

Clica una miniatura per anar a Google Books.
S'està carregant… A Tale for the Time Beingde Ruth Ozeki
![]()
Booker Prize (20) » 50 més Books Read in 2015 (82) Five star books (70) Favourite Books (383) Books Read in 2017 (169) Books Read in 2016 (460) Top Five Books of 2020 (321) Top Five Books of 2015 (527) Books Set in Canada (27) Asia (30) Overdue Podcast (195) KayStJ's to-read list (190) Books Set on Islands (38) magic realism novels (43) First Novels (105) Contemporary Fiction (58) Female Author (922) Female Protagonist (748) Books Set in Canada (17) SantaThing 2014 Gifts (104) To Read (130) SFFCat 2015 (24) Buddhism (37) infjsarah's wishlist (303) Protagonists - Women (28) Women Writers (14) Canada (22)
Borrowed this from a friend back in March - it was an interesting read overall, but at times felt like a tourist's version of experiencing Japan. Half of the book is about Nao, who calls herself the "time being", a teenage girl who grew up in America, down on her luck in Japan and having to make money in the seedier parts of Akihabara - and the other half is about Ruth, a very literal author insert. Those parts felt like Ozeki wanted to write a memoir about her time living in British Columbia, but wasn't sure how to do it without fictionalizing it. That kind of thing doesn't always work, but I went with it, and I found it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction at times. Through the conceit that Ruth finds Nao's diary washed up ashore and that the book is her reading them along with us, the story of both unfolds gradually. Perhaps too slowly for my liking. One annoying aspect was that Nao's chapters were written in her voice so much that they are liberally peppered with Japanese words, with footnotes to translate them into English (as if Ruth is presenting the words as-is and translating them for us) - very little was unfamiliar to me of course, and this is the part that made it feel like the tourist's version of Japan. Bilingual books are hard to do well. There's also stuff about Zen Buddhism, and the book A time being - one who lives within the bounds of time. What a ride, this slowly sweeps you in and moves you through the lives of two people, a young girl and a woman reading the girl's diary that was swept out to sea. There are so many serious topics involved here, suicide, bullying, sexual assault, that it does get pretty heavy. The writing is fantastic though, very clever, funny, and pleasant. I loved this, and will look for more by this author. Basically a two timeline book with a teenage journal writer in 2001 Tokyo and her reader on a remote western Canadian island. Both are removed from places they thrived in and having difficulty moving ahead. The book takes a long time to really get going but somewhere about 2/3 of the way through it gets strangely and wonderfully entangling. A Tale for the Time Being somehow manages to blend zen philosophy, quantum mechanics, ecology, suicide, and teenage angst into a very readable story. Ozeki’s novel concerns the diary of a Japanese schoolgirl called Nao (pun on “now”) who has returned to Japan from the USA. She is bullied unmercifully, but her suicidal father and disengaged mother are unable to help. She records her story in a diary hidden inside a copy of Proust. The diary somehow ends up wrapped in a Hello Kitty bag with a WW2 watch and some letters, washed up on the shores of an island off British Columbia, where it is found by the struggling novelist Ruth. Ruth feels a strong bond to Nao as she reads her story and obsesses with finding her to see if she is OK. This proves to be a whole lot more difficult than she expects, with none of the people or events described seeming to be traceable. Ozeki plays with the concept of the "time being”, which seems to mean both a person existing in the here and now, and also the idea of time being fluid and mutable. It takes her a fair while to resolve all this, and I confess I lost patience with Ruth and her fellow islanders halfway through, wanting to return to the Japanese characters in the story, who are far more interesting. Which may indeed be part of Ozeki’s point - interconnectedness with other lives, other times, in fiction and in fact, can enrich our own experience.
In clever and deeply affecting ways, Ruth Ozeki’s luminous new novel explores notions of duality, causation, honour, and time. ... Though [the character] Ruth is clearly intended as a semi-autobiographical portrait of the author, it’s the character of Nao, in all her angsty adolescent dismissiveness, that Ozeki truly pulls off (here’s an author who should be writing YA novels). A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki is expansive, provocative and sometimes rather confusing. But that’s okay. It’s supposed to be....It can leave you scratching your head – for starters, the main character of the novel seems to be Ruth Ozeki herself, or at least, a fairly obvious facsimile of her – but ultimately, the effect of such riddles is charming, earnest and very much a departure from your typical literary novel....Like them, Ozeki manages to turn existential conundrums into a playful, joyful and pleasantly mind-bending dialogue between reader and writer. Here’s hoping that this book will find its way to an audience just as excited to participate in it. "A Tale for the Time Being"... is an exquisite novel: funny, tragic, hard-edged and ethereal at once. [It's] heady stuff, but it hangs together for a couple of reasons — the exuberance of Ozeki's writing, the engaging nature of her characters and, not least, her scrupulous insistence that it doesn't have to hang together, that even as she ties up loose ends, others come unbound. Seen from space, or from the vantage point of those conversant with Zen principles, A Tale for the Time Being is probably a deep and illuminating piece of work, with thoughtful things to say about the slipperiness of time. But for those positioned lower in the planet's stratosphere, Ozeki's novel often feels more like the great Pacific gyre it frequently evokes: a vast, churning basin of mental flotsam in which Schrödinger's cat, quantum mechanics, Japanese funeral rituals, crow species, fetish cafes, the anatomy of barnacles, 163 footnotes and six appendices all jostle for attention. It's an impressive amount of stuff. One version of you might be intrigued. Another might pray it doesn't land on your shore. If you’re a fan of the metaphysician Martin Heidegger, or the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, you will be pleased at the novel’s tip of the hat to their abstruse notions of time and sub-atomic space. There’s even an appendix to the novel explaining the “thought experiment” known to the world as “Schrödinger’s cat...But the novel suffers from a tinge of self satisfaction. It pits sensitive souls like the involuntary kamikaze pilot who loves French literature against brutal army officers, and it’s not a fair fight. The fight becomes Us — readers who derive spiritual sustenance from Marcel Proust, and appreciate “the value of kindness, of education, of independent thinking and liberal ideals” — versus Them, who are sheer brutes. Pertany a aquestes col·leccions editorialsTé una guia d'estudi per a estudiantsPremisDistincionsLlistes notables
"A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be." In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace--and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox--possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
Cobertes populars
![]() GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:![]()
Ets tu?Fes-te Autor del LibraryThing.
|
Review: I wanted it to be better than it really is, and it was pacing along splendidly well for the first 2 parts. The ending felt paced; and all that QM-Buddhist charade is frankly getting old by now. How many novels do we have to endure where the author, instead of carrying out a subtle and fulfilling denouement, relied on a faulty understanding of QM to resolve the plot? That pissed me off more than anything.
Other than that, the plot paces nicely for a large part, and the prose isn't bad either.
I think it's imperative to read Proust and Dēngo now. (