Review: A Tale for the Time Being

A Tale for the Time Being

Author: Ruth Ozeki
Pages: 432
Publisher: Viking Adult
Source: Publisher

Description from Goodreads:
A brilliant, unforgettable, and long-awaited novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki

“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.

Full of Ozeki’s signature humor 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.

First Sentence: "Hi!"

Review:

Generally, when I sit down to write my review of a book, I know precisely what I want to say and have a pretty good idea how I feel about the book in question. My reactions tend to be clear and summing up my thoughts is not that difficult. Not so with A Tale for the Time Being. There were parts that I loved utterly, parts that bored me, and parts I'm not sure that I quite fathom. As such, this review might be a bit meandering, so bear with me.

In subject matter, though not in characterization or overall aim, A Tale for the Time Being reminds me heavily of Jonathan Safran Foer's remarkable book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Both follow story lines in the past and the present, as a main character searches through the history of their ancestors to find meaning in life after tragedy. Both draw lines between WWII and 9-11. Both feature odd protagonists, though they are strange in entirely different ways. Ozeki does very different things with these elements, but the similarities are fascinating, and I would recommend A Tale for the Time Being to Foer fans.

The opening pages of Ozeki's tale captured me immediately. A Tale for the Time Being opens with Nao, a sixteen-year-old girl living in Tokyo. Though born in Japan, she feels American, having spent much of her childhood overseas in Sunnyvale, California, where her father was working. When he lost his job in the bursting of the Dot-com bubble, they moved back to Japan. Nao hates it there. Her father still hasn't found work, instead descending first into gambling and then becoming an agoraphobic determined to commit suicide. Nao suffers from the change to the Japanese school system as well, since she's behind academically and horribly bullied by her classmates. At the time she begins her story, she's a drop-out, a ronin, studying to take the exams to get into high school again.

What I loved about the opening, though, is how authentic and real Nao feels. She's been through so much darkness at that point, is herself intent on suicide, but there's something fresh, young, and vibrant about her narration. My favorite parts of Nao's story are always those where she loses her train of thought and goes off on a rambling tangent. Her story itself is very sad, but her tangents are where you really get a look at the real Nao and how her mind works. She's darkly funny and I was desperately hoping for her story to come to a happy ending.

Nao's story takes place within another story, Ruth's. Ruth is half-Japanese and living in a remote Canadian city with her husband, Oliver. An urbanite, Ruth does not love her life there. She hates the way the power is constantly out from the storms and she's been struggling to get any writing done, cut off from her inspiration. Out on the beach, she finds a plastic bag and plans to throw it away, afraid of what might be inside. Oliver opens the bag, and inside finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox, within which are letters in old-fashioned Japanese, a diary in French, and a copy of Proust with a school girl's writing inside, mostly in English.

Ruth's story is both a mystery, as she searches for the ending to Nao's story, and self-discovery. As she reads, Ruth also researches, trying to find evidence that this diary is in fact a true thing. She gets the diaries and letters translated and the story slowly unfolds around her, becoming more present to her than her actual life. There's an almost magical realism sort of feel to Ruth's portion of the narrative, as though there's an actual mystical connection between writer and reader, allowing Ruth to influence the story despite the distance and time between them, though everything else is couched firmly in the real, non-magical world.

Within Nao's story, there are others, as she learns about her grandmother, her uncle and her father. Ozeki's got a huge focus on family and on the importance of life. She also delves into powerful philosophical themes, like the purpose of existence and Schrödinger's cat. The title, for example, is a lovely play on words, making use of two meanings, both a tale for the moment and a tale for beings that live in time. That phrase pops up at many points in the narrative and is crucial to Ozeki's overarching themes.

Unfortunately, I don't really feel like I got this. I think I'm partway there, but I most certainly do not have everything all figured out, which I don't think you're supposed to necessarily, but I should be a bit further along. Part of my problem is that I didn't have any clue where the story was going, having falsely believed Nao's assertion that it would be a story about her grandmother, but Nao is not a reliable storyteller, which had already been established, so silly me. As such, I allowed myself to get bored in sections that didn't seem important to me, because I had a predefined idea of where I thought the story was going. My expectations kept me from paying as much attention as I should have and from picking up all of the threads needed to weave the story into a cohesive, meaningful whole in my head.

All I can leave you with is that, though this novel didn't get an absurdly high rating from me in the end, it's one I will be keeping in my personal collection. These days, I have so many books I tend to give them away once I finish, except the ones in the 4-5 range, and a lot of the 4s I pass on as well. I think A Tale for the Time Being is one of those odd books that I will have a much greater appreciation for on a reread, because I'll have a better idea of what to expect and be able to appreciate more the intricate weaving of Ozeki's story.

Rating: 3/5

Favorite Quote: "And if you decide not to read anymore, hey, no problem, because you're not the one I was waiting for anyway. But if you decide to read on, then guess what? You're my kind of time being and together we'll make magic!"