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 moving story about friendship, illness, and the poetry of Paul Celan by the astonishing Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award
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 don’t 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 can’t 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 man’s name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik…
In the spirit of imaginative homage like Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain, Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem, and Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Yoko Tawada’s mesmerizing new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which friendship, conversation, reading, poetry, and music are the connecting threads that bind us together.
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
Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel 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. 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 directly—but it explains why so many buildings are closed, and why Patrik’s desire for connection has a hysterical, unresolved urgency.
— Dan Piepenbring, Harper's
A poignant ode to artistic inspiration… inventive and deeply human.
— Publishers Weekly, starred review
The tension between belonging and not, between clarity and ambiguity, thrums through this book. Brilliant.
— Sylee Gore, Words Without Borders
Most impressive to me is how deftly Tawada establishes the antitheses, scope of concerns, and voice of this 1st/3rd person and his jittery world, all of which has the symmetry and clarity of realism. Susan Bernofsky’s acutely attuned translation delivers these qualities.
— Ron Slate, On the Seawall
A beautiful reflection on nationality, friendship and the value of art.
— Dazed
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
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.'
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