Spontaneous Acts
Author(s): Yoko Tawada (translated by Susan Bernofsky)
The highly anticipated new novel from award-winning, critically acclaimed novelist Yoko Tawada.
Patrik, who sometimes calls himself "the patient," is a literary researcher living in Berlin, a city just coming back to life after lockdown. Though his beloved opera houses are open again, Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can't manage to get past the first question on the registration form: "What is your nationality?" As Patrik attempts to find a connection in a world that constantly overwhelms him, he meets a mysterious stranger. The man's name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik . . .
Yoko Tawada's mesmerizing new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which the solace of friendship, reading, conversation, music, of seeing and being seen weave a life together across decades, languages, and cultures, and reaches out to all of us who find meaning and even obsession in the words of those before us.
Previous praise for Tawada:
'Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives us new senses in return.' Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing
'Something about the way Tawada writes . . . allows the reader to take the most surreal and fantastical elements of the work completely seriously.' Lucy Scholes
'Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things.' Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither
General Information
- :
- : Dialogue Books
- : Dialogue Books
- : 0.3
- : 09 July 2024
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Yoko Tawada (translated by Susan Bernofsky)
- : Paperback
- : English
- : 128
- : FA
More About The Product
"A keen observer of cultural and linguistic dislocation, Tawada has absorbed a kind of anti-language from Celan, a deeply affecting, sui generis diction unmoored from nationality or obvious tradition." -- Dustin Illingworth - New Left Review
"A poignant ode to artistic inspiration... inventive and deeply human." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The varied characters in Tawada's work-from different countries, of different sexes and species-are united by the quality that Walter Benjamin describes as 'crepuscular': 'None has a firm place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines.'" -- Rivka Galchen - The New York Times Magazine
"Yoko Tawada conjures a world between languages. . . . She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds." -- Julian Lucas - The New Yorker
"Tawada is interested in language at its most elusive or incomprehensible." -- Natasha Wimmer - The New York Review of Books
Author Biography: Born in Tokyo in 1960, Yoko Tawada writes in both Japanese and German: she has received the Akutagawa, Kleist, Lessing, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso, and Tanizaki prizes, as well as the Goethe Medal. Her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award.
Susan Bernofsky has translated Yoko Tawada's Where Europe Begins, The Naked Eye, and Memoirs of a Polar Bear (winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation), eight titles by the great Swiss-German modernist Robert Walser, and five books by Jenny Erpenbeck, including The End of Days (winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize). She is the author of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser, and teaches at Columbia University, where she also directs the literary translation program.
