book
bookreview
Review: A Tale For The Time Being
18:00
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Published: 2013
Rating: ★★★★
Across the pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox - possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.
This is a wonderful book that draws on two perspectives; Ruth upon reading the diary, and Nao, who wrote the diary. In Nao's perspective you get to read about her teenage life through raw emotions; she writes to this diary like one would talk to a best friend. She relives her darkest and emotional memories in such raw emotion that it's not hard to get sucked in and feel so much sympathy for her. The traumas that she has to go through, and live with on a day-to-day basis are shocking for an adult, let alone coming from the diary of a teenage girl.
Ruth on the other hand is reading this journal the way the we, the reader, are reading this book. She feels the same emotions, the same want for information, and the same want to stop this from happening. She is a writer herself and feels that she owes it to Nao to look into her story and delve into the questions that she has lingering in her mind about what happened to her and why her diary came into her possession. The aforementioned idea of Ruth being like ourselves as a reader leads me to believe that Ruth is in fact a mirror image of ourselves when reading this book.
The main theme for the book is time; how we don't have much, how we take it for granted and how we waste time taking pity on ourselves. I believe that as we relate so much to Ruth, in this mirror image theory, it is used to relate this theme into our lives as a whole - to provoke thought on the subject, to make us value our own time on this planet and to live in the now.
The novel did often take a tangent, whilst in Ruth's perspective, into philosophical theories and information about her family; however information and, sometimes, interesting, it did make the book drag somewhat. The pages of information weren't necessarily needed and I often found myself glazing over on these parts in excitement for Nao's next chapter. That is not to say that I didn't enjoy Ruth's perspective, as there was still a lot to learn from her as there was from Nao, but I did find them to have a lot of pages that hindered the story more than helped to improve it. Alongside that, there were also the footnotes. These began as interesting little tidbits of information about the Japanese culture and turned out to be a chore as the numbers went from 50 to 150, and were often not of importance as they didn't impact the story as a whole.
A Tale For The Time Being is a beautifully lyrical novel that touched me on so many occasions, often causing me to stop reading and to think about what I'd just read. As corny as it sounds, it's made me think about life and reassess the things that I thought were important in my world and really was a thought provoking book. I've often caught myself in the past worrying about my future and this book makes me realise that I should be living in the "Nao".
0 comments