goodreads the book of form and emptiness

Writing his own story grants him a sense of autonomy and peace of mind.

No matter how hard she tries to reach Benny, she cannot seem to help him.īenny gradually realizes that if he can channel the voices in his head into art, he might be able to gain control over them. Whenever he yells at her and storms out of the house, Annabelle becomes frenetic. Benny has become increasingly agitated and volatile. At the same time, Annabelle remains confused as to how to care for her son. She also tries to use work as a distraction, but her work offers her little fulfillment. She not only continues to accumulate a slew of unnecessary objects, but refuses to throw anything away. Meanwhile, Annabelle’s mental health worsens. Both the Aleph and the B-man encourage Benny to regard the voices in his head as sources of creative power rather than dysfunctions. The Aleph introduces Benny to a homeless man, the B-man. She introduces herself as the Aleph, her self-given artist name.īenny and the Aleph soon become friends. While there, he runs into the girl from the ward. Shortly after his release, Benny secretly stops attending school and starts spending his days at the Library instead. He is especially intrigued by a girl who resembles a girl in his dream. The voices are quiet in this space and he likes his peers. While on the psychiatric ward at Children’s Hospital, Benny feels more at peace.

She prescribes him several medications and recommends in-patient psychiatric care. Melanie says that Benny is experiencing auditory hallucinations and suffering from a mood disorder. Though she thinks that her late husband’s ghost is communicating with her via refrigerator magnet poems and the local crows, she never explicitly vocalizes her sadness.Īfter Benny's repeated outbursts at school, Annabelle takes Benny to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Annabelle also proves reluctant to face her own grief. She is concerned that her job will lay her off and that she will be incapable of supporting Benny by herself. Meanwhile, Annabelle fails to notice her son’s increasingly odd behavior because she is struggling with worries and woes of her own. When he tries talking back, the voices do not seem to respond. The more he ignores them, the louder they become. Benny starts to hear voices, unsure whether they are coming from inside or outside his head. When Kenji, Annabelle’s husband and Benny’s father, dies in an accident, the mother and son struggle to confront their loss and sorrow. The following summary relies upon the present tense and a linear mode of explanation.

The narrative also features the past and present tenses, and distorts traditional notions of novelistic form and structure. Ruth Ozeki’s novel The Book of Form and Emptiness employs the first, second, and third person points of view. The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Ozeki, Ruth.

Goodreads the book of form and emptiness