He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions about what is “real” and find his own voice among the many.Īnd he meets his very own Book-the preeminent and most profound talking thing-who narrates Benny’s life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter. There, Benny discovers a strange new world, a world where “things happen.” He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space.

Soon the voices begin to follow Benny outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. When her office closes and she is forced to work from home, a growing tidal wave of work-related paraphernalia and personal possessions accumulates in their apartment, threatening to drown them both-and, if their landlord’s meddling son has his way, get them evicted. While Benny struggles with the cacophony of clutter, his mother, Annabelle, feels sentimentally attached to even the smallest and most seemingly insignificant objects, and can’t seem to throw anything away that might tether her to her old life with Kenji and a younger, more hopeful version of herself. Though he tries to ignore them, the voices grow steadily more clamorous and intrusive, and Benny finds himself doing everything he can to block them out. Although Benny doesn’t understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry, and full of pain. The voices belong to the things in his house-a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce.

A luminous, inventive novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things, by the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time BeingĪfter the tragic death of his beloved musician father, Kenji, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices.

The book of form and emptiness reviews