Ruth Ozeki's "The Book of Form and Emptiness"
Ruth Ozeki is a writer, filmmaker, Zen Buddhist priest, and author of three novels, My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being, which was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize. Her nonfiction work includes a memoir, The Face: A Time Code, and the documentary film, Halving the Bones.
Ruth joins Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher to talk about her latest novel, THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS. The novel opens with the death of Kenji, an itinerant jazz musician who is run over by a chicken truck after he falls down in the street late at night and is too intoxicated to pick himself back up. The story follows Kenji's wife Annabelle and son Benny as they both cope, in their own ways, with their terrible loss. Annabelle becomes a hoarder, stacking various objects in their home as a kind of insurance against loss. Benny starts to hear those objects, and many others, talking to him, eventually landing him in a psych ward. As the novel moves forward, Benny meets an alluring, rebellious girl, Aleph, and Slajov the Bottleman, a wheelchair-bound drunk whose ravings about poetry, capitalism and philosophy gin up, in part, the novel's deep investment in questions about consumption, objects, and grief.
Also, Tom McCarthy, author of The Making of Incarnation, retuens to recommend Three by Ann Quin.