A Tale for the Time Being: A Novel (ALA Notable Books for Adults) - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the award-winning author of three novels, My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her critically acclaimed independent films, including Halving the Bones, have been screened at Sundance and aired on PBS. She is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation. She lives in British Columbia and New York City.

Visit www.ruthozeki.com and follow @ozekiland on Twitter.
 

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Praise for A Tale for the Time Being

“Nao’s lively voice, by turns breezy, petulant, funny, sad, and teenage-girl wise, reaches the reader in the pages of her diary, which, as Ruth Ozeki begins to fold and pleat her intricate parable of a novel, washes ashore, safe in a Hello Kitty lunchbox, on a small Canadian island off the coast of British Columbia. . . . Dualities, overlaps, time shifts, and coincidences are the currents that move A Tale for the Time Being along: This is a book that does not give up its multiple meanings easily, gently but insistently instructing the reader to progress slowly in order to contemplate the porous membrane that separates fact from fiction, self from circumstance, past from present.”

—The New York Times

“Plunges us into a tantalizing narration that brandishes mysteries to be solved and ideas to be explored.”

—The Washington Post

“A delightful yet sometimes harrowing novel . . . 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 . . . all drawn into the stories of two ‘time beings,’ Ruth and Nao, whose own fates are inextricably bound.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“A terrific novel full of breakthroughs both personal and literary . . . Ozeki revels in Tokyo teen culture—this goes far beyond Hello Kitty—and explores quantum physics, military applications of computer video games, Internet bullying, and Marcel Proust, all while creating a vulnerable and unique voice for the sixteen-year-old girl at its center.”

—The Seattle Times

“A fascinating multigenerational tapestry of long ago, recent past, and present . . . The writing resonates with an immediacy and rawness that is believable and touching.”

—The Boston Globe

“A rich and engaging novel . . . A Tale for the Time Being explores many themes, biculturalism, war, manga, depression, suicide clubs, Internet bullying, the slippery qualities of time, and Zen Buddhism. When Nao learns to meditate at Jiko’s temple she says, ‘When you return your mind to zazen, it feels like coming home.’ Ultimately this satisfying novel is about discovering home in the moment, or now, and also home within ourselves.”

—The Oregonian

“Beautifully written, intensely readable, and richly layered . . . Ozeki moves between Ruth’s and Nao’s stories and their very different voices while exploring the elements of time, past, present (whatever that is, in the context of this book), and, perhaps, the future. Nao stays with her Jiko and meets the ghost of her great-uncle Haruki, a kamikaze pilot; Ruth makes a mysterious journey and has an important encounter of her own. The human relationships are deftly explored. . . . A Tale for the Time Being is compelling and memorable, one of the best books of the year.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Forget the proverbial message in a bottle: This Tale fractures clichés as it affirms the lifesaving power of words. . . . As Ozeki explores the ties between reader and writer, she offers a lesson in redemption that reinforces the pricelessness of the here and now.”

—Elle

“A powerful yarn of fate and parallel lives.”

—Good Housekeeping

“Ozeki weaves together Nao’s adolescent yearnings with Ruth’s contemplative di – gressions, adding bits of Zen wisdom, as well as questions about agency, creativity, life, death, and human connections along the way. A Tale for the Time Being is a dreamy, spiritual investigation of how to gracefully meet the waves of time, which, in the end, come for us all.”

—The Daily Beast

“As we read Nao’s story and the story of Ozeki’s reading of it, as we go back and forth between the text and the notes, time expands for us. It opens up onto something resembling narrative eternity . . . page after page, slowly unfolding. And what a beautiful effect that is for a novel to create.”

—Alan Cheuse, NPR’s All Things Considered

“A Tale for the Time Being is ambitious, it’s multilayered, and it’s fantastic. . . . Ruth Ozeki creates multiple worlds that are alive and filled with so much sensory details and symbolism and it’s difficult not to resist being completely immersed. Stock your fridge, finish the laundry, and feed the cat because you’ll be busy for a few days.”

—Hyphen

“A multilayered postmodern fantasia with a heart of gold.”

—Ellis Avery, Public Books

“In A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki pulls out all the stops with her new cast of beautiful, batty, and sad characters. . . . It’s such a romp—so unafraid of the disasters of life, so full of delight—that it’s well worth the read. Forget the easy escape route of quantum mechanics; the novel more than supplies enough old-fashioned reading magic.”

—Shambhala Sun

“Ozeki is a fantastic novelist.”

—The Sunday Times (London)

“A deep and illuminating piece of work.”

—The Guardian (London)

“A huge, compassionate, and cleverly wrought novel . . . Ozeki beautifully captures Nao’s teenage voice, with its conflicting harmonies of bathos and intensity, stoicism and optimism. . . . As the novel draws to a close, with an extended riff on quantum mechanics, Schrödinger’s cat, and the influence of perception on physical reality, the readers shares with Ruth a series of revelations about the human need for resolution and the impossibility of getting it.”

—The Times Literary Supplement (London)

“Links have been made between Buddhism and modern quantum physics before, but seldom can they have been intertwined with such emotive power and linguistic grace as Ruth Ozeki manages in this funny, heartbreaking, moving, and profound novel. . . . The warmth, compassion, wisdom, and insight with which Ozeki pieces all these stories together will have the reader linked in a similarly profound way to this fantastic novel.”

—The Independent (London)

“Japanese pop culture, fiction, and nonfiction all mash up in this genius novel about hope and friendship.”

—Chatelaine

“Dazzling . . . In its shift to a novel of ideas, through a carefully wrought yet seemingly reckless narrative explosion, the novel shines. It is not only a storytelling tour de force (and rest assured, Ozeki doesn’t abandon either the richness of her characterizations nor the expanding force of the paired story lines in favor of the deeper searching; everything resolves, though not in a manner that anyone would expect), but a rich, thought-provoking, paradigm-disturbing experience of a novel. Like a Zen koan, A Tale for the Time Being defies simple answers or explanations even as it reveals all. You will carry it with you.”

—The Vancouver Sun

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