the book of form and emptiness goodreads

We rely on you to emmbody us, and we exist because you can. “Oh, sure, you can say that acts of literature are a kind of impassioned boundary crossing, tooo, but literary acts are inherently disembodied, more notional and distributed. The evening before Kenji left for the gig, Annabelle and Kenji had a major argument. Loss and grief were new emotions that Benny had to process but his mother, who cherished her husband was anything but devastated. On the way home following a gig, drunk and high, Kenji was run over by a chicken delivery truck, resulting in his instant death. His young life would be turned topsy turvy following the untimely demise of his father. He still manages to perform academically and he has friends. When the story commenced, Benny was already twelve-years-old, and a regular student who was shorter than the average. The focus of the story, after all, was Benny. A couple of months after the unfortunate September 11, attacks, Benny was born.īut then, as Benny would protest, that was too much information. What Joe did not expect was Kenji’s intervention. As Annabelle’s shaky vocals resonated, it was clear that Joe only wanted to humiliate her. She was not provided the option to choose what song she wanted to sing and before she knew it, Mein Liebling started to play. Annabelle, on the other hand, was forced by her date, Joe, to sing in front of the audience. Kenji was on a tourist visa from Tokyo, visiting the city to check out the jazz scene. Annabelle, who escaped from her hometown, was studying to be a librarian when she met Kenji Oh, a half-Korean, half-Japanese clarinetist. He was the only son of Kenji Oh and Annabelle Lange, whose lives intertwined one fateful evening at a downtown jazz club in the fall of 2000. Ozeki transports the readers to the story of Benjamin Oh, fondly referred to as Benny.

Thus commenced Ruth Ozeki’s fourth novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness. A book must start somewhere, and this one starts here.” From there, a paragraph amasses, and soon a page, and the book is on its way, finding a voice, calling itself into being. One brave letter must volunteer to go first, laying itself on the line in an act of faith, from which a word takes heart and follows, drawing a sentence into its wake.

The book of form and emptiness goodreads