Tawada is an artist out on the tip of the spear. She isn't courting a readership, curating her image, coaxing popularity like some; she is pushing her art forward, and we as readers are welcome along for the ride if we can keep up. It's<b> startling, breathtaking</b> prose, literature at its purest. <b>What to compare it to? Nothing. It is simply Tawadaesque...</b>

- Iain Maloney, The Japan Times

This slim novel is <b>a beautiful reflection on nationality, friendship and the value of art</b>.

- Jessica White, Dazed

<b>A poignant ode</b> to artistic inspiration... <b>Inventive and deeply human</b>.

Publishers Weekly

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Yoko Tawada <b>conjures a world between languages. . . . She is a master of subtractio</b>n, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds.

- Julian Lucas, The New Yorker

Tawada disrupts our perception and<b> reveals the terror and beauty of our world as we get lost in it, and regain our footing through reading her novels</b>.

- Kit Fan, author of THE INK CLOUD READER,

Tawada is a master of defamiliarization and ultimately of the unity that can arise from the discord of human consciousness. <b>I read<i> Spontaneous Acts</i> in a state of fascination and wonder</b>.

- Elizabeth McKenzie, author of THE DOG OF THE NORTH,

A love letter to language and to connection . . . <b>Tawada effortlessly unfurls flesh and blood into a world of intricacies</b> and untethered thoughts.

- Ellen Pigott, The Conversation

<b>A keen observer of cultural and linguistic dislocation</b>, 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

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": "<b>None has a firm place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines.</b>"

- Rivka Galchen, The New York Times Magazine

Reads almost like a cautionary tale . . . this is what happens if you devote your life to poetry. Celan's poems are Patrik's only confidants . . . This is Tawada's pandemic novel, which is never addressed directly―but it explains why so many buildings are closed, and why <b>Patrik's desire for connection has a hysterical, unresolved urgency</b>.

- Dan Piepenbring, Harper's

Tawada is interested in <b>language at its most elusive</b> or incomprehensible.

- Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books

The highly anticipated new novel from award-winning, critically acclaimed novelist Yoko Tawada.Patrik 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 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 - is examined and celebrated.Spontaneous Acts 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
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The highly anticipated, exquisite new novel from the award-winning, critically acclaimed Yoko Tawada, following our protagonist Patrik as he attempts to find connection in a world that constantly overwhelms him.
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Praise for Yoko Tawada'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 BaumePraise for The Last Children of Tokyo'Hums with beautiful strangeness' New York Times'Achieves a technically impossible balance of open-hearted fable and cold-blooded satire' Financial Times'A joyful exploration of language, a constantly surprising and exciting romp' Daisy Johnson'Carries us beyond the limits of what it is to be human, in order to remind us what we must hold dearest in our conflicted world, our humanity' Sjón
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This slim novel is a beautiful reflection on nationality, friendship and the value of art. - DazedTawada disrupts our perception and reveals the terror and beauty of our world as we get lost in it, and regain our footing through reading her novels.Tawada is a master of defamiliarization and ultimately of the unity that can arise from the discord of human consciousness. I read Spontaneous Acts in a state of fascination and wonder.A love letter to language and to connection . . . Tawada effortlessly unfurls flesh and blood into a world of intricacies and untethered thoughts - The Conversation
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780349704234
Publisert
2024
Utgiver
Vendor
Dialogue Books
Vekt
200 gr
Høyde
214 mm
Bredde
132 mm
Dybde
20 mm
Aldersnivå
00, G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet

Forfatter
Oversetter

Om bidragsyterne

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books-stories, novels, poems, plays, essays-in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Goethe Medal and the National Book Award.

Susan Bernofsky is the prizewinning translator of seven works of fiction by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as novels and poetry by Yoko Tawada, Jenny Erpenbeck, Uljana Wolf, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse and others. Her biography of Walser, Clairvoyant of the Small, appeared in 2021. A Guggenheim, Cullman and Berlin Prize fellow, she teaches literary translation at the Columbia University School of the Arts.