It had to happen once. After 600 pages, the American one writer Ruth Ozeki put the final point in novel, so she also wrote (to avoid confusion, I guess) "the book has to end somewhere". It wasn't worth reading delays, taking the text by the spoonful so that there was more left for tomorrow and the longing for it to come tomorrow, the strategy of reading one or two more books in parallel didn't help either: after the point of blankness, I gaped as if I would never read something this exciting, powerful and beautiful again, as if my rich reading experience didn't tell me that, probably, I would start something just as good on the same day (dozens, hundreds of books are staring at me from the shelves and attracting attention), as if, after all, 1983 Miljenko Jergović, with which I cut The Book of Form and Emptiness, it's no wonder a book after which I will fall into the same reading depression until, on the same day, probably, I find something completely different and equally exciting...
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VOICES
After his father's death, fourteen-year-old Benjamin O (O is a surname of Korean origin) begins to hear voices that no one else hears, that is, he understands that things are speaking: the window glass wanted to crack in misery when a bird crashed into it, so it shared its pain with a stunned Benny, the sneaker had a lot to notice, and "pencils have stories in them and are harmless as long as you don't stick the tip in your ear". Scissors, however, are something else and dangerous, hissing like snakes and bending Benny to their will. The very circumstance that a man hears voices that no one else hears is dramatic enough, but when Benny's mother Annabel, who after her husband's death is unable to come to her senses, realizes that something strange is happening to her son, everything becomes even more dramatic because those who do not hear what he hears, including his school friends and psychiatrists, will declare Benny abnormal, and to be abnormal means to be ostracized. If we add to that that Benny and his mother are barely making ends meet, that the evil landlord is threatening them with eviction, that Benny is running away from school because he can't stand being bullied, while Annabel herself is falling ill, the situation becomes unbearable. At a very difficult moment, however, through interesting opportunities (instead of going to school, Benny goes to the library because it's warm there, no one bullies him, he can take a nap, and books live in the library), the girl Alef, a little older than him, and the old homeless Slavoj, a Slovenian, philosopher and poet, who lives in his wheelchair and drinks like schmuck, enter the boy's life. Unlike all the others, the two of them, Alef and Slavoj, are not at all surprised by the fact that Benny can hear things and communicate with them, on the contrary, they like this ability. Plus, Aleph is an artist and devilishly attractive. The changed perspective that the boy faces for the first time since he heard the voices raises, as Slavoj would say, a philosophical question: what is reality? Because until Benjamin met Alef and Slavoj, the environment did not miss a single opportunity to inform him that the voices he hears are not real, that no one else hears them and that, therefore, he is crazy. His new friends, however, think otherwise. The episode in which Benny will think for the first time that everything is not so simple and so unambiguous, that episode in which Benny will ask himself "what is real?", is one of the most impressive that the signer of these lines has ever read.
GENRE: It could be said that Ruth Ozeki tried herself in a demanding genre in which the main characters are children or adolescents, and would The book of forms and emptiness stood in line together with A large notebook Agote Christoph, Wild geese Julijana Adamović, With the sadness of Belgium Hugo Claus, Early sorrows Danilo Kiša, or The role of my family in the world revolution Bore Ćosić (to mention only the first ones that come to mind), but although Benny O's voice undoubtedly dominates, this is no less a novel about his mother, who deals with grief, love, poverty, worry, fears and her own madness. Namely, Annabel is unable to get rid of things and turns the house into a dump. Descriptions of her disorder, finding excuses for it can't get rid of otherwise completely useless things - bags and bags of newspaper articles, for example, which climb the walls and cover other useless things - compulsive buying of small things (despite poverty), difficulty in basic actions, and especially her deep loneliness, desperate efforts to feel joy for at least a few moments because of anything - let's put it that way - break the heart. This phrase "break your heart" would undoubtedly appeal to Annabelle because she lives in an atmosphere of kitsch - she constantly buys glass globes in which it snows when shaken, because, well, they're so beautiful - but the angst that the reader can't help but feel is the effect of Ruth Ozeki's perfect writing balance, her (literally) unerring sense of how far and which way to go in slippery places (and the novel is full of episodes in which 98 percent writers with all their length and weight spread across the vast rink of ambition without a cover): obsession with a lost husband, for example, a weakness for crows, or the episode in which he goes for a massage for the first time. And precisely because of Annabel - but not only because of her - The Book of Form and Emptiness it is not a text in which only the child tells his own story.
