Patrik, who sometimes calls himself the patient, is a literary researcher living in present-day Berlin. The city is just coming back to life after lockdown, and his beloved opera houses are open again, but Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. When he shaves his head, his girlfriend scolds him, What have you done to your head? I dont want to be with a prisoner from a concentration camp! He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he cant manage to get past the first question on the registration form: What is your nationality? Then at a café (or in the memory of being at a café?), he meets a mysterious stranger. The mans name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik
In the spirit of imaginative homage like Roberto Bolańos Monsieur Pain, Antonio Tabucchis Requiem, and Thomas Bernhards Wittgensteins Nephew, Yoko Tawadas mesmerizing new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which friendship, conversation, reading, poetry, and music are the connecting threads that bind us together.
Recenzijas
"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 Tawadas workfrom different countries, of different sexes and speciesare 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 "Tawadas Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel reads almost like a cautionary tale...this is what happens if you devote your life to poetry. Celans poems are Patriks only confidants. His girlfriend is long gone. A mysterious stranger, the trans-Tibetan angel of the title, lifts his spirits by seeking him out at a café with a gift: a German medical text that Celan once annotated on his quest for new language. This is Tawada's pandemic novel, which is never addressed directlybut it explains why so many buildings are closed, and why Patriks desire for connection has a hysterical, unresolved urgency. " -- Dan Piepenbring - Harper's "Tawada is an artist out on the tip of the spear. She isnt 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. Its startling, breathtaking prose, literature at its purest. What to compare it to? Nothing. It is simply Tawadaesque..." -- Iain Maloney - The Japan Times
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 booksstories, novels, poems, plays, essaysin 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. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, as well her novels The Naked Eye, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, The Emissary, Scattered All over the Earth, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, Suggested in the Stars, and forthcoming in autumn 2025 is Archipelago of the Sun, the final novel in her Scattered trilogy.
For New Directions, Susan Bernofsky has translated Yoko Tawadas 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.
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