the Book, “stories are told in hindsight. Stories of life are lived backward.” The simple act of recalling our stories shows how books have seen more of us than we ourselves ever can. Moreover, they have the grand task of preserving the stories of people across the ages, not just the ones we see here and now. However, books themselves need to be kept in a safe space lest they be swept away by time. In other words, like us, they need love.
Ozeki’s novel posits that love shows up in many ways, places, and forms. From Kenji’s would-have-been memory quilt, to the birds protecting Annabelle after her stumble, to Benny’s haven in the library. This unbounded love tackles grief head-on without reservation, proving that the voices in Benny’s head or the gaping wound in Annabelle’s chest can somehow be healed by the power of words, stories, and books. Readers and books share a symbiotic relationship, in which “each [human] makes each [book] mean differently, regardless of what’s written on our pages… one book, when read by different readers… becomes an ever-changing array of books that flows through human consciousness like a wave.” For that matter, Chapter 4 of Tidy Magic is titled “We Are All Connected.” As books rightly describe this intimate relationship, “[w]e do our best to bring you pleasure and sustain your belief in the gravity of being human… we exist because you can.” It is through and in words and stories that true life is conceived, both for Ozeki’s characters as well as the readers of their stories.
As such, the relationship between the Book and Benny, in the metanarrative, is a beautiful thing. This unconventional way of storytelling involves both the listener and speaker in dialogue, thereby questioning who truly has agency in the narrative. Although Benny claims his lived experience as his own, the Book begs to differ. When Benny complains to the Book:
So it doesn’t make me feel any better to hear you clean up the story when you tell it and make me sound like the poor little crazy victim boy… Nobody wants to read about a boy who thinks shitty thoughts like that about his mom…
THE BOOK
Okay, but just so you know, Benny, people do want to read about boys who think shitty thoughts about their mothers… But if you’re not comfortable with that, let’s move on.”
Appearing before the beginning of several segments, Benny and the Book’s conversation acts as a liminal space in which words of caution, comfort, and affection can be exchanged. Drawn into these conversations, the reader experiences another layer of intimacy.
THE BOOK
The dark side has its allures, Benny, but most people don’t want to go there… This is the territory that books know well, and it’s our job not to turn away from it, whether we like it or not… So what’s a book to do? Spin the moon, and see where we land, and hope you can live with the outcome.
Although the novel explains that the voices of the book are a part of Benny’s psychiatric condition, Benny has a deeper, and more courageous, explanation for these voices:
“Actually, I don’t know if it was me who learned to tune into the voices, or if the things of the world learned to express themselves in a way that I could hear… Probably we trained each other… Everyone’s got an opinion. Everyone’s got a story to tell.”
His empathetic view, even of the inanimate voices in his mind, truly demonstrates how complex and profound Benny’s understanding of storytelling is. Although this realization torments him at times, it also sheds light on how meta-narration occurs here. He bears the responsibility of being “the spokesperson for the fucking toaster oven,” the coffee beans, the fluorescent lights, and all other silenced objects. As trivial as it may seem, the Made and Unmade all present stories waiting to be shared with the world.
Rebekah Lim is a free-spirited soul wandering this earth in search of the next best thing that brings meaning to her lived experience. Apart from hiking and spotting squirrels, she enjoys an eclectic range of literature. Rebekah has a bookshelf dedicated to Haruki Murakami, Mitch Albom, Samuel Beckett, and C.S. Lewis.
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