Review: A Tale for the Time Being

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This strange tale was my first encounter with Ruth Ozeki. She’s good. The margins of this story are unusual; it demanded that I relax and cooperate with this gifted author. I tried. I got lost a few times - sort of folded up in the transmogrifications – but I never gave up on it.

The central character, Ruth (or is that Nao?), has lost her mother to Alzheimer’s and now fretfully faces her own frontiers of forgetting. Nao, a 16 year old, tortured, and impossibly sad girl, has lost her home, her security and her happiness. The two connect, most improbably, and through an undefined time and space. Simply put - Nao wrote her story and Ruth finds it and reads it. So, the tale unfolds.

Together they narrate, but this duo in discourse become an aimless tennis match. They lob the ball back and forth, but no one is keeping score and it is hard to imagine how and when it will wrap up.

The sprinklings of supernatural were just enough to keep me derelict in my full comprehension. Add to this the oddity of texting Buddhist nuns, disappearing words on pages, possessed crows and cats, kamikaze pilots, specious fears of gun violence in America, suicide-centricism, and then Oliver…dear, poor Oliver – what was his place in all of this? I think the context switching was more than I could handle, but I did marvel at Ozeki’s written word. Really impressive stuff.


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