The title – taken from the Buddhist heart sutra – implies a more earnest book than is the case The Book of Form and Emptiness is a big, polyphonic, often comic, magical-realist collage of a novel that attempts to interrogate the most pressing issues of the age, from global heating and consumerism to mental illness, art and the nature of reality. The idea that literature is engaged in a constant dialogue with itself is a beloved trope of authors, and Ozeki’s novel aspires most obviously to kinship with Jorge Luis Borges (and, through him, Umberto Eco and Carlos Ruiz Zafón, whose fictions also employ the library as metaphor). You could even say we are all related, enjoying a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath human consciousness and knits the world of thought together.” This narrator is itself a book, and its job is to tell the story of 14-year-old Benny Oh and his mother, Annabelle, as they navigate their grief after the death of Benny’s father. “B ooks like each other,” observes the narrator of Ruth Ozeki’s fifth novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness.
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