Daniel Voicu

I got this book from a small bookshop a while back, not knowing anything about the writer or the book. I picked it up because the title had a Buddhist ring to it, and when I read the description on the back cover I thought it would be an interesting read, because it was about the relationship between a kid, books, his family and the world. The name of Ruth Ozeki sounded familiar, and later I remembered from where: I encountered it in Tricycle Magazine and I also heard her speak on a podcast from Tricycle.

Mild spoilers ahead, I think.

I’ve been going through it for the last few weeks or so. I am not that slow of a reader, but I tend to read multiple books in parallel, with different subjects. And this is a book that made me realize that my attention span has become worse. Ruth Ozeki does this nice thing: she hides some beautiful details in parts of the book that normally I would try to skip. Because of that, I’ve been reading it slowly, waiting for the surprises.

A lot of those details are in the descriptions of places and things. You can see the mess growing inside the house of the Oh family over time. Their mental state reflects into the world around them, and probably vice versa.

Some are in the small scenes between Benny and his father, like the ones where they talk about space. I liked that his father tells him why he thinks people stopped going to the moon: there is no one there to subjugate and nothing to steal, and if there is no profit, there is no point. On earth people can still do this. It’s said in a light moment, on the couch, and that makes it stay with you more.

You can see how the characters cope with grief, and the push and pull between the mother and the child. There’s this general feeling of the mother trying to protect him while he is trying to distance himself from her, and then he regrets what he says. Or the moment with the fridge magnet poems that sound like broken haikus. He is trying to be more independent, he is making mistakes, he is dealing with everything, and the books and characters help him unfurl his personality.

There is also a part about what a story is, before it becomes words. It has such a Buddhist layer to it, and it’s presented in such a beautiful way that it almost has a bittersweet feeling.

And I think Ruth Ozeki is actually a character in the book, a character that watches over Benny when he’s in the library. At least based on the physical description. So we’re basically seeing the author writing the book inside the book, which also contains another book. It made me curious, I wanted to understand why she’s there. I want to understand why she added that detail, why she put herself in, and I want to see how that character appears through the rest of the book and what her role is.

I haven’t finished reading it yet, so I don’t know where all of this goes, but I am not in a hurry to finish this book.