![]() ![]() The Book connects Annabelle’s hoarding to the looming ecological catastrophe slowly being triggered by human beings’ carelessness and waste the voices Benny hears, it suggests, are calls to recognize our kinship with the other beings on our planet. ![]() ![]() “You do your job, and I’ll do mine,” Benny tells the Book, and their interaction drives the story. There he meets a girl called The Aleph, whose enigmatic notes lead him post-hospital to the local library and a quest for meaning directed by The Aleph and a homeless hobo who was “a super famous poet back in Slovenia.” As she did in A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Ozeki counterpoints faultless contemporary teenspeak with an adult third-person voice-in this case, intriguingly, the voice of Benny’s Book. Meanwhile, the voices Benny hears in everything from coffee cups to windowpanes become so insistent that he unwisely reveals his unwelcome ability at school and winds up in a pediatric psychiatry ward. A boy who hears objects talking and his mother, who can’t stop hoarding things, work out their destinies in a meditative tribute to books, libraries, and Zen wisdom.Įverything starts going awry for Benny Oh the year he turns 12, “the same year his father died and his mother started putting on weight.” It’s not just pounds that Annabelle adds she obsessively accumulates things-kitchenware, snow globes, it doesn’t really matter what-to fill the void left by her husband’s death. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |