|
S'està carregant… A Tale for the Time Beingde Ruth Ozeki
  
Booker Prize (19) » 48 més Books Read in 2015 (80) Favourite Books (362) Books Read in 2017 (160) Five star books (95) Books Read in 2016 (441) Top Five Books of 2020 (317) Top Five Books of 2015 (536) Asia (29) KayStJ's to-read list (132) Overdue Podcast (167) magic realism novels (42) First Novels (86) Books Set in Canada (17) SantaThing 2014 Gifts (104) To Read (107) SFFCat 2015 (25) infjsarah's wishlist (336) Women Writers (14) Protagonists - Women (28) Novels Set in Asia (10) Books Set on Islands (50) Canada (52) Books Set in Canada (22) Contemporary Fiction (54)
I really like this! But didn't give it a 5-star because Ruth's story can be a bit draggy and the ending lecture about quantum physics is quite mind-boggling. I don't know what's that about. Nao's story itself is worth the read. Ozeki gets the tone exactly right, making you believe in the narrative of a 16-year-old. Nao writes about a tale that happens at a particular time (time being) but the tale doesn't just fade away, it survives. Ruth picks it up and is immersed in it, likewise we too (or at least I). While this gives some permanence to transient things, what's more important is what happens at that point in time. You can't live the same moment twice, so make full use of it. Nao's uncle knew he would die but he was learning up till his death. Likewise Nao's great-grandma who was also learning in her old, old age. Finally, she teaches Nao and her father to live. And they did. (  ) siok | Apr 17, 2021 |  I had another case of “too high expectation kills the book” which is not the book’s fault per se. It started well enough, but the mystical/Buddhist/quantum physics ending just did not work that well for me. It felt artificial. It is too bad, as actually my bookclub is just restarting after a couple of years hiatus, and I chose this book for our first discussion. I should know better than choosing a book I have not read… (  ) RosanaDR | Apr 15, 2021 | 4.25* There were some sections that were a bit slower, but this was a beautifully written story! (  ) courty4189 | Mar 24, 2021 | This book just didn't work for me. It's written well, but it just isn't my kind of story. It made me feel depressed. (  ) ToniFGMAMTC | Feb 17, 2021 | The first ~200 pages of this weren't so great for me. I found the voice of Nao annoying (that's probably by design, though) and just wasn't pulled into the story. The book started to grip me a bit more later on but then lost me again at the end. It was an ok book, but I didn't think it was all that well done in the end. It felt in a way like the sort of Richard Powers book (bringing together things from science and history) that has a lot of potential but is ultimately executed disappointingly. ( ) dllh | Jan 6, 2021 |
 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 editorials
"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. |
 Google Books — S'està carregant…Cobertes popularsValoracióMitjana: (4.06)
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2
2013 Booker longlist: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
2