The world Benny sees is increasingly at odds with the world that others around him perceive. She was singing “I’m a Little Teapot,” but Benny knew that was not what the teapot was actually saying. Melanie that the reason he broke was beyond simple irritation at his mother for coddling him. Benny eventually snaps at her and breaks the teapot, explaining later to Dr. In one instance, Annabelle tries to find her child in Benny by miming the “I’m a Little Teapot” nursery rhyme while pointing at a teapot. While Benny is adjusting to hearing new voices, Annabelle cannot let go of Benny’s childhood. Her desperation to better her life, entwined with a sense of hopelessness at the literal mountain of things she must confront in order to do so, results in an unhealthy relationship with objects. Annabelle’s job as a news monitor means that there are constantly piles and piles of trash bags filled with news clippings all over the house.

Without Kenji, who naturally kept their home in physical and emotional order, the household has fallen apart. Meanwhile, Benny’s mother, Annabelle, has a problem of her own: severe hoarding. Over the course of the novel, he is diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Melanie, finds that hard to believe, and Benny is placed in a pediatric psychiatry ward. In one instance at school, he ends up smashing a window because the glass was screaming. Benny is already a social outcast, but his existence now becomes even stranger in the eyes of other people. After his father Kenji’s death, Benny Oh hears voices, or rather, he is awakened to objects that have always been speaking and are delighted to find themselves with an audience. This is the world of the protagonist in Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness. What if someone asked you to consider the genealogy of the tablet you were holding? What if you heard the glass in your bedroom window speak to you: not as in “one day the glass began to talk,” but as if your ears were opened to the stories every particle of the world contains?

The book of form and emptiness review