A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki,

This was one of the book's nominate for the Mann Booker Prize this year.  Again, I have to ask, why did they choose the Luminaries as the winner????

This was a fascinating book, I found it hard to put down.  I have never read anything by this author but I think I will want to read more of her work.

“A Tale for the Time Being is an extraordinary novel about a courageous young woman, riven by loneliness, by time, and (ultimately) by tsunami. Nao is an inspired narrator and her quest to tell her great grandmother’s story, to connect with her past, with the world, is both aching and true. Ozeki is one of my favorite novelists and here she is at her absolute best—bewitching, intelligent, hilarious, and heartbreaking, often on the same page. A Tale for the Time Being is one of those novels that will renew your faith in literature.” - Junot Díaz, National Book Award finalist and author of the Pulitzer Prize winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

How to explain this book and its appeal?  The story is about a woman on an island on the west coast of BC who finds a package washed up on the shore.  She opens it to find an Hello Kitty lunchbox with some letters in French, a strange book, it bears the cover of a Marcel Proust book but the contents have been replaced with blank pages and the book has been used as a diary by a Japanese girl.  The main character Ruth is Japanese (a reflection of the author???) so she can read the diary.  She is a writer, but seems to be suffering from writer's block (like the author??). 

The diary desribes the life of a teenage Japanese girl who is the victim of vicious abuse by her classmates and whose father is unemployed and suicidal.  The young girl, Nao (Now) is also thinking of suicide.  As the author reads the diary she tries to track down the girl and her family on the Internet but she is unsuccessful.
Nao's parents send her to spend the summer with her great-grandmother, a buddhist nun who is 104 years old.  The grandmother tries to teach Nao some Supapowas (superpowers).  Nao also learns about her father's uncle who was forced to be a kamikaze pilot.  He was a philosophy student nad pacifist.  He was brutalized in his military training.   He wrote his true experiences in the military in French so that the officials would not know what he was saying. As the story proceeds the truth about him is revealed and Nao is happy to share the truth about her uncle with her father, who was named after him.

As the main characters struggles with her own life and goals, weather troubles and her strange artist husband she becomes obsessessed with the story, even dreaming part of the story, and at one point even seems to intercede in the story to save the father's life.

I think the story explores understanding who you are, peace, truth versus assumptions that can harm relationships between people, the importance of being "in time" living in the now and liking it rather than living in the past or the future.

It was an engrossing story, it plays with the ideas of time, role of writer and reader.  I really enjoyed it.