Fires rage as the redwoods burn and in the deep ocean, a pilot whale carries her dead baby on her nose, while sea turtles weep briny tears onto nets of plastic.
At the sound of a footstep, a young girl freezes, and Andromeda sparkles in the firmament. The plundered moon and all its craters globes and stars and asteroids a jet black crow with a diamond tiara a flock of rubber duckies, spinning through the Pacific gyres. Pyramids of sulfur, rising yellow in the mist. The Book of Form and Emptiness offers an unflinching and in many respects magnificent tour of that dark side. And, oh, the visions we had!Ĭontainer ships glittering on a moonlit night off the coast of Alaska. Some of these sounds were so beautiful they made you laugh out loud and clap your hands with delight, and others were so sad they made tears run down your face. With your supernatural ears, you were able to perceive, with absolute clarity, the sinuous shapes and contours of the sounds that matter makes as it moves through space and time and mind. For the first time you could see the voices of the things you'd been hearing for so long, all that clamorous matter vying for your attention. The book seems a bit too long and not quite sure what it wants to be, but it was a fairly good read that addressed many important topics.“Do you remember our conversation? Do you remember the places we went and the things we saw? The bindery was our access, the point in space that contains all other points, and that night you were a boy unbound, a tiny astronaut, taking your first leap into an infinite and unknowable universe. The Aleph is also present at the library, along with a disabled, Slovakian poet. It is there that he first meets "the Aleph," aka Alice by the doctors. And perhaps this is the place to mention the library because Bennie spends a lot of time in the library - it is his safe haven.īennie also spends time in a mental institution. Bennie sometimes gets really mad at the book because of things it says about his mother. She arrives to the story because her book "falls" into Annabelle's shopping cart at the thrift store.īut the highlight of this book is that Bennie and Annabelle's story is told by a book - a book that is telling Bennie's story. Then there is the Buddist nun who wrote a book about decluttering, the success of which saved her monastry. Annabelle turns into a hoarder and Benny starts to hear what objects (animate and inanimate) around him are saying.
Neither Annabelle nor Benny deal well with the death. The primary characters are Annabelle and Benny Oh, mother and son, of Kenji Oh, a Japanese-Korean jazz musician who was killed when he was run over by a garbage truck after passing out (drunk and drugged) in the alley behind their home. I am not a fan of this author but read the book because it was on the 2022 longlist (now on the shortlist) for the Woman's Prize.
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