

S'està carregant… A Tale for the Time Beingde Ruth Ozeki
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Now that's a book, with a buffet of themes to gorge even the hungriest lit major. Listing them discreetly--the meaning and function of time, the relationship between the reader and author, how identity is created and re-created, and how technology overlays all these issues--could give the impression that the novel is an overwhelming, jumbled morass, but Ozeki incorporates all these elements carefully and seamlessly. And what makes A Tale truly great is that Ozeki accomplishes all these themes in the midst of a believable, engaging story. She doesn't have to try too hard. There's a bit about a dream toward the end and maybe some metaphysical time travel that seems to have bothered some people, but for me, by the time I got to that part, I was already so embedded in the book that it didn't phase me. Also? It's fiction. A little suspension of disbelief is appropriate, and maybe a little less hubris about our own opinions of what can and can't happen in the "real" world would be beneficial. The one thing I found jarring was the switch from first-person in Nao's diary sections to the third-person omniscient narrator in Ruth's sections. At the most basic aesthetic level, it was simply disconcerting to jump back and forth. I'm still trying to decide the purpose of that switch. Does Ozeki want us to view adult, American Ruth as the "real," reliable narrator? If so, I'm a little offended on behalf of teenage Nao. I'll keep thinking about this one. A marvelous book. Equally pleasing to the mind and the heart. Quantumfysica, paralelle werelden die met elkaar in aanraking komen, theorien van Hugh Everett en het experiment met Schrödingers kat. Allemaal vrij complexe en interessante zaken, afgewisseld met een, helaas, te zwak verhaal van een Japanse "coming of age" en een Japans/Amerikaanse vrouw (lees: de auteur) met een writers block. One of the best books I've ever read
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 estudiants
"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. |
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![]() GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)813.54 — Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:![]()
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Took me a long time to read because I kept getting distracted by looking up so many references that we're new to me. (