A Tale for the Time Being

Fülszöveg

TALE FOR THE TIME BEING
"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 and with the larger 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 a timeless story. Ruth Ozeki beautifully renders not only the devastation of the collision between man and the natural world, but also its often miraculous results." ; ¦ : ' :
"Ingenious and touching I read it with great pleasure."
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"One of the most deeply moving and thought-provoking novels I have read in a long time. In precise and luminous prose, Ozeki captures both the sweep and detail of our shared humanity. The result is gripping, fearless, inspiring, and true."
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"A Tale for the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

TALE FOR THE TIME BEING
"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 and with the larger 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 a timeless story. Ruth Ozeki beautifully renders not only the devastation of the collision between man and the natural world, but also its often miraculous results." ; ¦ : ' :
"Ingenious and touching I read it with great pleasure."
- ¦ -'i !J
"One of the most deeply moving and thought-provoking novels I have read in a long time. In precise and luminous prose, Ozeki captures both the sweep and detail of our shared humanity. The result is gripping, fearless, inspiring, and true."
i I
"A Tale for the Time Being is equal parts mystery and meditation. The mystery ; is a compulsive, gritty page-turner. The meditation—on time and memory, on the oceanic movement of history, on impermanence and uncertainty, but also resilience and bravery—is deep and gorgeous and wise. A completely satisfying, continually surprising, wholly remarkable achievement."
"A great achievement and the work of a writer at the height of her powers. Ruth Ozeki has not only reinvigorated the novel itself, the form, but she's given us the tried and true, deep and essential pleasure of characters we love and who matter."
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* "Profoundly original, with authentic, touching characters and grand, encompassing themes, Ruth Ozeki's novel proves that truly great stories—like this one—can both deepen our understanding of self and remind us of our shared humanity."
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Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you
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a Hello Kitty lunchbox washes up on the beach. Tucked inside is a collection of curious items: an antique wristwatch, a pack of indecipherable letters, and the diary of a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl named Nao Yasutani. Ruth, who finds the lunchbox, suspects that it is debris from Japan's devastating 2011 tsunami. Once Ruth starts to read the diary, she quickly finds herself drawn into the mystery of the young girl's fate.
Nao has decided there's only one escape from the loneliness and pain of her life, as she's uprooted from her U.S. home, bullied at school, and watching her parents spiral deeper into disaster. But before she ends it all, she wants to accomplish one thing: to recount the story of her great grandmother, a 104-year-old Zen Buddhist nun, in the pages of her secret diary. The diary, Nao's only solace, is her cry for help to a reader whom she can only imagine.
Full of Ozeki's signature humor and insight, A Tale for the Time Being weaves across time and space as it probes the relationships between writer and reader, fact and fiction, as well as history, memory, and myth, in a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.
is a writer, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the author of the award-winning novels My Year of Meats ocadAll Over Creation. 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.
Jacket design: Jim Tierney
Jacket images: (top to bottom) Illustration of head pattern. CSA Images; kamikaze plane. © CORBIS; color woodcut by Uehara Konen. early 20th century. The Granger Collection, NYC - Alt rights reserved; illustration of red book, CSA Images; landscape, © Paul Buckley Vissza