"A Tale for the Time Being", by Ruth Ozeki: DISCUSSION Friday, August 12, 1:00 PM EDT

Good to go.

Unionist wrote:

In the good old days, when we were able to book (e.g.) an author to be present during the discussion, it was far more important to stick to an agreed several-hour timeline. And a deadline always has salutary effects on procrastination (speaking for myself, anyway).

Absolutely. If I don't have a deadline, I don't allot time to get something done, so having a timeline is very beneficial.

Quote:

I was actually thinking to revive the "Between the World and Me" conversation in light of events of this summer, and may yet do so.

Just saying.

I second the motion!  For one thiing, people who might be interested may have felt (as I did) that they could only contribute on the discussion day appointed.  And while having a definite time to get started is also a good strategy, it excludes people who can't participate at that time  - work schedules may interfere, as often happened for me, and I expect may be an issue for other people. Then too, there are the slow processors, also like me, who mull over a comment or contribution and don't have a ready response but want to add to it a day or more later. it would be good to encourage a continuing discussion. As for Between the World and Me I thought there was much more to mull over in that book (and I wanted to respond to a thoughtful post you made on the subject) but figured I was too late.

So yes, let's foster ongoing discussions. 

Open discussions, closed discussions. Same thing.

This isn't a book I would have found on my own so I am once again thankful to BBC for expanding my reading horizons. I found the book slow for me to get in to a reading groove. Once I did, I appreciated the various ways that the book played with the concept of a time. My first two degrees are history so the use of artifacts and research were appealing.

Since I rarely read fiction, I can confidently say I would never have stumbled across this book (in fact I had never heard of the author, and I do follow Canadian literary news in a general way so that surprised me). However although it starts slowly I found it engaging from the first (though the footnotes kind of bogged me down, as I felt obliged to read them all, and I am not at all familiar with Japanese culture so it was helpful to have terms and customs explained).

I liked the way the author adeptly juggled a realistiic approach with narrative sections that can be ambiguously interpreted. Were they magical? Were they hallucinatory? I found the author was playing with ideas - not only ideas of time, but also of reality. What is real? All this was helped along by my favourite character (other than the cat), Jiko, who gave voice to some central Buddhist concepts, like the circularity and interconnectedness of existence (I'm not phrasing this right, but I hope it makes sense) as well as the Moebius strip nature of things - up, down, same thing. Ozeki brought in the many-worlds ideas playfully too, leaving it up to the reader to determine whether such a thing was actually happening (in her story) or whether the character was imagining things. I love this stuff, it's intellectually stimulating and the ideas are fun to play with. 

I am not sure I liked Ruth at times. I put this down to her interactions with her partner who I found a more sympathetic character.

In many ways until we open a book, it only contains blank pages.

The question of who/what was alive or dead ran through the book.

Another group I belong to has a monthly book club. The book is picked in adavnce and it is discussed throughout a month. They have a different facilitator each month who posts questions around the 10th  to animate discussion while more general discussion takes place prior to that date. I wonder if something like that would be worth pursuing?

Power outage here. Just catching up now. I have a mundane and pointless question to ask as soon as I verify my battery sump pumps are working. flood/no flood, NOT same thing!

Sump pumps OK.  Now, I don't want to give away any spoilers for Left Turn so will endeavour to be sufficiently vague.  However,  I have actually two questions. One is (I believe) a misprint in the text that threw me for awhile - I will come back to that one later. This one is simpler. In the PS at the end, Ruth says,  "P.S. I do have a cat,  and he's sitting on my lap, and his forehead smells of cedar trees and fresh sweet air. How did you know?"

I don't remember anywhere where Nao speculates/opines/affirms that her reader has a cat, and scratching my head, I went back and reread significant portions of Nao's part looking for it. Did I miss it? When did Nao mention her reader having a cat?

My other question (where I think I found a misprint) will require me to thumb back and find the right page, will get to that after some other tasks.

Unionist wrote:

The very beginning of the beginning of "Nao", chapter 1:

Blush. I went backwards through the Nao chapters but gave up before I got to the very beginning. Big mistake. Thank you.

