I’m reviewing this for the first time after a reread that solidified it as a favourite. The first time I read this, my focus went to the human relationships within these pages and Benny (the protagonist) and Annabelle’s (his mum’s) emotional journeys. During my second read, I could focus more on the themes of the book that I only engaged with superficially during my first read. The heart of this book is in its characters, but a lot of its messages are in the circumstances that surround them.

It was a lucky coincidence that I happened to be reading Mutual Aid by Pyotr Kropotkin at the same time as this. This book almost feels like a fictionalised version of the main arguments of Kropotkin’s work when it comes to human nature and the inadequacy of the state as a means to satisfy human needs (but The Book of Form and Emptiness goes much farther than Mutual Aid in its critique of our idea of progress—more on this in the next paragraph). Through the characters’ hardships, we see the care institutions of the state fail again and again. To give an example, the state is supposed to step in and help Benny and his mum deal with the hardest moment of their lives: the sudden death of Kenji, who was Benny’s dad and Annabelle’s husband. They don’t have a support network, they are alone in the world, and the state’s interventions only worsen their situation at every turn.

This book also questions our notion of progress: we equal modernity with positive development; advances in technology with quality of life improvements; the modern nation state with the peak of civilisation. Yet this novel disregards this framework and asks us: what does progress mean? Who gets to define it? Who benefits from it? What happens to people who get left behind? What are we progressing towards, and is it a worthy goal? Who do our institutions serve? And, at the end of the day, does the help we need come from our institutions, or from the people around us who care?

I also happened to reread Ending the Pursuit of Happiness by Barry Magrid earlier this year, another one of my favourites, which deals with Japanese zen philosophy and how it has been grossly misunderstood and co-opted by self-help rhetoric. What is zen? Zen is about, among many other things, accepting life as it is in all its perfection and wholeness, yet understanding at the same time that is is also ever-changing and can be influenced (and improved) by our actions. Yet zen is not about self-improvement: rather, it directly challenges the notion of self-improvement and tells us that we (and the world we live in) are already perfect as we are. The Book of Form and Emptiness also deals extensively with Japanese zen, weaving it into its narrative through the character of Aikon and her book Tidy Magic (a clear reference to Marie Kondo), but also through the story and the predicaments its characters find themselves in.

This book also deals with neurodivergence and the difficulties that existing as a neurodivergent person in modern society entails. It questions our notions of sanity and insanity. It’s also a critique of materialism and consumerism and the circumstances that lead us to engage in them. It also plays with form and typography in fun and interesting ways. It’s so difficult to convey in just a few words everything that this book is and how much all of the main characters’ stories mean to me and how deeply touched I am by them.

This is a book about grief, about life, about modern Western society, about zen, friendship, love, anger, frustration, community, art, sadness… It’s one of those books that I feel were written for me specifically, and I’m sure I will be returning to it again and again in the future.

Let me end this review with a couple of quotes:

“Our beautiful blue planet is intricately alive. (…) Immersed in the miniscule details of daily living, we believe our lives to be separate, and our selves to be separate, too. But this is a grave delusion. The truth is that everything depends on everything else. A flower depends on the sun and the soil and the rain and the bee that pollinates it. It cannot survive apart from these things, and without them, the flower would die. Humans are the same. We need the sun and the soil and the rain and the plants we eat. We need our mother and father and all our ancestors stretching back into the past. We are a continuation of them and we would not be alive without them. And all of us—flower and bee, you and me—are tiny parts of the living body of the planet.” (pp. 492-493)

”Dreams are important, right? That's what I tell Benny. I tell him that his father and I had lots of dreams, and some of them never amounted to much, but the sweetest dream of all came true, and his name is Benny.” (p.544)

i hate petty gossip, cancel culture, and claims of “reverse racism” IRL – idk why i thought i might enjoy reading about it.

Kuang lays out some bold, quippy ideas on authorship and cultural appropriation, but overall i found this too heavy-handed, repetitive and predictable.