#all over creation

[ninasbookshelf]

finished vs started last week

[ninasbookshelf]

calling ruth ozeki fans...

I've had "The Face: A Time Code" by Ruth Ozeki on my TBR list for awhile now and I am finally getting around to ordering it, but I see she also has a book titled "Timecode of a Face". I'm guessing these are the same thing, but looking to confirm. Is the content different at all? I love her work and want to make sure I'm not missing out on anything, lol! If anyone has insight I'd greatly appreciate it.

[snswllr]

Man alone of all Nature's children thinks of himself as the center about which his world, little or large, revolves, but if he persists in this hallucination he is certain to receive a shock that will waken him or else he will come to grief in the end.

The Harvest of the Years by Luther Burbank, (From All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki)

[smokefalls]

Title: All Over Creation Author: Ruth Ozeki First Published: 2003 Genre: fiction Content Warning: racism, fetishization, gaslighting, statutory rape, cultural appropriation, cancer, death, mentions of war, domestic violence, miscarriage, police violence, drug/alcohol abuse, bullying, sexism, trauma, child neglect

All Over Creation was an emotionally exhausting journey. You’re not just dealing with family drama (and there is a lot of it)— Ozeki expects you to grapple with other themes, most notably environmental issues. You always need tension to keep your reader captivated, and I think this book could have honed in on a few specific problems rather than the seemingly endless number of them.

This book felt unorganized and unbalanced. I knew there were some characters that were “more important” than others, but I felt that Ozeki leaned too much into some of them… unnecessarily so, in one particular case: Yumi (or Yummy). Long story short, I hated her, so my opinion is further colored. If Ozeki’s intent was to create a self-absorbed character who you shouldn’t like, she passed with flying colors. It was difficult to push through the book at times because Yumi’s selfishness infuriated me. To add salt to the wound, it upset me that so many of the characters just… accepted it. She was at the epicenter of this book, which made it worse. I wanted to hear more about Momoko, the Seeds of Resistance, even Cass and Will. It was frustrating to watch these characters get plowed over so that the reader is forced to drown in other characters’ selfishness.

The environmental issues barely held together; a result of the near-propagandic mentions throughout. Otherwise, it would have drowned under the perpetual change in character perspective and timeskips. If not this stylistic choice, the sheer number of traumatic problems that took place on a potato farm in rural Idaho will drown them out.

As frustrating as a read as this book was, I was impressed that there were aspects of this book that felt real. The complexities of these characters—even the ones I hated—had me emotionally engaged, caring about what they do, getting upset over their fuckups, and so on. Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough to make for a satisfying read for me.

[smokefalls]

Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation.

Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation

[smokefalls]

You know how good-byes feel. How the air gets excited when all its ions and electrical charges are disrupted, first by the intent to leave and later by the leaving itself. Then, when the bodies move away through space, they create empty pockets where feelings get caught and eddy around in the vacuum, creating little vortices of relief or sadness or confusion.

Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation

[smokefalls]

Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby's body.

Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation

[smokefalls]

The wondrous thing about nature, her gift to us, is her wanton promiscuity. She reproduces herself with abandon, with teeming, infinite generosity. The first knuckle-dragging humanoid to realize this became the world's first farmer, and all the farmers who came after for thousands of years knew this, too. They saved seeds from their harvest, planted them, harvested them, and so it went, on and on, in a perfect, perpetually interconnected wheel of life.

Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation