Benny Oh
Benny is transforming into a teenager while dealing with multiple traumatic experiences. His jazz musician father has is dead and he has begun hearing voices coming from inanimate objects. None of these events have had the effect of improving the volatile relationship with his mother. Clearly, Benny’s coming-of-age is not just your average ordinary coming-of-age tale.
Annabelle
Benny’s mother, Annabelle, is having her own difficulties dealing with the loss of her husband and they are not being made any easier by her son’s increasingly strange behavior. The onset of Benny’s strange new powers results in an initial to run away from the voices. Annabelle is dealing with things in precisely the opposite manner, having developed a sudden obsession with hoarding.
The Aleph and TAZ
As a result of several behavioral incidents, Benny winds up being sent by Annabelle to the Pediatric Psychiatry Ward at the local children’s hospital. While there he meets a girl with a beautiful but highly adorned face who calls herself “The Aleph” which, she explains, is taken from a short story by one of the legends of Latin American magical realist literature, Jorge Luis Borges. In addition to Borges, the enigmatic girl introduces him either implicitly or directly to Situationism, the critical theories of Walter Benjamin, artist Paul Klee and German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In a completely different sort of story, The Aleph would probably be described as a variation of manic pixie dream girl. She constantly has a ferret companion named TAZ which has nothing to do with Tasmania, but instead is an acronym for Temporary Autonomous Zone.
The B-Man
The B-Man is a shortened versions of a nickname that The Aleph and associates have tendered upon a man that Benny describes as a “hobo in a wheelchair.” It actually stands for Bottle-man because, as The Aleph also describes him, he is the “dude with all the bottles.” However, his real name is Slavoj, he is a kind of education mentor to friends of The Aleph as well as a poet of some renown back in his home country of Slovenia.
The Book
The book features a split-narrative technique. A few of the chapters narrated in the first-person by Benny, but for the most part these are rather short interruptions in the narrative. The actual narrative seems at first to be simply everyday ordinary third-person point of view. Eventually it becomes much more apparent that this section of the story is being told by the Book. As in the book readers are holding in their hands. As Benny observes, the Book is “sincere…and reliable” and, fortunately, does not mind at all when Benny makes the occasional interruption of the flow.
