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Every object speaks in this tale of a boy coming to terms with loss, which investigates the real and illusory with calm good humour American-Canadian author Ruth Ozeki is a film-maker, a Zen priest and a teacher of writing. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker prize. In this, her fourth, everything possesses – everything is made up of – language. Every single thing is, in some sense, writing a book.Benny Oh is still a boy when his father Kenji, a Korean-American jazz musician at the time a little the worse for wear from drink, is run over by a chicken truck in an alley behind their house on the edge of Chinatown. At the crematorium, all Benny can think to ask his mother Annabelle is: “You going to burn his clarinet too?” Even though the body in the coffin is not really his father, Benny concludes, he still can’t bear to see it “thrown into a fire”. So he runs away, following a voice that calls his name from “somewhere deep inside the building”. Later, he begins hearing voices from inside everything. Whether “metallic and grating” or “pleasantly inhuman”, they clamour for his attention, and they often want to tell him about their pain, their histories of misuse and abuse. Even the unloved leftovers in the refrigerator can speak, in “the groans of mouldy cheeses, the sighs of old lettuces”. Half-eaten yoghurts whine at him from the back shelf. Continue reading...