That statement does look somewhat prophetic, given that Ruth lives on an island with cedars abounding. Of course, that ties in with the theme that the writer, as Nao also says somewhere early on, "I reach out across time to you.... you reach back in time to me" (not exact words -- I'm paraphrasing from memory). Which I think is the reciprocal relationship of writer and reader, in many cases. It's  demonstrated literally (and metaphorically) in this story, where the reader - Ruth - also reaches back in time and influences the writer, and her world (or does she? We are left to determine that for outselves).  But one doesn't have to take it literally, if one is turned off by the many-worlds hypothesis or the quantum dynamics. Writers are influenced by their readers, if not in such dramatic ways and across tranches of time. Feedback from readers, from editors/partners to wider circles of appreciative (or not) readers does influence most writers, consciously or otherwise. It's a dynamic relationship even though it's not usually personal.

Hope this makes sense. I know what I mean but I flunked lit crit as I have pointed out before.

I like, now that I reflect on it, that the book begins and ends with reference to the cat, who is of course Pesto, and who symbolizes both death and life, and perhaps possible lives. I was worried about him until that ending. Which end of Schrodinger's box would be open?

I found the passage I thought was a misprint, and it's not, but it's puzzling (to me) so I will elaborate on it in a separate post.

Unionist wrote:

Left Turn wrote:

I'm enjoying Nao's story, and I'm looking forwards to where it goes in the second half of the book. I really like the uniqueness of Nao's story.

Ruth's story I'm not enjoying as much. I generally like it when writers put more of themselves into their work, as Ruth Ozeki seems to be doing with Ruth's story; yet the narrative function of Ruth's story seems to be mainly as a framing device for Nao's story.

Don't know if you've had a chance to finish, but am interested to learn what your take is given on how these stories unfolded.

I'm curently at page 230, so don't have a take on the ending yet.

I went ahead and read your spoilers despite your warning; I figured there might be something there that would inspire me to keep reading the book, and I think there is.

Transitioning from another thread ....

Unionist wrote:

sherpa-finn wrote:

Gracious. Do we have a basic literacy problem here?

I think so. We reactivated the babble book club, but you haven't participated. I'm absolutely certain you were able to read at one point, and I'm saddened that you appear to have lost the capacity. Come back and visit us, and get into the discussion about Ruth Ozeki's novel. It will prove a refreshing break from the reality that seems to have you so worked up. Kick up your feet and relax!

You are too kind, Unionist - ever the dedicated Babble facilitator!

This is likely TMI, - but my personal circumstances have changed somewhat since the Book Club was last active. Firstly, I took early retirement and must now live with the commensurate reduction in household income. Secondly, I moved back Down East, - and in culling our creaking bookshelves before the move, discovered that I had a 100 or so titles in hand that remained wholly unread.

So my New Year's Resolution for 2016 was/is to work my way through the unread books, avoid buying any new books, - and otherwise rely on the wonderful new public library in Halifax for additional reading.  Bottom-line: there are still a couple of names ahead of mine on the waiting list for "A Tale for the Time Being". 

But rest assured that I do lurk quietly on the BBC thread ... and if prodded too actively will happily contribute totally uninformed opinions. As I readily do elsewhere - even without prodding. 

Parts of the book fell into to the magical realism genre. Yes, the book was slow and ponderous at times. The way I end up reading 100 + books a year is that I just plow ahead when I encounter slow and ponderous text.

Am in. p 82/403 so far. Will not read spoilers. Thanks to all for posting this thread as I'm enjoying some more fiction for a change.

supplemental: CBC News: 40 tonnes of garbage pulled from Vancouver Island beaches

Check for diaries.

Well, so far, it's like a story written by a sister I never met. Very enjoyable. Every reference I know, every sidebar is familiar, or an unfinished part of me.

I wrote:

3. There's a nice SF attribute to the book. Some good complexity. This overlaps with the author managing to draw the reader's attention to the relationship between them; writer and audience, not often the sort of sidelong talking to the camera that can be annoying, looked at in a thoughtful way. Gets you thinking about it. Caissa remarked, upthread, that "In many ways until we open a book, it only contains blank pages". We could also express that, equivalently, by saying that the reader invents the story.

Perhaps this is part of Ruth's message as author [in writing this book]? Just a thought. :)

More details here. The reader re-invents the story each time she reads the book. And it's patently true, at least with a book that has some substance, that it's a little different each time. In fact, that's a kind of measure of a "good" book. That's partly why we would read more than once.

Given the way the author wrote this book, with the interesting and SF-like relationship between the characters, it's a little like Ursala Le Guin's "The Lathe of Heaven" with it's strange, mind-bending possibilities of time, causality, etc.

Good authors can jump genres and show us new stuff, new combinations, new possibilities. To some degree, this is what Ozeki has done.