BOOKS


Author Interview Ruth Ozeki


Ruth Ozeki‘s latest novel is an inventive coming- of-age tale about grief and loss, and mental health, and our obsession with acquiring stuff


Alice O’Keeffe @aliceokbooks ‘‘T


he notion of ‘a book’ is just a convenient fiction which we books go along with because it serves the needs of the bean counters in publishing, not to mention the ego of the writers. But the realit is far more complex.” So explains “the Book”, one of the narrators of Ruth Ozeki’s fourth novel The Book of Form and Emptiness. It is her first novel since the glorious, Booker-shortlisted A Tale for the Time Being, which was “saturated with love, ideas and compassion” according to the Sunday Times. The Book of Form and Emptiness is just as compassionate and filled with ideas: an original, inventive coming-of-age tale about grief and loss, and mental health, and our modern, all-consuming, obsession with acquiring stuff. It is also a story about the vital relationship between a boy and his very own Book. At the beginning of The Book of Form and Emptiness we meet 14-year-old Benny Oh who, aſter the sudden death of his beloved jazz musician father, begins to hear voices. First the voice of his dad, and later voices which he realises are emanating from the inanimate objects in his house: a Christmas ornament, a piece of mouldy cheese. His widowed mother Annabelle finds comfort in shopping and struggles with a hoarding problem. As the voices grow louder at home and at school, life becomes increasingly tricky for Benny. Over a very crackly phone line from Northampton, Massachusets, Ozeki explains that her novels take shape when various ideas begin to “constellate”, and then the


30 9th July 2021


Photography: Danielle Tait


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