![]() They have strong feelings but they don’t know how to work with them. Young people spend a lot of time trying to understand their emotional range. My last two books were about young people. In fact, that’s a sane response to the world we’re living in, to climate change, war, racial and social injustice. I tell my students, there is nothing wrong with them if they are unhappy. ![]() ![]() Mental health figures a lot in your books. Meditation helps me to remember to relax in the middle of that and allow that generative tension to become energy instead of something that makes me crazy. You have to live with that tension for a long time. There is always a generative tension while writing. The writing supports my Buddhist practice and my Buddhist practice supports my writing. Do you think of writing as a form of meditation or do you meditate to get away from the stress of writing? Writers spend a lot of time thinking about plots, characters, etc., which can be stressful. That made me feel like it was all meant to be. In one letter, Adorno makes a reference to Benjamin’s snow globe collection. I read the letters he exchanged with Theodor Adorno. Then, when I was writing about libraries, my friend told me to read Walter Benjamin. I decided fortune cookies had to be a part of the book. One of them said, ‘the world is a beautiful book for those who read it’. I was at a Chinese restaurant and we got fortune cookies. I thought it was perfect and gave it to Annabelle’s character. She knows that I love sea turtles and brought me a cheesy snow globe with a sea turtle in it. My editor came back from a trip to the Bahamas. I had a rule that if any object made its way into my life, I would put it in the book and see what happens. Are there objects from your life that you have brought into this book? You say every book is semi-autobiographical. That kind of rampant materialism has terrible effects on the health of the planet.īook review | ‘Victory City’ is carried forward by Salman Rushdie’s infectious energy Consumer capitalism amplifies our sense of attachment and attraction by convincing us that we’re not enough and the only way we can be enough is if we have something new, whether a car or a pair of glasses. There are only three responses a person can have to a situation: attachment, aversion or being neutral. ![]() What is our relationship with objects in today’s world? And that means trees and the planet all become important. It helps people take care of their material objects. If, say, a sock has worn itself out after taking care of your feet, you don’t just throw it out carelessly you take a few seconds to hold the sock, feel grateful for it and then discard it. She comes from a Shinto tradition, which is animistic. Like how Marie Kondo talks about decluttering? Jaipur Literature Festival 2023: author Katherine Rundell on John Donne’s poetry, endangered species and writing for children in the age of TikTok ![]() In Japan, which is traditionally an animistic culture, there is a sense of taking care of things, of being careful with the way we handle things and how we throw them. But in the modern world, we treat objects with disrespect. So, the question at the heart of the story is, do insentient beings speak the dharma? In other words, can objects, trees and pebbles teach us about reality and the world? The answer is ‘yes’. It also had to do with a Zen koan (story) about insentient beings. The idea of objects speaking has to do with my attachment to things, such as a scarf or a spoon. But where did this idea of speaking objects come from? The voices that Benny, in your book, hears came from that experience. And that you kept hearing your father’s voice. Edited excerpts: You have spoken about how, after the death of your parents, you had to throw away their belongings, which was obviously difficult. In a conversation on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival 2023, the American-Canadian author talks about our relationship with objects, why every book is semi-autobiographical, and how she was inspired by the Japanese decluttering expert Marie Kondo. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013. The novel is a commentary on grief, mental illness and consumerism - issues that Ozeki is passionate about and has dealt with in her earlier books too. Inside Jaipur Literature Festival 2023: authors share quirks, anxieties and more ![]()
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