Last March, I read ElCicco’s review of A Tale for the Time Being and thought to myself, that sounds interesting! A few weeks later I happened to be in my favorite local indie bookstore and saw it sitting on the shelf. It was spring break, I had some time off work and school, why not enjoy a good book? Well, the fact that I just finished it about two weeks ago probably tells you what I thought about the book. I wanted to like it. I really, really wanted to like it. There was just something about it I couldn’t connect with and it made it hard to push through.
The narrative bounces back and forth between the (assumed) present day with Ruth, a married woman stuck with a horrible case of writers block, and the past with a 16-year old school girl, Nao, who wants to kill herself. I like the way the book was constructed and written. Getting to not just see both characters, but get inside their heads was a really interesting way to structure the book. It lets the reader really get to experience things from both their points of view, rather than just trying to see Nao’s world via reconstructed journal entries, as Ruth does. In that sense the reader has an advantage over the narrator.
I found myself connected much more with Nao in the story than I did with Ruth. There’s something so incredibly meta about this book and it kind of turned me off. The author putting herself (or more likely, a version of herself) in as one of the main characters was off-putting to me and came across more narcissistic than anything. It was confusing, I kept having to see if this was fiction, non-fiction, some kind of strange blend (and probably was intended to do that, which I didn’t like. Confusing your audience doesn’t seem the best way to write a book.) The last 50 or so pages just lost me completely with talks of alternate time lines and how Ruth was controlling Nao’s story. It ended up feeling very heavy-handed and like Ozeki was just trying to hit her audience over the head with metaphor and fancy time-travel talk.
I just wish I could have liked it more.
Aww, shame you were disappointed. I had the opposite experience. I thought I was going to hate it for all the meta stuff she had going on and I absolutely loved it.
Normally I love that kind of thing! I think it was a little too science-y for me in the end. It could be I was just tired and my brain just kind of shut down there towards the end.