La forma e il vuoto per accogliere le voci delle cose: Ruth Ozeki e la ri-mediazione della materialità del libro nell’era digitale

This essay discusses Ruth Ozeki’s most recent novels, A Tale for the Time Being (2013) and The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021), in the light of several recent theoretical strands, thus indirectly showing the interconnectedness thereof. Such critical discourses include, on the one hand, theories of multimediality, intermediality, and transmediality; and, on the other hand, theories of relational comparison and the Pacific which elaborate on Édouard Glissant’s ideas of archipelagos and Relation. I argue that Ozeki’s novels deploy the motif of reading, and especially of the book, as ways to re-imagine the book and its function in and for our present, planetary, transmedial condition. Ozeki responds to the crisis of the printed book, and of the institutions traditionally accompanying its centrality, by imagining and articulating forms of alternative materiality and concreteness for it, grounded in Buddhist strategies of non-attachment and a historically situated ecology of matter.