She has to literally archive the news, and she then feels the weight of the responsibility of owning that news, despite the fact that her employers couldn’t care less. Annabelle’s hoarding is tied in with her job: as a sifter of news, her job is to scour the newspapers (and later the internet) for everything that is being said on a subject. Ozeki’s larger thesis is that our mental health problems are not necessarily ours, but a symptom of a broken world. The book’s exploration of mental health is deft and kind, and also political. But Benny begins to struggle to distinguish between what is real and what is not. Each object seems to speak to him, resulting in some traumatic moments – the scissors that want to stab – and some moments of beautiful compassion and beauty. Benny, however, is plagued by the voices of objects. Annabelle’s grief has manifested in hoarding, of a scale that gradually becomes clear over the course of the book, and initially mitigated by Annabelle’s sympathetic, distracted interior monologue, which suffuses her objects with so much love and importance that it seems almost reasonable she can’t get rid of anything. Benny’s father, the beloved Japanese jazz musician Kenji, died a year ago, run over by a truck while high. Benny and his mother Annabelle are both broken.
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