The first impression that Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness makes is that at 560 pages, it looks about the right size for a novel that covers the landscape of grief and faith. But as you turn the pages, you see that it takes more time to reach the end. It demands your attention and patience in equal measure despite having a plot that’s just as thick as a bacon sandwich. Ozeki, though, for what it’s worth, expands it with her sheer power by adding half-a-dozen layers.
The characters don’t just converse with each other; they sometimes think for each other as well. But, mind you, it’s not in a playful manner. This is a serious work of fiction, where the protagonists, Benny and his mother Annabelle, try to break the walls that crop up between them after the death of the former’s father and the latter’s husband, Kenji. Death, especially that of our loved ones, brings us to the brink of a crisis. To make matters worse, Kenji loses his life in a freak accident.
The thing with an accident is that it doesn’t come with a warning bell attached to it. Benny is a teenager who has to deal with the irreparable vacuum in his heart, and Annabelle, all of a sudden, has to find a way to swim through her worries in order to take care of the remainder of her family. It’s not an impossible task, but for people whose clocks have stopped, it can be quite a tall hurdle to jump over.
Her job––Annabelle is a news tracker in a world preceding the digital revolution—leads her to hoard things such as newspapers, CDs, magazines, and even items that may not be of any materialistic value. Benny, on whose thought process Ozeki mostly zeroes in, begins to hear voices from the objects around him.
Earlier this year, The Book of Form and Emptiness won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and it’s not difficult to guess why. It dives deep into the larger practical (and philosophical) steps that help a person to move on––both physically and spiritually.
The best part about the book, however, is the all-knowing writer, named Slavoj, whom Benny befriends at a library. He acts as a mentor to the kid and shows him how one can find poetry, even in garbage. Eccentric and philosophical, Slavoj’s character is bound to capture the reader’s attention as he rises above being just a comic distraction in the story and drops gems about the world and the fuel on which it runs.
Perhaps that fuel is love. Benny falls in love with Alice, and Alice, in turn, shows him how important it is to heal. Then, of course, there’s the love that Annabelle showers upon Benny; even when she doesn’t have everything under control, she goes out of her way to make her son happy, and although her attempts seem meretricious to an extent, it should be noted that she’s also walking on eggshells around Benny. Love, in all its avatars, is what the novel ultimately holds a mirror too.
Ozeki enriches the structure of the book by bringing in literary luminaries such as Walter Benjamin and Jorge Luis Borges, through the doors of extended cameo appearances, and as though the fundamental nature of literature and life itself is to be hopeful, she ties up the corners of faith and grief––one is reverently dependent on the other. “God is a story,” says Slavoj. What is any book if not a story?