PHILOSOPHY
Strictly speaking, there are few good philosophical novels, and the biggest misunderstandings in the relationship between literature and philosophy occur when writers start philosophizing. (And vice versa: when philosophers think they can write novels.) There is a lot of philosophy in Ruth Ozeki's novel precisely because it does not occur to her to philosophize, except when, on only a few occasions, she accompanies philosophizing with an ironic or self-ironic gesture from Slavoj (who, by the way, speaks English with mistakes): "Let me tell you something about poetry, schoolboy," he addresses Slavoj Benny on p. 315. "Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness for you. The moment we put a word on a blank piece of paper, I gave myself a problem. And the poem that is born is a form, an attempt to find a solution to my problem. - He sighed. - In the end, of course, there is no solution. Only new problems, but that's good. Without problems, there would be no poems." Not only does this place to a certain extent explain the impossible title of the novel, but it shows how the writer introduces conceptual language into the story with a subtle feeling: first, the problem arises with writing, with the moment when the writer tries to squeeze a thought out of himself (before that thought is nothing), when that thought becomes material, solid, when it emerges from the nothingness of the interior, and then the problem is tackled precisely with the form, in an attempt, therefore, to find a solution to the problem. Every solution, however, is a new problem. And here is Hegel, and the reader has no idea that it is Hegel, nor does he need to know that it is Hegel. In the second episode, Slavoj tries to draw attention to himself in order to enable Benny to sneak into the library unnoticed. The old poet creates chaos, twists and turns, waves his artificial leg, falls out of the cart, but does not stop, with infectious charm, uttering the purest philosophical text which - and that's mastery - is exactly where it should stand.
And something else. The previous quote shows the genius of the translator Aleksandar Milajić on at least two levels. Of course, it is not too demanding to find a counterpart in Serbian for insufficiently good English, there are various ways, and Milajić opted for small, unimportant, in a certain way charming mistakes in gender, number, case ("we put one word on a blank piece of paper"). Something else, deeper, is wrong in Slavoj's English, i.e. now in Serbian: surpluses produced by foreigners, those who do not speak their native language, i.e. those who have never learned non-native language well enough. Let's say, Slavoj speaks the way mediocre (not even the worst) writers in Serbian write: unnecessary, redundant use of personal pronouns, for example, a slight disorientation in the very sentence that starts with the plural and continues in the singular. In addition, a foreigner and a bad writer do not have a good sense of personal pronouns, and put them where they do not belong, i.e. where they are not necessary (like this: i.e. where one are not necessary). No one in this novel speaks like Slavoj, and that's not because he doesn't make mistakes in gender, number, and case, but because there are no redundancies in correct English (that is, Milajić's Serbian).
ZEN
And, of course, a parallel Zen story told with an irresistible irony, necessary to bear all that Buddhist fog at all, but, again, not with that irony that destroys the very idea. While Benny, his mother, Alef and Slavoi are having trouble in a large, unnamed American city, on the other side of the world, in Japan, a story Annabelle finds in a self-help booklet unfolds. The Buddhist priestess, in fact, writes about how, first of all, she was addicted to things, and how she got rid of that addiction. Annabel, of course, finds solace in that booklet, but not enough motivation to decisively embark on a clean-up action on her own. At this point, large parts of the story must be skipped in order to point out the knot that, at some point, the better heroes of this story will tie. Let the curious reader discover for himself who will get away with it and in what way, and who won't and why. Something else is more important. To tell a story with so many strong, sometimes unbearable places and motifs, and at the same time maintain the balance with counterweights of humor, irony and just the right measure, is mostly an impossible task, except for Ruth Ozeki. Not at any time a writer Books of Form and Emptiness it will not fall into the gooey construction that will try to find the threatened truth of the world beyond all rationality in severe mental illness and its manifestations. On the contrary. The border between illness and health is not lost for a moment, and the weight of madness is felt by everyone who comes into contact with Benny, as in the terrifying episode when both Benny and the readers, for a moment, lose the distinction between reality and unreality, and no one knows whether what Benny is looking for is an illusion or reality. What the American writer does, however, is to question the unquestionable (ontological) status of reality as a quantity that is much less stable than the staunch devotee of reality might assume.
