title: a tale for the time being
author: ruth ozeki
country: usa
language: english
genre: fiction, psychological fiction
published: march 12, 2013
publisher: viking
pages: 432pp

synopsis:
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 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 a 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.

Full of Ozeki’s signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

this has to be my favorite read yet; a refreshingly vivid, wise yet youthful book that just has it all in one tale, you know what i mean?

(probably not, you'd need to read it first.)

so this story is told in two perspectives: one by ruth, a writer living with her husband in a remote island, and nao, a sixteen-year-old japanese girl. admittedly, i would be a lot sceptical about reading a dual-narrative story. it sounds like it would be tedious, and hard to keep up with, since we'd have to keep up with two main characters and all that, right? but ozeki did a wonderful job in piecing the story together. nao's and ruth's narratives are so refreshingly contrasted, one being dramatic and saturated, the other calmer. it's different, in the best way possible.

ozeki builds up a mystery from small questions, left unanswered with the underlying promise of an answer at the end of the book. the mystery gets bigger as we read on, and, okay, this is a really hyperbolic metaphor but it almost feels like vines slowly caging us in, twirling around our ankles, little by little. no complaints here—it's really a wonderful feeling to be this curious, this enraptured in a story, you know?

ozeki takes us on a journey to uncover nao's fate, connecting everything together, unfolding mysteries about the world. i especially love how she knit in quantum theories, like multiverses, so fittingly. it's super enlightening, and gives a realistic feel to the story.

all in all, it's a 5 stars from me! a must read. huge thank you to ruth ozeki for this masterpiece.

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Labels: book review, school

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