A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

Hardcover, 2013

Collections

Your library, Fiction

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

Viking Adult (2013), Edition: First Edition, Hardcover, 432 pages

Description

"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.… (more)

Media reviews

Quill & Quire

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).

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Globe and Mail

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.

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Los Angeles Times

"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.

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The Guardian

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.

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National Post

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.

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Bston Globe

This setup for “A Tale for the Time Being,” the new novel by Canadian-American writer Ruth Ozeki (“My Year of Meats”), allows for a fascinating multigenerational tapestry of long ago, recent past, and present. The work is fiction, but intriguingly self-referential....Nao calls herself a

“time being,” anyone who “lives in time.” Her diary, which is charmingly offbeat, clever, funny, and heartbreaking, reveals the isolation, displacement, and loneliness of a girl trying to fit in at school in Tokyo after her father loses his Silicon Valley tech job and grapples with his own depression and suicidal tendencies (which Nao refers to as his second hobby). On top of the fraught cultural transition and troubled home life, Nao also has identity issues that stray beyond normal teen drama. Certain diary entries strain credulity, such as Nao’s descriptions of the complicity of teachers and an elaborately staged mock funeral. But most of the writing resonates with an immediacy and rawness that is believable and touching.

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New York Times

Whenever the word “time” comes up — “wasting time,” “about time,” “in time” — the reader must stop and think about the many angles of approach to that subject in Ruth Ozeki’s delightful yet sometimes harrowing new novel, “A Tale for the Time Being.” ...Many of the elements

of Nao’s story — schoolgirl bullying, unemployed suicidal “salarymen,” kamikaze pilots — are among a Western reader’s most familiar images of Japan, but in Nao’s telling, refracted through Ruth’s musings, they become fresh and immediate, occasionally searingly painful. Ozeki takes on big themes in “A Tale for the Time Being” — not just the death of individuals but also the death of the planet

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The Telegraph

Ozeki uses the relationship between author and schoolgirl to conflate past with present and fact with fiction, and A Tale for the Time Being – with translation footnotes, six appendices, a bibliography and quotations from Japanese Zen masters – is a metafiction wrestling with grand themes. Ruth

and her husband contemplate quantum mechanics and Schrödinger’s cat. Nao and her father struggle with the modern notion that, thanks to an internet which catalogues mistakes, our past is ever present.

But the book is at its strongest not in these ambitious philosophical explorations, which can at times feel unsubtle, but in its quiet detailing of the love and pain of family life – in the moving depiction of the small hurts and comforts of Ruth’s marriage and in the painful portrait of the tortured relationship between Nao and her depressive father. ......she provides us with a compelling coming-of-age story.

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